How an Industrial Giant Is Optimizing Supply Chains and Boosting Growth with Salesforce

Regal Rexnord − a U.S. company headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — might not be a household name. But the products it manufactures help make modern life a lot more comfortable.

The company, which has about 30,000 employees and thousands of suppliers across North America, Europe, and Asia, produces automation, motion control, power transmission, and air-moving technologies that power data centers, industrial vehicles and equipment, and more.

But Regal Rexnord’s vast product inventory and highly complex global supply chain left the industrial conglomerate exposed following a merger and a global pandemic, forcing a fundamental rethink of its technology stack. 

The company’s response‌ — ‌a wholesale embrace of Salesforce CRM, order management, integration, and AI technology — ‌offers a template for how manufacturers can navigate volatile operating environments while positioning themselves for the next phase of growth.

Transforming the tech stack 

Robert Federer, Vice President and General Manager, Regal Rexnord, recently likened the Covid pandemic’s impact on supply chains to a “massive bullwhip effect.”

There was a sudden fall in consumer demand. Factories and production sites were shuttered. “Production was idled across the globe,” recalled Federer.  

The real challenge, however, came a year later when economies opened up again. Demand for products surged, which overwhelmed some company supply chains, including Regal’s.

“We saw more orders than we could fill,” said Federer. 

In 2021, Regal merged with Rexnord Process and Motion Control (PMC) to become Regal Rexnord Corporation. This compounded pandemic-driven pressures. As the company grew larger, strategic and operational shifts created a massive web of disparate, siloed technology systems and processes.

In early 2023, Regal Rexnord began working with Salesforce to streamline their vastly complicated supply chain tech stack — which by now included various channels and more than 20+ ERP systems.

“We had a golden opportunity to kind of rethink what we wanted our technology stack to be and really audit what we felt were our strengths and what were our weaknesses,” said Federer. “We got an opportunity to say, what will we do long-term?”

We had a golden opportunity to kind of rethink what we wanted our technology stack to be and really audit what we felt were our strengths and what were our weaknesses. We got an opportunity to say, what will we do long-term?

Robert Federer, Vice President and General Manager, Regal Rexnord

The company began by moving their service users — those who quote, interact with support requests, and provide updates on orders — onto Salesforce Order Management. That, combined with ‌Salesforce’s CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) sales tool, enabled Regal Rexnord to see and process all of their orders in one place. With all of a customer’s information in one place, rather than spread across disparate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Regal Rexnord was able to reduce the time it took to onboard new customer service reps. The more intuitive and user-friendly interface also helped reps streamline order processing, which in turn improved CSAT scores. 

Underpinning this technology is Salesforce’s integration and automation solution, MuleSoft. The software acts as a sort of central nervous system, connecting all of Regal Rexnord’s strategic platforms to the Salesforce OMS and CPQ tools. For a company that had undergone a series of complex mergers, leaving a tangled web of systems, this was critical. For example, an integration between Salesforce and Regal Rexnord’s multiple ERPs allowed reps to split orders and move customers to a single PO, regardless of where they originated from.

An AI-powered future

Efforts like these are also paving the way for Regal Rexnord to take advantage of the next wave of technology — AI.

Regal Rexnord will now be using Salesforce’s AI-powered service platform to help customer service agents quickly generate written responses to things like common customer questions. Without needing to spend time and energy crafting these messages on their own, Regal Rexnord reps have had more time to focus on revenue-generating opportunities. 

The company is eyeing agentic AI to scale these results. Agentic AI, the technology that powers AI agents, can understand and ‌respond to customer inquiries without human intervention — and is widely predicted to be the next big thing in AI. 

By 2028, one in three (33%) enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, with at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions being made autonomously through AI agents, research company Gartner has forecast.

Today, Regal Rexnord is testing an out-of-the-box AI agent built inside of Salesforce Order Management. By retrieving order data from both Regal’s ERP and order management systems, Agentforce can answer the most common customer question − “Where’s my order?” − without needing any of a rep’s time.

This helps the company automate a tedious, repetitive but essential task previously done by employees in favor of more strategic work, noted Federer. It also helps the company respond more quickly (and around-the-clock) to customers looking for their order status.

“Having an agent sit inside of that ecosystem, we’re moving faster than we would otherwise,” he said.

Having an agent sit inside of that ecosystem, we’re moving faster than we would otherwise.

Robert Federer, Vice President and General Manager, Regal Rexnord

This speedy response time, Federer says, is helping the company grow.

“From a top-line growth perspective, any time you’re increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty scores, that helps you grow,” he said.

The next step in Regal Rexnord’s multi-year AI transformation includes testing custom agents built on Salesforce’s Agentforce platform for other business use cases, including larger projects, across its business.  

“We have a lot of experimentation going [with Agentforce] across our organization with our different teams,” said Federer. “For example, we are executing a project on the SIOP [sales, inventory, and operations planning] and supply chain side,” said Federer.

Agentforce can “automate a tremendous amount of manual effort [helping to] manage thousands of suppliers and communications and change the dates of deliveries that all have to be updated in our systems of record,” he said.

AI inflection point

As for the future, Federer is excited about the potential to use Agentforce for “win-loss analysis” − a system to help businesses understand why they win or lose sales opportunities.

He describes AI agents, paired with the company’s own data, as “transformation technology.”

“[Imagine] having years of data of win-loss analysis and pricing information in Salesforce, having consolidated quotes and orders and opportunities in one platform,” said Federer. “An agent can analyze [the data in aggregate], versus the old legacy world of having customers’ information across numerous ERPs.”

Federer clearly believes in the opportunity to use AI agent technology to modernize Regal’s manufacturing business.

The journey has only just begun.

More information:

• See how AI agents provide a competitive advantage for SMBs 
• Learn about Goodyear’s journey to reinvent tire sales and customer experiences with Agentforce
• Discover how leading companies of all sizes and industries are transforming to become Agentforce companies 
• Explore Agentforce and Data Cloud customer stories
• Read about how Data Cloud powers Agentforce
• Join the new Agentblazer and Datablazer communities