In the manufacturing industry, one mistake or delay can affect time to market, cost millions of dollars, and make or break a company. The bright side to that dark, expensive cloud? Business apps.

These days, there are hundreds of apps that can transform business processes for the better. This is good news for the manufacturing industry, since more customers are demanding customization and creating a whole world of new business challenges.

On the cutting edge of this massive industry shift is GLOBALFOUNDRIES, a semiconductor manufacturing company that produces only custom-built components. There are no standard SKUs, just expensive made-to-order components that must work together. The stakes to get it right and done on time are massive, because their products are at the core of many technologies.

King Ou, Director of Systems and Solutions at GLOBALFOUNDRIES, recently joined App Talks to share a visionary story about leveraging business apps from Salesforce and Apttus to create a feature-rich customer portal that would engage customers in the initial configuration discussion. The result? GLOBALFOUNDRIES completely revolutionized their business process, setting a high bar for customer-first, collaborative manufacturing.

For most manufacturing leaders, the vision that King and team had probably seems like a dream. But GLOBALFOUNDRIES realized their vision and more with the help of Salesforce Community Cloud, Sales Cloud, and two essential apps from Apttus: Contract Management and CPQ.

Watch the complete interview with King here, and check out highlights below.

What did GLOBALFOUNDRIES achieve with their visionary customer portal project? A few highlights:

Sales start faster, with fully executed NDAs in a matter of hours—not weeks. Due to the extremely sensitive IP on both sides, NDAs are the first step in any sales dialogue for GLOBALFOUNDRIES customers. Getting NDAs signed used to be a two- to three-week process, with multiple parties passing spreadsheets and docs back and forth. After implementing Contract Management from Apttus, the GLOBALFOUNDRIES team trimmed NDA turnaround time from two weeks to less than two hours.

By integrating data across Contract Management, Salesforce Communities, and CRM, GLOBALFOUNDRIES automatically gives multiple users access to sensitive data on the customer portal the minute an NDA is executed. It also automatically disables all users the minute the NDA expires.

Configuration is faster, more accurate, and customer-controlled. King’s team implemented Apttus CPQ with an intensive logic set based on historical engineer knowledge and also from massive manufacturing compatibility manuals. This created a way for customers to tweak configurations on their own timelines. Customers can use the Configurator tool to specify exactly what they want and check the compatibility of their design with manufacturing capabilities to determine if what they want can actually be done.

During initial tests, King and team ran parallel processes to test the new Configurator against the traditional, people-driven method. They found that the new system offered something more than speed; there was also a new, even higher level of accuracy, which is critical in a world where one error can add up to multi-million dollar loss

Customers, engineers, and administrators are happier.  Customers are happier and more efficient. Engineers are free to focus on innovation. The same tech experts administer core CRM and portal systems and a shared data set. Everyone wins.

 Three Tips for Peers

What advice would King offer his peers?

1) Establish a vision. What do you expect from your company and how will the tools you want to use help you do that?

2) Decide if you want to build or buy. You can build anything if you throw the right resources at it, but is that the right thing? Is that your company’s core competency? Says King, “Apttus provided tools we could never have thought of by ourselves, and the ROI was there—much more so than if we built it ourselves.”

3) Secure alignment on changing the business process. Get buy-in from key players and teams to find out what would make them more efficient.

Check out Apttus’s entire collection of apps on AppExchange, where 200+ Salesforce customers have shared reviews.

App Talks is a series of conversations with Salesforce customers who have transformed their business using AppExchange business apps.