About the Customer

A global specialty pigment manufacturer produces color concentrates and compounds for customers across plastics, coatings, and industrial applications. With manufacturing plants on three continents and a sales team managing hundreds of SKUs across a worldwide customer base, the company operates at a scale where even small forecasting errors translate into real supply chain consequences.

For years, those errors were accepted as a cost of doing business. Not anymore.

Forecasting That Couldn’t Keep Pace

The annual forecasting process was a months-long ordeal. It would kick off in August for the following year: sales reps manually pulling data from Oracle EBS, layering in historical trends, making educated guesses, and submitting numbers that leadership would consolidate and adjust. The process took months to complete and arrived with known error margins baked in, a best effort, not a reliable view.

There was no real-time picture of actual orders versus forecasted volumes. When supply chain disruptions hit, and in specialty chemical manufacturing they do, the team had no way to respond quickly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chain shortages created exactly that kind of urgency. By the time the problem was visible in the data, months had already passed. The forecasting process simply wasn’t built for how fast the world was moving.

A Custom Forecasting Platform, Built to Evolve

ForeFront built a custom Salesforce-based forecasting solution that integrates Oracle EBS order data with Salesforce sales data in one place. Sales reps gained dashboards showing actual orders against forecasted volumes, by customer and by product, in near real-time. When numbers deviate meaningfully from forecast, the system automatically sends an alert through Microsoft Teams.

The design was deliberate: keep the sales rep in the driver’s seat. The goal was never to automate away human judgment. It was to give reps better signal so they could act on it faster. Forecasting shifted from an annual ritual to a continuous discipline, and it became required practice across the sales team.

When the pandemic hit and supply chains buckled, the team leaned on the system harder and found it needed to be faster. ForeFront iterated. The same happened as tariff volatility created new urgency. The platform evolved to support adjustments that once would have taken months, or simply wouldn’t have happened at all, in about a week.

The forecasting solution today is meaningfully different from what launched. It’s faster, more connected, and more embedded in how the business runs. Tableau and Power BI data surface alongside Salesforce and EBS data, giving leadership and reps a fuller picture at every level of the organization.

Even as the data pipeline matured, a friction point persisted for the sales reps doing the daily work of forecasting. Penn Color’s CRM Analytics dashboards — the front end reps relied on to review and adjust their numbers — refreshed on an hourly cycle. A rep who made a forecast adjustment wouldn’t see that change reflected for up to an hour, making it impossible to confirm edits had taken hold or work through a list of variances without losing their place. The lag eroded trust in the data and slowed the team down.

ForeFront built a custom Forecasting Scenario App to address this directly. The custom dashboard gives each sales rep a single screen showing all of their accounts and products at once, with visual sparklines that make trends and anomalies immediately readable. Changes made in the app reflect instantly — no hourly wait, no guessing whether the update landed. Reps can bulk-adjust all visible accounts at once, apply a bulk update to a single account, or drill down cell-by-cell when precision is needed. The result is a forecasting workspace that matches how reps actually think and work: across their whole book, in real time.

ForeFront designed the Forecasting Scenario App to fit Penn Color’s existing data architecture — built around opportunities and opportunity line item schedules, matching how the business already operated. The accelerator is designed to install into a Salesforce org and be tailored to a manufacturer’s specific data model, making it reusable across process and discrete manufacturers facing comparable forecasting complexity.

Expanding the Platform

Beyond forecasting, ForeFront has expanded the broader Salesforce footprint: Maps for field rep visit planning, LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration for contact intelligence, and a Microsoft Teams integration that keeps the sales organization connected and responsive.

Forecasting Is No Longer a Season

What used to take months now happens continuously. The forecasting platform is embedded in how the sales organization operates. It’s required, not optional. When markets move fast, the team can see it and respond in days instead of months.

When tariff changes created new urgency across global supply chains, this manufacturer was able to adjust forecasts in approximately a week. That’s the difference between a reactive organization and a responsive one.

The outcomes delivered include:

• Annual forecasting cycle compressed from months to near real-time
• Tariff and supply chain disruptions now addressed in about a week vs. months previously
• 75 sales users with data-driven forecasting ingrained as a daily discipline
• Automatic Teams alerts when actuals deviate from forecast thresholds
• Oracle EBS and Salesforce integration as a single source of truth for orders and pipeline
• Platform iterated through multiple generations, each faster and more capable

ForeFront built a custom forecasting platform tailored to a global specialty manufacturer’s complexity. We integrated Oracle EBS with Salesforce, iterated through multiple generations of the solution as business needs evolved, and delivered a tool so embedded in daily operations that it became mandatory. ForeFront’s pioneering work on manufacturer forecasting solutions like this ultimately helped inform Salesforce’s development of Manufacturing Cloud. Since then, ForeFront has been a critical member of the Manufacturing Cloud Partner Advisory Board at Salesforce, influencing key Go to Market and product roadmap messaging.