Exploring Manufacturing Commercial Operations

Release version: Xanadu

Updated August 1, 2024

4 minutes to read

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Summary of Exploring Manufacturing Commercial Operations

The Manufacturing Commercial Operations (MCO) solution by ServiceNow provides a unified platform to manage manufacturing sales, support, and service operations. It enables organizations to accelerate revenue generation, enhance customer and channel experiences, and reduce operational costs by managing the complete lifecycle of products, subscriptions, and services. MCO facilitates activities ranging from opportunity creation, quoting, and contracting, to resolving disputes, managing complaints, and supporting quality issues, all within a seamless ecosystem.

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Key Features

Real-Time Ecosystem Management: MCO leverages Service Exchange to securely build workflows and sync product offerings with customers, suppliers, channels, and partners in real time. This integration eliminates errors, reduces delays, and enhances agent efficiency and customer satisfaction without costly custom integrations.
Automated Exceptions and Disputes Workflows: The solution automates order exception and invoice dispute processes by connecting OEMs, partners, and customers. Intelligent workflows improve issue resolution speed, agent productivity, order delivery, and cash collection cycles.
Lead-to-Cash Cycle Optimization: MCO manages leads and opportunities end-to-end, supports configurable product catalogs, streamlines quoting and order processing, and automates fulfillment across all operational teams to increase revenue and reduce costs.
Subscription and Service Lifecycle Management: It supports launching and managing subscriptions and services with integrated sales, order, and customer lifecycle workflows, enabling organizations to respond swiftly to changing market demands and boost retention.
Omni-Channel Customer and Channel Engagement: The platform fosters seamless collaboration and personalized experiences via self-service, proactive issue management, and consistent communications, strengthening loyalty and brand value.
Integrated Support and Service Management: MCO offers configurable case management, playbooks, and agent workspaces to resolve product quality and post-sales service issues efficiently while ensuring cross-team alignment.
Channel Support Operations: It provides self-service options, real-time communication, and streamlined service processes like warranty claims and recalls, improving partner satisfaction and operational consistency.

What You Can Expect

Faster revenue cycles through streamlined sales-to-cash processes and automated workflows.
Improved operational efficiency by reducing manual handoffs and integrating ecosystems across customers, partners, and internal teams.
Enhanced customer and partner satisfaction via real-time collaboration, proactive communication, and personalized experiences.
Greater visibility and auditability of orders, disputes, and service requests through comprehensive monitoring and SLA tracking.
Flexibility to manage traditional product sales alongside new subscription and service offerings within a single platform.

Learn how the  Manufacturing Commercial Operations solution can help your organization speed up revenue and create differentiated customer and channel experiences while reducing operations costs.

The Manufacturing Commercial Operations (MCO) product offers a single platform to manage your sales, support, and service operations. For example, you will be able to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of your products, subscriptions, and services including creating opportunities, generating quotes, contracts, and orders, resolving exceptions and disputes, supporting customer complaints and product or service quality issues, and enabling seamless channel operations.

Benefits

With Manufacturing Commercial Operations applications combined with ServiceNow workflows, your organization can speed up revenue, improve profitability and deliver exceptional customer and channel experiences.

To support end-to-end operations, Manufacturing Commercial Operations provides the following features, capabilities and applications.

Manufacturing Commercial Operations graphic

Manage an entire manufacturing ecosystem in real-time: Securely build business workflows across the ServiceNow ecosystem using Service Exchange for Manufacturing Commercial Operations. Manufacturers can adopt new features, publish product offerings, and sync them to customers, suppliers, channels, and partners, all within one system of engagement. This allows companies to manage their entire ecosystem easily in real-time, enabling customers and partners to work within their own ServiceNow environments to make any requests they need. These requests, incidents, or cases are received by manufacturers in real-time, eliminating errors and time lags, and increasing agent efficiency and customer satisfaction, and reducing the costs of custom integrations and e-bonding. Connect OEMs, Partners, and Customers.
Improve agility and savings with automated exceptions and disputes workflows: Manufacturing Commercial Operations helps automate the order exception and invoice dispute management processes by fusing customers, OEMs, channels, and other value chain partners with one system of engagement and action. Intelligent guided recommendations and workflows help resolve issues and disputes quickly, yielding improvements in agent productivity, order delivery performance and cash collection cycles, thus boosting revenue and cash flow.
Optimize the lead-to-cash cycle and increase revenue: Manage leads & opportunities from start to finish and map customer needs to best offers with Order Management for Manufacturing Commercial Operations. Launch complex products and services fast with configurable catalogs. Quickly configure and price quotes and convert to orders to speed up revenue. Automate order fulfillment across front, middle, and back office teams to reduce costs. Manage post-sale changes, upgrades, and renewals to boost revenue and retention
Accelerate growth with new subscriptions and services: Swiftly launch and manage new subscriptions and service offerings. Sales and order management applications,including product & pricing catalog management, opportunity to order management, post-sales activities and customer lifecycle workflows, convene on a single platform, increasing an organization’s responsiveness to rapidly changing customer expectations, market conditions, and emerging opportunities, translating into increased revenue potential.
Provide differentiated customer and channel experiences: Through Manufacturing Commercial Operations, manufacturers can offer seamless collaboration and enriched, personalized experiences to their customers and channel partners, fostering stronger partnerships and bolstering customer loyalty and retention. Omni-channel engagement, intelligent self-service capabilities, and proactive issues management and communications help not only increase loyalty but also improve overall brand value.

Key Features

In Manufacturing Commercial Operations, there are three major areas – Sales, Support, and Service. These areas collectively contribute to the effective sales of the company’s products and services. Manufacturing Commercial Operations aims to streamline, automate, and optimize these functions.

Establish Integrations between customer, partner, and manufacturer instances: Establish integrations between multiple ServiceNow instances to provide seamless manufacturing support and experiences across the manufacturing ecosystem, from enterprise customers to suppliers, to channels, to partners, without having to configure and maintain custom integrations. Create and publish catalogs of manufacturing services, manage order exceptions and product issues, and establish integrations between customer instances with Service Exchange for Manufacturing Commercial Operations.
Subscription and services lifecycle management: Connect end-to-end processes, verify customer contracts and entitlements at the point of service/sale, track and make post-sales changes, and proactively manage activations and potential loss of revenue. Manufacturers no longer have to rely on manual processes and legacy knowledge to manage activities across the various stages of pre-sales, sales, and post-sales processes (i.e., opportunity to renewal lifecycles). Additionally, these processes were optimized for product and parts sales and are not flexible enough to accommodate requirements of new subscriptions and services offerings.
Order-to-cash exceptions and disputes management: Integrate with ERP and other point systems, capture requests from omni-channels, intelligently route the request to the right teams, and orchestrate the collaboration, resolution and approval processes. You will be able to monitor SLAs, progress, and provide proactive communications to all stakeholders increasing auditability and visibility to all stakeholders. Provide an easier way for manufacturers to manage change requests to the orders, deliveries, and invoices, avoiding major issues and disputes that are often manually handled and go through many hand-offs, and preventing customer frustration and loss of revenue and/or cash.
Product quality Issues and post-sales services support: Integrate with other systems, make data available to the agent at the point of service, and communicate back and forth with customers, internal teams, and stakeholders seamlessly with configurable case types, playbooks, issues management workflows, and agent workspaces. Identify all impacted install base and communicate solutions and issue resolutions. Provide the best service to customers by resolving complaints and product quality issues on time, and avoid disconnect from internal teams such engineering, production, procurement, etc. With Manufacturing Commercial Operations, keep complete, consistent information on customers, install base, orders, warranty, contracts, entitlements, and products.
Channel support operations: Provide self-service capabilities, support requests on products, subscriptions, and services, and provide proactive, consistent, and real-time communication. Define the organization, hierarchies, and relationships with the end customers with Service Model Foundation capabilities. Proactively send service requests to nearest the dealers and service providers for maintenance and repairs to streamline service processes such as warranty claims and recalls. Avoid frustration from channel partners, including dealers, service providers, and retailers, because of inconsistent, delayed and inadequate responses to their inquiries, requests, and issues.