Manufacturing Cloud | Partner Pocket Guide

Deliver predictability and transparency across your entire ecosystem

Welcome to the Manufacturing Cloud Partner Pocket Guide!

Purpose: This Partner Pocket Guide is your one stop shop for all your content and tools to help you successfully sell and implement the Manufacturing Cloud product. Review this document to understand the purpose and positioning of Manufacturing Cloud, what innovation is being delivered to address customer needs, answers to FAQs, and quick links to key partner enablement resources for a deeper dive.

We will be regularly updating this guide so be sure to check back in the Table of Contents below to find out what’s new for Manufacturing Cloud!

Table of Contents

I only have 10 minutes in my day. Where should I start?

Review Introduction to Manufacturing Cloud
Understand the Sales Positioning Message
Explore the Manufacturing Cloud Chatter group in the Partner Community for additional information

What is Manufacturing Cloud?

Built on the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, Manufacturing Cloud is an industry-specific product designed for manufacturers. Manufacturing Cloud brings sales and operations teams together around a unified view of market and customer demands to more accurately forecast, plan and drive predictable business performance. With Manufacturing Cloud, companies can now better meet commitments and run a more streamlined business while improving customer satisfaction.

Why do we have Manufacturing Cloud?

The manufacturing industry depends on predictability, as its capital-intensive businesses often have complex physical operations that cannot be quickly or inexpensively modified to meet changing customer demands. Unfortunately, operations teams aren’t always aligned with sales reps to ensure they have a single, real-time view of all aspects of their customer relationships. Critical customer insights are siloed across spreadsheets and multiple ERP systems, which can negatively affect service level agreements, account performance and ultimately the ability to accurately predict demand. The resulting inventory stockouts, buildups and warehousing costs reduce operating margins and negatively impact revenue. In order for manufacturers to provide a seamless customer experience, they need a solution that helps them better understand customer needs while improving visibility across the entire value chain.

How can this help me with my deals?

Manufacturing Cloud delivers a new level of business visibility and collaboration between the sales and operations organizations of a manufacturing company. This allows them to have a better view of their customers through powerful new sales agreements and account-based forecasting solutions, providing visibility into their customer interactions while enabling them to generate more robust sales forecasts.

How does Manufacturing Cloud Work?

Manufacturing Cloud enables manufacturers to align sales and operations, unify account planning and forecasts, and deliver greater transparency with a tailor made CRM for manufacturers:

Increase transparency into your run-rate business: With the Sales Agreements feature, you can create a consolidated view of all the terms of every agreement, including duration, products, prices, and planned quantities — and combine this with actual quantities from your back office. You can even create your own custom metrics to track account performance and get a complete view of your run-rate business.
Surface insights across your entire business: With Account-Based Forecasting, you get a complete picture of both your run-rate and net-new business. Your sales, operations, and product teams can collaborate on a central platform to develop more accurate revenue and volume forecasts that combine sales agreements and opportunities.
Leverage the power of a complete CRM designed for manufacturing: Give your account teams a complete 360-degree view of every customer. Your teams will gain real-time visibility into key sales and service activity, along with collaboration tools, workflows, and AI-driven insights, so they can more actively manage the health of every account
Engage and collaborate in real-time using intelligent insights: Enable real-time online collaboration between customers, channel partners, and employees. AI-driven insights are embedded to give account health, customer lifetime value, pricing performance, and more, so executive and account teams always have the insights they need to take effective action.

If I am a Salesforce Consulting Partner interested in Manufacturing Cloud, what do I do?

Partners interested in learning more about Manufacturing Cloud should work with their Salesforce partner contacts. Partners can leverage the Partner Community Chatter Group to ask questions to product experts and to access important Manufacturing Cloud partner enablement resources: Manufacturing Cloud Experts . To request access to the Partner Community, please follow this link and click “Join Now.” For additional questions, partners can refer to the Manufacturing Cloud FAQ page.

If I am interested in getting trained on Manufacturing Cloud, where do I go?

Partners interested in getting trained on Manufacturing Cloud can explore the Manufacturing Cloud Partner Learning Camp (PLC) Courses - the complete virtual Manufacturing Cloud Academy *Please Note: You must first log into the Partner Community in order to access the Learning Path.

How is Manufacturing Cloud priced and packaged?

Partners interested in learning about pricing options can visit the Manufacturing Cloud Pricing page.

Is Manufacturing Cloud a managed package like other Industry Clouds?

No — Manufacturing Cloud is built on the core Salesforce platform. This means that customers can leverage all platform capabilities out of the box such as permission settings, lookups, connecting objects, workflows, approvals, etc.

What is a Sales Agreement?

A sales agreement is a catch-all term for a volume-based commitment (typically not legally binding like a contract) over a specified time horizon. Most manufacturers use some type of sales agreement to manage their run-rate business, which can account for a large part, if not a majority, of their business.

Why can’t customers easily manage their run rate business with out-of-the-box functionality in Salesforce?

There are two primary reasons:

Most manufacturers do not use opportunity management in their run rate business and some do not even generate a new quote for repeat orders with existing customers. With our existing out-of-the-box capabilities in Sales Cloud and CPQ, there is no way for manufacturers to have a single view of their volume commitments, actual orders, and forecasts for each customer and to easily collaborate on that information.
The collaborative forecasting functionality in Sales Cloud generates a revenue forecast by rolling up open opportunities and their likelihood of being won. Manufacturers forecast at the product/unit level because they do not recognize revenue until a product is shipped and there are typically long lead times to sourcing and building that product.

What is the difference between Manufacturing Cloud and CPQ?

Manufacturing Cloud surfaces the outcomes of the sales process over a time horizon versus a single point in time quote or contract generated by CPQ. Manufacturing Cloud adds functionality around Account Forecasting. CPQ provides functionality around Guided Product Selection, Configuration, Advanced Pricing, Pricing Guidance, Approvals, Contract Terms, Document Generation. Customers typically fall into one of the following buckets:

Quote-to-Contract: Customer uses CPQ to create a Quote prior to setting-up an agreement with estimated quantities over a period of time and agreed upon pricing [CPQ integrated with Manufacturing Cloud, Quote-to-Sales-Agreement]
Complex Agreement Authoring capabilities are required (Guided Product Selection, Configuration, Advanced Pricing, Pricing Guidance, Approvals, Contract Terms, Document Generation) Short Term: [CPQ integrated with Manufacturing Cloud, Quote-to-Sales-Agreement] Long Term: Manufacturing Cloud leverages CPQ capabilities as micro-services
Sales Agreement functionality for business planning purposes without the need for complex quoting and configuration [CPQ is not required]

Check out the demo our CPQ team built to show how CPQ & Manufacturing Cloud can work together.

It’s called Manufacturing Cloud, so should I only be talking to my Manufacturing customers?

No — sales agreements and account-based forecasting can be relevant for any customer that wants to have greater visibility into the performance of their run rate business. Within the Manufacturing, Energy, and Automotive space, we believe the following verticals and sub-verticals will derive the most value from Manufacturing Cloud:

Discrete Manufacturing (Parts Production, Distribution / Aftermarket Manufacturing, OEMs)
Process Manufacturing (Agricultural & Chemical)
Oil & Gas (Chemicals, Downstream Refining, Oil Field Services, Oil Field Manufacturing)

My customer is interested in Manufacturing Cloud, what are the basic requirements?

Awesome news! In order to run Manufacturing Cloud, customers need to be on Lightning and at least on Enterprise Edition. Manufacturing Cloud currently does not support PE or Essentials.

Manufacturing Cloud is built on the core Salesforce platform so it will not disrupt any existing customizations a customer has in their org. Access to the Manufacturing Cloud objects is governed by a license, which admins can assign and manage through permissions and user roles. Because of this construct, customers can decide how many users will require Manufacturing Cloud functionality and purchase licenses accordingly.

Manufacturing Cloud Org Options

Options to access: Manufacturing Cloud, Rebate Management and Tableau CRM for Manufacturing

Partner Developer Environments (PDE)

Our Industry Partner Developer Edition Orgs (PDEs) are intended for development use. PDEs provide a robust, flexible, and scalable framework that allows partners to leverage the latest capabilities and features to develop applications and test product features. By using the PDE, partners can create value-added solutions that extend the power of Industry products.
PDE Orgs are created via the Environment Hub, which is available through your Partner Business Org (PBO). Review the “Create an Org from the Environment Hub” article to learn more.
To create your org, you will be able to enter the Manufacturing Trialforce Template ID for your the Manufacturing PDE; you can find the Manufacturing Template ID in the Demo and Dev Station page under the section “Industry Partner Developer Edition Orgs”.
Expiration: PDEs do not expire, unless they are inactive for more than a year.
Salesforce Releases: After each release, you may need to create a new PDE org if the new release features you wish to access did not update to your current PDE org.
Learn about types, benefits, and usage here: Partner Development Orgs and Demo Orgs

Developer Edition Org

Take the Sales Agreements and Forecasting in Manufacturing Cloud module in Trailhead to get a unified view of your accounts for collaboration across sales and operations. In order to complete this module, you will need a special Developer Edition org that contains Manufacturing Cloud and our sample data. Get the free Developer Edition Org for Manufacturing Cloud and connect it to Trailhead so you can complete the challenges in this module:
Sign up for a free Developer Edition org with Manufacturing Cloud.
Fill out the form:
Email - enter an active email address
Username - enter a username that looks like an email address and is unique, but it doesn’t need to be a valid email account (for example, yourname@mfg4ever.com)
Click Sign me up.
A confirmation message appears.
When you receive the activation email (this can take up to 30 minutes), open it and click Verify Account.
Complete your registration by setting your password and challenge question.
TIP: Write down your username, password, and login URL for easy access later.
You are logged in to your Developer Edition.
NOTE: The org has a 30day default expiry, to extend, please log a partner support case: https://help.salesforce.com/s/case-selection
If you want to connect your new Developer Edition org to Trailhead:
Click your Trailhead profile avatar, then select Hands-on Orgs.
Scroll to the bottom of your list of Salesforce hands-on orgs.
Click Connect an org.
Enter your new Developer Edition org username and password, and click Log In.
On the Allow Access? screen, click Allow.
On the Want to connect this org for hands-on challenges? screen, click Yes! Save it.

Accessing Salesforce Industry Demo Orgs (IDO)

Industry Demo Orgs (IDO) are solely intended for demonstrating Salesforce industry solutions to customers and are not intended for Customers to use. The IDO includes configuration and additional data, apps & communities, and demo scripts with a click path, talk track and screenshots. The Industry Demo Org is the same powerful environment that Salesforce Solution Engineers use on a daily basis to showcase our industry solutions.
To request access to a MFG demo org, please navigate to the IDO tab in PLC and select IDO Type: MFG.
MFG IDO now includes Rebate Management.
For more information on different org variations, please see the Demo and Dev Station page.
For questions related to IDOs, please see the Demo Org for Partners group on the Partner Community Site.

Manufacturing Cloud Base Free Trial Org

Another option to get hands-on experience with Manufacturing Cloud & Rebate Management and all add-on products
Request Base org via this link
Access pre-enabled Manufacturing Cloud & Rebate Management features
Don’t forget to assign the right Permission sets to relevant user records
Includes Manufacturing Cloud, Rebate Management, and add-on related products
Intended for proof of concept and guided setup exploration
Does not come pre-configured with data
Org will expire in 30 days

Manufacturing Cloud Learning Org

Learning Org with comprehensive coverage of latest features and licenses to get hands-on experience with Manufacturing Cloud & Rebate Management and all add-on products
Request Learning org via this link
Pre- configured features, sample data sets for all major features for an enriched enablement
Persona based in- app navigation for a step by step in- app guidance for getting started with Mfg. Cloud
Updated with new capabilities each release
Org will expire in 30 days

Manufacturing Cloud Accredited Professional Credential - 9/28/2023 Launch

Manufacturing Cloud (Exam Update): The Manufacturing Cloud Accredited Professional exam has been updated to reflect the latest product features and functionalities. This credential validates that a partner is able to successfully design and implement Manufacturing Cloud solutions to meet customer requirements.

Credential Resources:

Manufacturing Cloud Partner Enablement Distribution List

Complete this form to be invited to future Manufacturing Cloud partner webinars, events, courses, etc.

Content Details

Last Updated: July, 2024

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