Manufacturing Cloud Customer Portal: What to Show

A customer portal on Manufacturing Cloud pays off when customers can see their framework agreements, orders and open cases there and place orders or requests themselves. In a global Manufacturing Cloud rollout I worked on, customers saw their sales agreements, orders, master data and cases in the portal. They could request new products and prices and place orders. Three decisions determine whether such a portal works: which licence customers get, how much of the sales agreement they see, and which system owns master data when customers change it themselves.

What can customers do in the portal?

In the project, the portal had two kinds of features. Customers could see:

• Their sales agreements, meaning agreed quantities and terms.
• Their orders.
• Their master data, such as addresses.
• Their cases, meaning requests and complaints to service.

And customers could act:

• Request new products and prices. The request goes into the quoting process I describe in part 2: from quote to sales agreement.
• Place orders. If customers should order from a catalogue with their own prices, that is a B2B store; when a portal is enough is covered in chapter 1 of the B2B Commerce masterclass.
• Maintain certain master data themselves, such as the billing address.

For the manufacturer the benefit is simple: questions like “How much of my framework agreement have I called off?” or “Where is my order?” are answered by the customer without an email to inside sales. For that to hold, the numbers in the portal have to be right. Where the actuals in a sales agreement come from is covered in part 3: sales agreements, spotting customers behind on volume.

Which licence do customers need in the portal?

Salesforce offers two portal licences for Manufacturing Cloud. According to Salesforce Help1:

Licence	For whom	What Help names
Partner Community for Manufacturing	Partners, dealers, suppliers	Sales agreements, account forecasts, leads, opportunities, quotes, campaigns, warranty and rebate claims, visits
Customer Community Plus for Manufacturing	Customers	Cases, knowledge articles, orders, assets and warranties

Help also says that Customer Community Plus for Manufacturing does not share leads, opportunities, campaigns or quotes with external users. It does not explicitly name sales agreements for this licence.

In my project, customers had Customer Community Plus for Manufacturing and saw their sales agreements in a reduced list view. So I read Help as describing typical use cases, not a complete list. I still would not rely on it.

What portal licences cost and how they differ from internal licences is covered in Salesforce licences: does everyone need a full one?. How the portal fits into the dealer channel next to rebates and partner visits is in chapter 3 of the Manufacturing Cloud masterclass.

Customers see less of the sales agreement than sales does

Less than internal staff. In the project, customers saw their sales agreements in a slimmed-down list view, not at the level of detail sales works with.

There is a technical reason for that. According to the object reference2, the sales agreement holds fields such as planned and actual margin percentage and planned and actual cost. Those values belong to the agreement, but a customer must not see them. The same goes for internal forecasts and the account manager’s notes.

So before building, I write a list of which sales agreement fields go outside. A useful question is what the customer needs for their own planning:

• What they committed to: products, quantities, term, prices.
• What they have taken so far: actual quantities per period.
• What is still open: the difference.

Everything else stays internal. The list is also a good document for acceptance testing, because the business can check it without knowing Salesforce.

One side effect is worth a thought: when customers see for themselves that they are behind on their commitment, the conversation about the open volume sometimes starts on their side. Sales should know that before the portal goes live, so the customer’s call does not catch them off guard.

Who owns master data when customers maintain it themselves?

That sounds like a detail, but it shifts the roles of the systems. At manufacturers, the ERP usually leads for customer master data, because orders and invoices are created there. When a customer maintains a field in the portal, Salesforce becomes the entry system for that field. That leads to rules I settle before building:

1. A list of fields customers may change. Billing address yes, payment terms no. IT and the business maintain the list together.
2. One direction per field. A field the customer changes in the portal must not be changed in the ERP at the same time and written back, or the systems overwrite each other.
3. Visible errors. If the ERP rejects a change, for example because an address is incomplete, someone has to see it. Otherwise the portal shows an address that never reached the ERP, and the next invoice goes to the old one.

How I decide the leading system for customers, products, prices and orders is described under integration with ERP, middleware and telephony.

Portal orders close the loop through the ERP

An order in the portal is the last step for the customer and the first one for the manufacturer. It has to reach the ERP, be confirmed there and flow back into the sales agreement as an actual quantity. Planning the portal means planning the whole loop.

Requests for new products or prices take a different route. They go to sales and run through configuration, quote and approval. What matters most to the customer is seeing the status of the request instead of having to chase it.

Cases are the most familiar part of the portal. Here Manufacturing Cloud helps with links to orders and assets, which Help lists for the customer licence. How warranty claims run through dealers is a topic of its own in a later part of this series.

Check the feature list against the licence

Before the portal is built, settle these points:

1. What do customers see and do? A list of features, as in the first section above.
2. Which licence covers it? Confirmed in writing, especially for sales agreements.
3. Which fields go outside? For the sales agreement and the master data, without margin and cost.
4. Which data flows back to the ERP? One direction and one error handling per field.

I send the feature list from point 1 to Salesforce and have them confirm, line by line, which portal licence covers it. Whatever stays open does not go into the first release.

Sources2

1. 1Salesforce Help (opens in a new tab)help.salesforce.com
2. 2object reference (opens in a new tab)developer.salesforce.com