Salesforce Price Hike: How Does It Affect End Users?

Salesforce has long been a leading CRM platform, empowering businesses to connect with their customers and streamline their operations effectively. However, Salesforce’s announcement of hiking the prices on their products by an average of 9% has raised concerns among users. In this blog, we will explore the implications of the Salesforce price hike and shed light on how users can still gain significant value from their Salesforce investment.

Understanding the Salesforce Price Hike:

After maintaining stable list prices for seven years, Salesforce has finally decided to increase the costs of their products. The increase in list prices will be effective from August 2023 across Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Industries, Marketing Cloud, and Tableau.

• The increased prices only affect new purchases or renewals
• Existing customers who have an ongoing contract have a grace period of at least 2 years before they start incurring the increased costs

Take a look at the revised prices:

Let's take a closer look at how Salesforce price hike compares with its competitors in the CRM market. The bar graph below showcases the subscription costs of Salesforce and its major competitors for the Enterprise Edition:

How does this benefit end-users?

Despite being competitively priced, Salesforce offers unparalleled features and capabilities that set it apart from its competitors. Let’s explore how amidst the price hike, end-users still stand to gain benefits from their Salesforce investment:

More Value through New Features:

Since its last price hike in 2016, Salesforce has delivered around 22 new releases and added numerous features to expand the platform’s capacity and improve user experience. The price hike will encourage the customers to optimize their current Salesforce usage in order to get the most out of the platform. This involves identifying areas where the platform is underutilized or redundant and making modifications in their contracts to optimize the new features.

The Power of Generative AI Integration:

Over the past few months, Salesforce has released Generative AI products like Einstein GPT, AI Cloud, Sales GPT, Service GPT, etc. These products will allow customers to leverage the power of Generative AI through Salesforce helping them get valuable insights, lower costs, increase overall revenue, while ensuring increased efficiency.

Upgrading and Customization Opportunities:

With the price hike in place, customers can seize the opportunity to upgrade their existing Salesforce products. They can also consider expanding their usage to cater to evolving business needs. Furthermore, customization options allow businesses to tailor Salesforce solutions to their specific requirements, boosting competitiveness and business performance.

Optimizing Salesforce Spending:

Salesforce price hike prompts existing customers to reassess their Salesforce spending and find ways to maximize their returns on investment. Businesses can collaborate with Salesforce consultants and experts to optimize their current usage, streamline processes, and identify areas where cost-efficiency can be improved.

In addition, the existing users who can currently enjoy a grace period before they start paying the increased prices can take this time to plan their Salesforce usage in advance. This will allow them to form strategies that will help them get the optimum benefits.

Conclusion:

While the Salesforce price hike poses challenges for end-users, it also presents opportunities for businesses to reevaluate their strategies and optimize their Salesforce usage. With a proactive and strategic approach, businesses can continue to harness the power of Salesforce and deliver exceptional customer experiences while ensuring cost-effectiveness and long-term growth.

10 Things to Consider When Choosing a Technology Partner

In today's fast-paced world, technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate, growing 2X every 1.5 years. With global tech spending expected to reach USD 3,950 billion by the end of 2023, businesses face the challenge of keeping up with the latest innovations. The rapidly evolving technological landscape has made it more crucial than ever for organizations to seek a reliable business technology partner who can help them navigate this digital transformation journey effectively.

To shed light on this critical aspect of business growth, this blog aims to provide insights into 10 important factors that organizations must consider when selecting a digital technology partner. By understanding these key considerations, you can make informed decisions, ensuring a successful partnership that aligns with your specific needs and propels your business towards sustainable growth in the digital era.

10 Key Considerations for Selecting the Right Technology Partner:

Selecting the right tech partner can benefit you in more than one way. You can cut down on costs, increase ROI, access a pool of technical expertise, and get an edge in the competitive market. But what should you consider for selecting the right technology solution provider? Let’s take a look: 

1. Partner’s Technical Expertise
2. Attention to Delivering Value
3. Understanding of Your Business Needs
4. Generalists or Specialists
5. Ease of Communication
6. Transparency in Workflow
7. Commitment to Your Business Success
8. Creative Abilities
9. Work Methodology
10. Customer Support

Partner’s Technical Expertise

Look for a tech partner who not only supports you in your project ideas but also offers better suggestions that can help you achieve your goals faster. You must check:

• • What current technologies they are well-versed with
  • If they have the ability to learn and adapt new technologies
  • If they can scale up and down as per changing technological landscape

A partner with strong technical skills can navigate complexities, optimize code, and implement best practices, resulting in a reliable and robust product. Technical expertise reduces risks, enhances the overall performance, and ultimately contributes to the success of your partnership and project.

Attention to Delivering Value

When you first meet your potential digital technology partner and discuss your goals, challenges, etc., pay attention to how attentive they are in offering solutions that will help you gain a competitive edge.

• Are they only talking about monetary benefits?
• Are they trying to go beyond meeting project requirements?
• Are they focused on providing tangible value to your business?

A partner who prioritizes value understands your goals and aligns their solutions accordingly. They actively seek ways to increase your return on investment, improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance user experiences.

Understanding Your Business Needs

Hiring a technology partner also means investing a significant sum of money with the aim of achieving better results. Finding a partner who understands your business needs is the first step to ensure your investment works out in the way you imagined.

• Is your partner able to anticipate future market needs?
• Are they able to identify opportunities in the industry and offer relevant solutions?
• Are they able to customize their solutions to meet your unique business needs?

A partner who comprehends your business needs can better translate them into technological solutions, ensuring that the final product addresses your challenges and goals effectively. This alignment between technology and business objectives enhances the partnership's value and drives meaningful results.

Generalists or Specialists

Generalists offer a broad range of skills and adaptability, allowing them to handle diverse projects and technologies. They can provide a holistic approach and cross-domain knowledge. On the other hand, specialists bring deep expertise in a specific technology or industry, offering a focused and in-depth understanding. They excel in niche areas, delivering specialized solutions. Choosing between the two solely depends on the complexity or specialization of your project.

• What are the specific technical requirements of your project?
• Does your project require industry-specific knowledge and expertise?
• What is the scale and scope of your project, and does it require a dedicated focus?

By asking yourself these questions, you can gain clarity on your project requirement and make an informed decision regarding the choice between a generalist or a specialist technology partner.

Ease of Communication

No amount of technical expertise can help if you struggle to maintain active communication with your chosen tech partner. Ineffective communication can create a lot of information silos and raise risks of losses.

• Is your partner easily accessible?
• What is their usual response time?
• How effectively can you communicate feedback and how soon is it addressed?

Clear and effective communication promotes a shared vision, facilitates timely decision-making, and minimizes misunderstandings. It also allows you to understand the project progress, ask relevant questions, and stay informed.

Transparency in Workflow

Transparency in workflow fosters trust, accountability, and effective project management. It opens the scope for effective communication and increases the chances of identifying potential bottlenecks or risks to making informed decisions.

• Is your partner providing sufficient visibility in their processes?
• Are you kept up to date with project timelines?
• Are you struggling to keep track of project milestones?

Transparency helps you ensure that your technology partner operates with honesty and integrity. By promoting transparency, a tech partner demonstrates their commitment to open collaboration, which contributes to the overall success of the project.

Commitment to Business Success

Your business technology partner’s commitment to your success throws light on their dedication to your goals and long-term growth. A committed partner will readily invest time and efforts to build a strong and collaborative relationship.

• Is your partner proactively seeking ways to contribute to your business success?
• Are they ready to take ownership of their work?
• Are they offering strategic guidance aligned to your business goals?

A tech partner who is truly committed will focus on delivering value that goes beyond immediate project requirements. Their commitment instills confidence, fosters trust, and lays the foundation for a fruitful and ongoing partnership.

Creative Abilities

With competition skyrocketing, what sets a business apart is their ability to innovate. Therefore, choosing a partner showcasing creative abilities is essential because they drive innovation, problem-solving, and differentiation.

• Is your partner able to offer fresh perspective?
• Are they capable of bringing out-of-the box ideas to the table?
• Are they able to push your business beyond traditional solutions and find new ways?

Regardless of your technical requirement, a tech partner with creative abilities can enhance the overall quality, usability, and marketability of your technology solutions, giving you a competitive edge.

Work Methodology

Analyzing your potential partner’s work methodology is crucial as it greatly impacts how your project will be delivered. It also affects the timelines of your projects and how soon you are able to reach the market to meet the demand.

• Does your partner have a complex workflow in their organization?
• Do they follow agile methodology or depend on some other ways?
• How effective is their methodology in meeting project deadlines?

A partner who follows effective workflows ensures your requirements are met on time, without any compromise on quality. Reduced TTM not only boosts your ROI but also increases your reputation in the market.

Customer Support

Lastly, choosing a technology partner that offers robust customer support is paramount. It ensures ongoing assistance and maintenance beyond the project's completion. A reliable partner provides timely updates, address bug fixes, and offers support for enhancements or upgrades.

• What channels of customer support does your partner offer?
• Do they have a dedicated support team? If yes, is their availability restricted to certain hours?
• To what extent is the support provided?

A partner who is available to assist you when the need arises will help you minimize downtime, ensure the smooth functioning of your technology solution, and allow you to focus on your core business activities.

Wrapping Up!

Collaborating with a technology partner is a choice that will have major implications on your time, money, and success. The right technology partner will not just help you navigate the technological landscape but will also drive innovation and add value to your business, giving you a competitive edge. However, remember that this process takes time. It’s essential to engage in thorough research, ask the right questions, and make an informed decision that aligns with your business needs, goals, and culture. After all, your tech partner is more than just a vendor – they are an extension of your team.

How Infopine Helps Textile Manufacturers with its ERP Based Products?

Seven Important Modules of iTexClouds:

• • Sales Order Management - iTexClouds implements functions of order placement, order scheduling, shipping and invoicing. This module helps in sales planning too. It helps in online order entry with an enhanced visibility into sales. It also allows your organization to process orders more efficiently. It minimizes delays and backorders, and help in developing client connections.
  • Production Planning & Control (PPC) - It is the first and foremost planning and estimation that textile production and manufacturing firm would take care of. iTexClouds ERP is planned utilizing special numerical calculation to respond to questions like:
    • What will be the textile production capacity of the Business unit?
    • How much raw material is needed?
    • What must be the process of production?
    • Whether it is cost-effective or not?
    • How much workforce is needed? Etc to have a smooth production. This module is intended to design your creation a long way ahead on schedule, even before the manufacturing starts.
  • Job Work Management - iTexClouds job work module provides a complete solution for job work material management with invoice and GST for both manufacturer to Jobber and Jobber to manufacturer management. Job Work is an important module for textile manufacturing unit.
  • Quality Management - As a part of iTexClouds ERP, handles the traditional task of quality planning, inspection and quality control. It acquires and process the essential data required by goods receipt and production in order to achieve and protect a high standard of quality using proven methodologies. In textile manufacturing market to survive and succeed in the present scenario, it is crucial that you maintain a very high quality at all steps of your manufacturing process and iTexClouds ERP makes this happen for you.
  • Exports Management - Managing, tracking and maintaining exports document is a tedious job and a challenge in textile industry. iTexClouds ERP has a beautiful and efficient way to take off all your export documentation load and make it easy for you & handle even the tiniest export-related task. It is designed to digitise export compliance and transactional functions.
  • Payroll Management - Payroll is defined as a method of managing employees’ salaries in the organizations. This software consists of pay calculation and different deductions of the staff, administrating other benefits and payments of their salaries. This module of iTexClouds ERP helps textile manufacturers to manage end to end payroll of their employees.
  • Financial Accounting - iTexClouds ERP system gathers financial data from various departments and generates valuable financial reports. This module of the application helps to take important financial decisions and manage budget. Financial position of the company can also be tracked at any moment with Financial accounting module.

Digital Transformation for Textile Manufacturing Industry

The Technologies That are Impacting The Textile Manufacturers

ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning, helps textile manufacturers in managing their workflow starting from Order, Inventory, Production, Quality Control, Ware House, Order Fulfilment, Finance & Accounting & Customer Management.

ERP enables departments and decision makers to work remotely by providing them the real time data that can be accessed anytime and from anywhere. It also helps departments to get connected with one another. It monitors, controls, analyse and understands business process. It supports supply chain, sourcing and Procurement.

Artificial Intelligence (AI):

Internet of Things (IoT):

Manufacturers are using IoT for enhancing their customer’s experience. It makes the communication easy between the manufacturers, retailers and consumers.

IoT plays a very vital roles for textile industry. It helps in smart management, quick decision, better maintenance & Process optimisation. It helps in managing the following KPI’s:

• WIP tracking,
• track material movement,
• track product SOP flow,
• Machine availability
• Machine ON & OFF status
• Batch Creation
• Down Time & Reason
• Energy Perimeter
• Operator efficiency
• Daily Shift wise reports

Benefits of Digitization for The Textile and Apparel Industry

Sustainability: After the digitalization implemented in textile industry supply chain & operational management became more sustainable. There are programmed machine that are helping the manufacturers to generate improved quality output. By the use of cloud-based technologies, decision makers are able to deliver the order fulfilment on time.

Efficiency: Helps in increasing the efficiency as there is a growing requirement of improved and enhanced coordination in textile industry because of its worldwide distribution. Cost cutting and boosting productivity methodologies that are required to automate a business are available.

Cost Effectiveness: Textile manufacturing units are quite expensive. There are wide range of sub cost required like equipment management, labour management, marketing costs, maintenance costs, and space costs. To regulate this cost digital transformation is required.

Enhanced Safety: Digital solutions provides electronic signatures and e-invoicing that are totally more secure than physical documentation. It also helps to avoid non-compliance issues in different countries.

Staying Competitive: Organizations are developing digital capabilities to gain an edge in a hypercompetitive market. After the COVID-19 pandemic, digital adoption is accelerating industries.

Conclusion: Digital manufacturing technologies are revamping every part of the textile manufacturing industry. The execution of digital transformation and developed work process have modified the landscape of organizations and that also resulted in cost saving and enhanced productivity.

Digitalization is not simple. It requires well-thought-out strategies. Digital Transformation is driving the fashion, apparel, textile, and footwear industries to the next generation. It has been proved to be a blessing for textile industries.

Is Textile Industry Equipped to WFH During Pandemic?

ERP System for Textile Industries:

It Helps In:

• Inventory Management - Control over all your entire inventory, including future arrivals.
• Order Management - Automating and streamlining the order processing for business. Helps to manage your orders.
• Order Fulfilment - Provides Receiving, Processing and delivering orders to end customers.
• Customer Management - Manage your customer details, Includes contacts, stores and ship to locations.
• Production Management - Manging your production accuracy and on time by managing vendors, material & operations.
• Finance & Accounting - Features of summary, analysis & Reporting of financial transaction pertaining to business
• Ware House Management - To support & optimize warehouse functionality and distribution centre management including inventory management, picking processes and auditing.
• It Also Helps in Improving Your ROI.It’s important to Select the best ERP Software for your business

How it Helps in Supporting Work From Home for Employees:

• Ease Implementation - Easy and fast to implement.
• Real-Time Access & Team Work - It helps in working remotely as the employees have access to real time data without the need to go to work place. It can be accessed anytime and from anywhere. This helps teams to continue their daily work in normal way from their home itself and remain connected to their daily operations.
• A New Level of Agility - large and small manufacturing companies’ employers can access data at any time from any devices like smartphones, laptop or Monitor. This ease of accessing data helps in maintaining company resilient.
• Reduce Miscommunications - The biggest issue that was been faced by manufacturing industries in taking orders or in delivering the result during the start of pandemic there was a risk of miscommunication between the employees working remotely, as digital communication has not always been as much as effective like face-to-face conversation integrates all the data into one centralized system which authorised employees can access to view the performance. Employees have also the access to the most recent documents and, information which keeps them updated on their daily task.
• Improve Speed and Accuracy - Generally passing an information verbally or over email consumes time. Textile ERP software allows offices in boosting their productivity & efficiency, as divisions can see the work of other teams on real time basis, without being present physically. This also helps improving team unity.
• Allow Scalability - Helps is saving overhead cost that was previously spent in offices space. The scalability makes it easier to adapt to, than using onsite infrastructure where any change can be, slow and complicated to achieve. By capitalising on these savings companies are expanding their teams, as it can be easily scaled up and down as required. Increase in demand, resource planning can help you to make hiring decisions quick by driving higher levels of scalability. In the same way when you are running a manufacturing and distribution business which peaks seasonally, you will be able to plan to scale down during quieter seasons.
• Simplify Supervision - Helps higher authority to work remotely as they have the access to view the work done by their respective team and view company real time data. Track activities and efficiency of employees working remotely.
• Financial Accounting - This Software also makes accounting and financial data analysis easier, and accessible remotely. Data entry is automating and you can easily keep track of all the transaction and can get reports on the same. It makes the management of your textile business easier.
• Analytics - Flexible Dash board and reporting tools.

Wildlife Conservation – Infopine’s Consciousness

Forest Fire:

• Myth- Natural disaster like rubbing of trees, lightning.
• Reality- It’s a manmade disaster l
• Result- Loss flora & fauna.

Feeding Animals in Wildlife:

• Myth- Animals are happy
• Reality- They have fixed balance diet by them self
• Result- Imbalance in food chain of wild forest

Harsh or Fast Driving:

• Myth: Luxury of long drive-in forest
• Reality- Road accidents in forest
• Result- Road kills of wild & endangered species

Saints Uses Animal Skin:

• Myth- Gain of super power
• Reality- Scam
• Result- Killing of innocent animals

Some other Reality That is Important to Know:

• Vehicle parking is prohibited in forest & wildlife Sanctury as it violates the ecosystem
• Total number of tigers in India is within 4k to 5k and maximum are in Karnataka
• Cheetah existence in India is extinct only leopard are seen.
• Lions are mostly found in Gir National Park, Gujarat.

Employees Takeaway:

Pooja (Talent Acquisition Specialist):

• It was such a wonderful experience in Meeting Mr Rajkumar and learning so many things about the Ecology of forest, and wildlife.
• It was more of an educative and Interactive session.
• Over this workshop we learnt about the wildlife cycle and ecological balance
• Results of human negligence on wildlife
• To step out of superstitious believes in killing wild life
• Love towards the animals & social awareness

Gaurav Kumar (Senior Manager):

Chandana G (HR Executive):

• It was good and informative session
• Awareness creating session

PavanKumar SM (Sr. Technical Lead):

• Wildlife Conservations is very much integral to the balance of nature.
• Saving tigers is about more than restoring a single species, tiger plays an important role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Every time we save a tiger, we protect forests that sustain many wildlife species and local communities.
• We need to protect wildlife for our future generations else many beautiful species can be seen only in books & museums.

Mohitha M G (Trainee Software Engineer)

• The wildlife workshop enlightened me about the importance of conserving the wildlife as they play a key role in our day-to-day life.
• I got to know the actual facts regarding forest fires and an awakening to stop feeding wild animals.
• STOP Deforestation, animal slaughtering, hunting...in order to cut-off the extinction of wild animals!

Summary:

Ray of Hope:

• Government started providing Gas stove to people to avoid tree cutting,
• Plantation activities are started,
• many trainings session is provided to educate people on wildlife conservation etc