What's New in the Xanadu Release for Manufacturing Commercial Operations –
Manufacturing Commercial Operations (MCO) was introduced to give manufacturing organizations across industries a solution to help them optimize sales, support, and service processes to deliver exceptional experiences and accelerate revenue growth. With the Xanadu release, we continue to add capabilities to help our customers address the complexity of modern manufacturing operations, break down silos across teams and systems, and deliver a more unified customer experience.
The top innovations in this release include –
- Service Bridge Enhancements,
- Now Assist Enhancements,
- CPQ Enhancements, and
- Lead and Opportunity Management Improvements.
Let's explore how these innovations address specific challenges in the manufacturing industry.
Service Bridge Enhancements –
- Mismatched Version Support and Configuration Revisions -
Manufacturing organizations often face challenges when updating their service management systems, as not all partners may upgrade simultaneously, leading to version mismatches and potential service disruptions. The Mismatched Version Support and Configuration Revisions feature solves this by empowering providers to update Service Bridge applications and adopt new features while supporting consumers who haven't upgraded.
Mismatched Version Support configuration
It facilitates the seamless exchange of version and configuration data between provider and consumer applications, ensuring uninterrupted service during Service Bridge upgrades by activating compatible entitlements or marking them as "awaiting upgrade". This capability allows manufacturing organizations to maintain service continuity and adopt new features without disrupting their partner ecosystem.
- Consumer Pre-flows –
Manufacturing companies often need to customize their service request processes based on specific customer or partner requirements, which can be challenging to manage across multiple systems. The Consumer Pre-flows feature addresses this by enabling the Service Bridge consumer to set a workflow for any Remote Record Producer entitlement before sending the request to their provider.
Consumer Pre-flows configuration
It empowers consumers to control data synchronization timing precisely, ensuring immediate synchronization for RRPs without attached consumer flows. This feature allows manufacturing organizations to provide more tailored service experiences while maintaining control over their processes.
- Order Management Support –
Manufacturing organizations often struggle with managing complex order processes across multiple systems, leading to delays, errors, and poor customer experiences. The new Order Management Support feature solves these challenges by allowing providers to publish their product offers to their Service Bridge connected customers as a Remote Record Producer.
Order Management Support on provider and consumer instances
It gives customers easy access to entitled product offerings published as Remote Record Producers on the customer instance and facilitates new, disconnect, suspend, and resume product and service orders. This capability helps manufacturing organizations streamline their order management processes, reduce errors, and improve customer satisfaction by providing a more seamless ordering experience.
Now Assist AI-powered features –
- Knowledge Article Generation -
Manufacturing support teams often struggle with creating and maintaining up-to-date knowledge articles, leading to inconsistent support experiences and longer resolution times. The Knowledge Article Generation feature powered by Now Assist addresses this by generating complete draft knowledge articles based on case records.
Knowledge Article Generation process
It provides relevant recommendations to deflect common exceptions and product issue cases, enhancing efficiency and improving agent workflows by reducing repetitive and manual work. This AI-powered capability helps manufacturing organizations improve their knowledge management processes, reduce support resolution times, and provide more consistent support experiences.
- Dynamic Translation –
Global manufacturing companies face challenges in providing multilingual support, often leading to delays and misunderstandings in customer interactions. The Dynamic Translation feature solves this by allowing customers to engage in their preferred language for support and enabling organizations to utilize existing English knowledge articles to support non-English speakers.
Dynamic Translation in action
This capability helps manufacturing organizations provide more inclusive and efficient global support, improving customer satisfaction across diverse markets.
- Post-call Summarization –
Manufacturing support agents often spend significant time documenting call outcomes, reducing their availability for handling new customer issues. The Post-call Summarization feature addresses this by simplifying and codifying agent call closure and wrap-up activities.
Post-call Summarization UI
It allows agents to document voice interactions quickly and move on to support other calls in the queue. This feature helps manufacturing organizations improve support efficiency, reduce call handling times, and increase overall support capacity.
CPQ Enhancements –
- Contract Management for Sales and Order Management –
Manufacturing organizations often face challenges in managing complex contracts across their sales and order management processes, leading to inefficiencies and potential revenue leakage. The Contract Management for Sales and Order Management feature solves these issues by automating the creation of legal sales contracts from quotes to reduce manual steps and errors.
Contract request initiated from a quote
It generates PDFs with quote header, line details, terms, conditions, and signatories, defines responsibilities and liabilities to reduce the risk of disputes, and tailors contracts to the needs and preferences of involved parties to improve customer satisfaction. This capability helps manufacturing organizations streamline their contract management processes, reduce errors, and improve overall efficiency in their sales and order management operations.
- Quote Management: Sales Agreements –
Manufacturing companies often struggle with efficiently converting quotes to sales agreements, leading to delays in revenue recognition and potential errors in contract terms. The Quote Management: Sales Agreements feature addresses this by enabling single-click creation of sales agreements from quotes to accelerate revenue and improve operational efficiency.
Creating a sales agreement from a quote
It creates sales agreements in ServiceNow or syncs externally created agreements for a consistent, unified 360-degree view, and enforces agreements while creating orders by filtering catalogs and applying agreement-based prices. This feature helps manufacturing organizations streamline their quote-to-contract process, improve accuracy, and accelerate revenue recognition.
- Product Catalog Management Enhancements –
Manufacturing companies often struggle with managing complex product catalogs and configurations, leading to inefficiencies in the sales process and potential errors in order fulfillment. The Product Catalog Management enhancements solve these challenges by associating product specifications to any level of product offer hierarchy to improve technical catalog mapping.
Product Catalog Management interface
They use eligibility rules to dynamically filter catalog categories and product offers, increasing customer satisfaction, accuracy, and agent efficiency. The enhancements also set default configurations and pre-populate values in Configurator UI based on configurable criteria to improve efficiency, and customize the Configurator UI via a flexible, open state model. These enhancements help manufacturing organizations improve their product catalog management, streamline the configuration process, and enhance overall sales efficiency.
Lead and Opportunity Management Improvements –
- Lead Management –
Manufacturing companies often struggle with effectively managing and nurturing leads, resulting in missed sales opportunities and inefficient use of sales resources. The new Lead Management feature addresses these challenges by allowing organizations to create or import leads, manage the end-to-end lead cycle, and use a Kanban view to change status via drag and drop.
Converting a lead to an opportunity
It enables the launch of needs analysis questionnaires to identify relevant product offers, manages lead activities and view priority activities needing attention, and quickly creates opportunities and maps to accounts/contacts or consumers. This feature helps manufacturing organizations improve their lead management processes, increase conversion rates, and make more effective use of their sales resources.
- Opportunity Management Integration with Field Service Management –
Manufacturing organizations often miss out on potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities during field service engagements due to disconnected systems and processes. The Opportunity Management integration with Field Service Management addresses this challenge by empowering technicians to create opportunities during field engagements leveraging previously captured information.
View and create opportunities from the agent mobile app
It enables upsell or cross-sell of additional products and services during field service visits and fosters better customer relationships by identifying and capturing additional customer needs. This integration helps manufacturing organizations drive revenue growth by capitalizing on opportunities identified during field service interactions and improving overall customer relationships.
Summary –
These new and enhanced capabilities help empower your manufacturing organization to launch products and services faster, accelerate revenue, and improve the customer experience. By leveraging Manufacturing Commercial Operations, businesses can deliver a unified customer journey across the lead-to-cash cycle that today's customers demand while simultaneously increasing efficiency, reducing operational costs, and increasing revenue.
Manufacturing Commercial Operations is available in both Standard and Professional packages. For more information, check out servicenow.com, review the Xanadu release notes, then schedule a meeting and demo with your account team, or contact us here.
For those of you in the manufacturing industry, please also check out our Manufacturing community page for more industry-specific information on Manufacturing Commercial Operations and related solutions.
