Manufacturing Experience Cloud sites for partner and customer collaboration
Key Takeaway
Pick the license first. Partner Community for Manufacturing is for partners, distributors, and suppliers, and it is the license that lets you share leads, opportunities, campaigns, and quotes. Customer Community Plus for Manufacturing is for customers. Permission set licenses, permission sets, and sharing sets then decide what each external user can see and do.
Agentforce Manufacturing uses Experience Cloud sites to give external users a branded portal into the manufacturer's data. A partner portal connects the manufacturer with partners, distributors, and suppliers for selling, forecasting, incentives, and service. A customer portal lets customers track their assets, orders, and warranties and solve problems on their own. In the business design, you decide which portal each external group needs and which features it uses. The license you choose, the permission set licenses you assign, and the sharing you set up decide what each external user can see and do.
Partner portal or customer portal
Manufacturers use partner portals to drive more sales, manage service operations, and help partners track the full lifecycle of their assets. They use customer portals to give customers visibility into their assets, orders, and warranties and to help them get answers. Admins can create multiple sites based on business needs.
The license decides which portal you can build. Both licenses are available in Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions. The sites run in Lightning Experience.
| Partner Community for Manufacturing | Customer Community Plus for Manufacturing | |
|---|---|---|
| Connects the manufacturer with | Partners, distributors, and suppliers | Customers |
| Share leads, opportunities, campaigns, and quotes with external users | Yes | No |
| Person accounts | Not supported | Supported, along with business accounts |
Only the Partner Community license lets you share leads, opportunities, campaigns, and quotes with external users. So a distributor that must work opportunities with the manufacturer needs Partner Community for Manufacturing.
A maker of electric bikes sells directly to riders, and each rider is stored as a person account. The company wants riders to log in and check their bikes and warranty terms. Person accounts aren't supported with the Partner Community for Manufacturing license, so the riders' portal uses Customer Community Plus for Manufacturing.