Manufacturers have been tasked with bringing their traditionally laggard industry up to speed with modern digital transformations—but a one-and-done implementation is far from enough to keep up. Ongoing growth requires ongoing updates and enhancements to keep your digital processes fresh, relevant, and beneficial to the bottom line. The regular seasonal updates from Salesforce help ensure a cloud solution built on the Salesforce platform does just that. 

Salesforce’s latest update, Winter ‘23, includes three noteworthy developments for manufacturers: Service Console updates, improved management of partner performance, and enhancements to sales agreements and advanced account forecasting. Let’s take a closer look at each and how they will impact your business.

Service Console updates

This part of the Manufacturing Cloud release update is all about making your customer service even faster by putting all interactions and events in one central spot. Customer service representatives can address queries from customers even faster without having to switch between different screens to verify customer profiles or view interaction timelines. All customer information will be contextualized and captured on a single screen for those who have the Service Console for Manufacturing permission set on their user. For even more components, users should also have the Industry Service Excellence permission set enabled. 

Applicable product: Manufacturing Cloud Lightning Experience for Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer editions

Improved management of partner performance

On the partner management side of things, manufacturers can now drive better insights into how their partners are performing and generating revenue with a channel partner performance dashboard. This breaks down into three key functional improvements: displaying visits and visit task info for managers and field reps, planning effective visits to partners, and performing tasks with metric capture during visits. 

• Displaying visits and visit task info for managers and field reps: Sales managers and field reps can schedule and perform visits far more effectively with new components such as Visit Overview, Visit Actions, Visit Task List, Visit List, and Visit Map available on the Visit record page within Salesforce.
• Planning effective visits to partners: Your visit details can be more refined beforehand with information like location, priority, estimated time, and previous visit history. Templates for visit tasks, including mandatory or non-mandatory items, are a good way to generate additional customer service efficiency for your reps. 
• Performing tasks with metric capture during visits: Finally, field reps can easily use mobile Salesforce to view the visit information, navigate to partner locations with embedded maps, and check off tasks by filling in the required key metrics during a visit. 

Applicable product: Manufacturing Cloud Lightning Experience for Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer editions

Enhancements to sales agreements and advanced account forecasting

Two more small enhancements included in this release update that manufacturers will want to note include changes to Sales Agreements and Advanced Account Forecasting. First, the enhancements to sales agreements now give users the ability to define agreements with a weekly schedule. Next, added advanced filter options have been added to the Advanced Account Forecasting so users can refine their reports and dashboards more granularly. 

Applicable product: Manufacturing Cloud Lightning Experience for Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer editions

If you’d like to understand more about these updates or get started with a Manufacturing Cloud implementation, Simplus knows just how to help. Reach out to our team to start identifying your needs and goals and matching them to the right Salesforce functionality with expert implementation.