Thousands of Salesforce® customers utilize MuleSoft® to create a 360-degree view of their customer data, or to boost productivity with automation, or for other purposes related to enhancing their CRM. You may be wondering why? 

In a recent AdVic “Salesforce Simplified” podcast about such a CRM enhancement, our MuleSoft Practice Director, Tom Minton, explained the many benefits of MuleSoft Composer.

“The main advantage to MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce, Minton says, “is that it allows Salesforce admins the ability to create inner integrations with external systems using no code.”

He added, “Without having to concern IT departments, Salesforce admins can connect an assortment of connectors with just clicks. Even without having a vast knowledge of MuleSoft coding ability, they can achieve the results they need and  the information they need in a much more efficient way.”

MuleSoft Composer or MuleSoft Anypoint?

MuleSoft Composer and MuleSoft’s API/integrations flagship tool, Anypoint, share some of the same features. 

Minton explains, “Anypoint comes with a bigger financial investment and may not be ideal for medium or rising businesses. MuleSoft Composer, however, is a lighter version of Anypoint that packs the same power, is user-friendly to Salesforce admins, and it’s efficient.”

Integrate, Streamline, and Automate with MuleSoft Composer

MuleSoft Composer integrates with products such as Workday, ServiceNow and Slack, and enables the use of Salesforce directly from an app. With these integrations, sales and procurement receive automated messages that notifies them of inventory when they are selling to customers. 

Mitigating Sales Forecasting Risk

Whether it is Tableau, or those infamous Excel/Google Sheets, data can be pulled from these sources to forecast for the following months using historical data and past performance. Integrating Google sheets into Tableau or Salesforce can actually map out data in a more usable and visually appealing way. 

Another one of the many benefits of MuleSoft Composer is the ability to synchronize orgs. As your business grows and you decide to collaborate with competitors or acquire brands with their own org, MuleSoft allows you to come together as one. Thus allowing orgs to pass information without having to swivel back and forth between systems.  

Streamlining Operations with MuleSoft Composer

MuleSoft Composer streamlines everything. That means less keyboard time and more time making sales.

Here’s some additional streamlining Composer helps with:

• You could have inventory information.
• You can view the throughput.
• You’re able to send information out about a new opportunity via a Slack message. In that Slack message, it could have a link back to the Salesforce opportunity for whether your salespeople are in house or on the road.
• There’s a connector for a service called Stripe, which is a cash reconciliation ecommerce tool. 
• You can get the information into the system that it needs without having to type it.

The Future of MuleSoft Connectors

All-in-all, MuleSoft enables its users to have multiple sources of customer information at their fingertips. 

“They come out with a new set of features every three to six months,” Minton says, “with plenty more to come.” 

As a certified MuleSoft Anypoint and Composer, and Salesforce multi-cloud consulting partner, Ad Victoriam’s integration experts understand the complexities of enterprise integrations, both on-premise and in the cloud. We simplify complex integration scenarios, integrate disparate systems, and provide a scalable architecture that your business can grow with – whether or not you are using Salesforce. So, if you are ready to connect your systems, we’re ready to talk to you today.

Related Resources:

How Salesforce and MuleSoft Create a Seamless Customer Experience
What Can MuleSoft Do for Your Salesforce Org?
MuleSoft Composer’s Ease of Use Reduces the Need for IT
MuleSoft Integration Creates Customer 360-Degree View

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What is Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud? 

Manufacturing Cloud was created specifically for manufacturers to streamline operations, secure data, and gain a 360-degree view of customer profiles, while also driving collaboration, eliminating inefficiencies, and maximizing transparency.

Why Consider a Salesforce for Manufacturing Solution?

Here are the five most important things Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud does for businesses:

1. Modernize Commercial Operations: Manage your complete book of business from opportunity through order management and demand forecasting.
2. Simplify Partner Engagement: Drive greater partner visibility, engagement, and performance.
3. Transform the Service Experience: Enable faster and smarter service experience optimized from the contact center through field service to the customer.

4. Enable the Workforce of the Future: Enhance employee productivity, and agility with modern experiences for the work-from-anywhere world.
5. Translate Data into Insights and Actions: Integrate legacy systems and enable better decision making and execution by AI, analytics, and the Salesforce platform.

Compatible Add-On Suggestions

So, now that you know the most important solutions Salesforce for Manufacturing offers your business, here are a couple of compatible add-ons to consider that will take your Manufacturing Cloud platform to the next level:

– Incorporating Experience Cloud for Manufacturing delivers a new pre-built template specific for manufacturers that extends sales agreements to channel partners, allowing them to easily collaborate together on leads and opportunities.

– Analytics extends the power of Manufacturing Cloud by infusing intelligent insights, predictions, and recommendations into your day-to-day operations. With a fully customizable platform, executives and account teams can discover insights into sales agreement compliance, account health, pricing, and product performance.

– Additionally, adding MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform unlocks data from any application, data source or device—whether that data is on-premise or in the cloud. By enabling organizations to connect Manufacturing Cloud with other systems, sales and operations leaders can automate the complete order-to-cash process, create a comprehensive forecast view and drive business process automation across all sales channels.

When you’re ready to align sales and operations, unify account planning and forecasts, and deliver greater transparency with a tailor-made CRM for manufacturers, the AdVic Salesforce for Manufacturing Consulting Team is ready. Our team has earned Salesforce’s Manufacturing Industry Expert Level, which verifies that AdVic is one of the most experienced and capable Manufacturing-focused Salesforce partners, one that meets the highest standards of customer satisfaction. Let’s develop your plan starting today.

Related Resources:

Manufacturing Cloud Aligns Sales and Ops

Innovative Technology that Drives Manufacturing Sales

Manufacturing Cloud Accelerator

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Integration is the future. In an increasingly technology-driven world, it is crucial that there is a single source of truth for your company’s information. If your employees must go to multiple different places to get the information they need, you have wasted time, money, and energy. 

Salesforce® and MuleSoft® can create a powerful, real-time integrated experience in your Salesforce org. This article will explain what it means to have an integrated experience in your Salesforce org and how to acquire that experience with MuleSoft. In addition, we will cover some of the basic integration tools in Salesforce, a high-level overview of MuleSoft architecture and how these tools work together. 

Salesforce Integration Tools for MuleSoft 

Salesforce is built to be integrated with your legacy systems to create a 360 degree view of your customers for your Salesforce users. MuleSoft can be added to your Salesforce org by adding a Connected App in the App Manager settings. 

The best way to allow MuleSoft to have access to your Salesforce org is by creating an integration user. When the user is set up, save the username, password, and security token that is sent to the related email. These credentials will be used in MuleSoft to login to Salesforce and make changes to the data via the Salesforce REST API. 

Salesforce can communicate changes to the data to MuleSoft in a few different ways. The most common and simple way being via Platform Events and Process Builders. A Platform Event can be created in Salesforce and triggered to send a message to MuleSoft via a Process Builder. In this way, you can create the trigger to respond to whatever changes in the data suit your business needs. 

In addition, an APEX Class can be configured to use the Salesforce REST API mentioned earlier. An APEX Class is created in the Developer console and is written to receive the request from Salesforce regarding the change in data, then that message is sent to a listener in MuleSoft, similar to the way the first option with Platform Events works. However, it is highly recommended that you use Platform Events and Process Builders because they require significantly less Salesforce Development time and are easier to maintain in the long run. 

MuleSoft Architecture – How Does it Work? 

MuleSoft architecture is unique from other integration platforms because it is an Enterprise Service Bus architecture model. This means that MuleSoft is the translator between many different systems. You can create APIs unique to your systems that only change when that system changes. Then, these system APIs speak to each other through MuleSoft processing APIs. As you can see in the diagram below, systems do not connect directly to each other. Rather, they are connected through MuleSoft. 

In MuleSoft, there are three kinds of APIs that are created: 

• Experience API (Channels): Produces what the end user needs to see and interact with.
• Process API (Processes): Performs the transformations between systems.
  • Translates each of the systems to Salesforce or other systems that need to communicate.
• System API (Data): Represents what is held in each system.

Below is an example of how these APIs can be structured: 

As you can see, the system layer represents the two systems that need to be integrated. These system API’s do not contain any of the business logic to “translate” Salesforce to the ERP system. The process layer APIs contain the business logic for Products, Orders, and Customers so that this data can be translated from one system to another. The top layer, Experience APIs, create what the end users interact with. These APIs generally contain schedules for when the other API’s should run in order for the data to move from system to system.

This kind of architecture creates many significant benefits to integrating with MuleSoft. To start, it creates reusable, scalable, and secure integrations. Once you have created a System API, you do not need to ever create it again. You may need to make small additions, but you will be able to connect that system to any other system via a Process API by reusing the System API. This leads to increased agility on projects, less time wasted, and more money saved. Similar to the App Exchange, there is an Anypoint Exchange for MuleSoft. Here you can find connectors, accelerators, integration patterns, etc., that you can use in your projects instead of starting from scratch yourself.

Salesforce + MuleSoft: Catalyze Your integrated Experience

The combination of Salesforce integration tools and MuleSoft can create the integrated experience you’ve been looking for in your Salesforce org. It can be difficult to fully transition from legacy systems to Salesforce and with MuleSoft you can implement Salesforce at your own pace. This will allow you to slowly retire your legacy system operations while keeping your data up to date in real time and creating a future-proof implementation. MuleSoft can be updated in an extremely agile manner to keep your systems up-to-date and avoid technical debt build up.

With a MuleSoft integrated experience, your Salesforce users will be able to see the data they need in one place. This will create an increased level of trust in your Salesforce org from the start and make the transition away from legacy systems as painless as possible. The future is integrated and MuleSoft can take you there.

As a certified MuleSoft Anypoint and Salesforce multi-cloud consulting partner, Ad Victoriam’s integration experts understand the complexities of enterprise integrations, both on-premise and in the cloud. We simplify complex integration scenarios, integrate disparate systems, and provide a scalable architecture that your business can grow with – whether or not you are using Salesforce. So, if you are ready to connect your systems, we’re ready to talk to you today.

*This article also appears on Salesforce Ben

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Highlights from MuleSoft’s CONNECT: NOW

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Members of the Ad Victoriam MuleSoft® Consulting Team attended the virtual conference and chose a few session highlights to share.

Session: Streamline and Scale Lending with API-led Integration

This breakout session provided a good understanding of how lending companies have addressed the need to deliver products and services with the use of a digital platform.

API-led connectivity plays a big part in lending-type MuleSoft applications, as this helps to define or refactor current business processes to help improve the overall end to end customer experience.

During the session, Truist Bank CIO, Ken Meyer, talked about how adopting MuleSoft is not just a technology effort, it requires the business to define all the requirements for the APIs that can then be implemented using MuleSoft.

With the use of APIs and MuleSoft, companies within the lending industry can unlock data from other systems, automate manual business processes, and drive innovation with more speed and agility.

Session: Revolutionize the Patient Journey in Life Sciences Through APIs

This session focused on how in today’s healthcare world patients are seeking virtual engagement.

Due to COVID19 healthcare companies are having to rapidly change and adapt to the growing virtual needs of patients.

The MuleSoft Anypoint platform is helping healthcare providers to quickly combine disparate systems with builder block APIs to drive interoperability. Traditionally IT teams would not be efficient enough to quickly build out new interrogations.

To support the healthcare industry’s needs, such as those that COVID19 has presented, the API building block approach with MuleSoft allows IT teams to build upon past phases to narrow the development timeline.

Session: Manage Changing Retail Operations with Real-Time Data

The main subject of the presentation was how retail has changed significantly in the last few months due to COVID19.

Kreena Mehta, Lead Software Engineer of Asics Digital showed how they used SAP and MuleSoft to streamline their operations and quickly adjust their supply chain to a more delivery-based model as opposed to the traditional brick and mortar.

MuleSoft made this easy with its API-Led approach because the existing processes did not have to be changed from the top down, just the targeted areas dealing with shipping/receiving.

The digital shopping experience is now the number one priority in the retail space due to more online shopping by consumers.

As a certified MuleSoft Anypoint and Salesforce multi-cloud consulting partner, Ad Victoriam’s integration experts understand the complexities of enterprise integrations, both on-premise and in the cloud. We simplify complex integration scenarios, integrate disparate systems, and provide a scalable architecture that your business can grow with – whether or not you are using Salesforce. So, if you are ready to connect your systems, we’re ready to talk to you today.

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