Bolt Has Struck the Manufacturing Community

Everyone likes Salesforce Communities, but working with Lightning templates for Communities is another story.

Yes, they’re not the one-size-fits-all, one-stop-shop solution for most everyone’s needs, and the very thought of customizing them strikes fear into the heart of seasoned SFDC developers.  Ultimately, such valiant efforts lead to a perfect storm of technical difficulties and delays in delivering functionality.  

Summa has cracked the code and beautifully crafted a set of templates focused on helping you quickly deploy Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and Customer Service (CS) focused portals for your customers.  Using industry standard JavaScript libraries, programming savvy, and Human Centered Design practices (HCD), the Summa team has created a customized experience for partners and customers specifically focused on many of the common—and not-so-common—engagement opportunities in the manufacturing space. We've packaged our experience into a unified template that lets you quickly create beautiful customer portals, using Salesforce Lightning Bolt.

Why Bolt?

Lightning fast development: Turnkey PRM and CS

Bolt is a platform that lets you jumpstart your community implementation. For manufacturing partners, Summa has effectively minimized the time-to-market for implementing the Lightning Experience for your Community users, offering a turnkey, Bolt-based solution for PRM and CS with the following features:

Table: Features of the Summa Bolt templates for Manufacturing

Partner Scorecard

The Partner Scorecard is a completely gamified widget, showing how much is in the pipeline, how much of the partner’s product has been sold, whether you are eligible for receiving discounts, and your partner status level (silver/gold/platinum), among other metrics.  

Leads, Quotes, & Opportunities

When working on joint leads, opportunities, and quotes, you can easily share these with your partners out of the box.  Your partners will better  anticipate supply and share critical delivery data with you.

Support

Share cases with your partners to resolve customer issues faster.  Realtime/anytime access to trouble tickets enables your partners to help you help your customers faster.

Knowledgebase/Marketing Information

One-stop-shop for sharing the most up-to-date spec sheets, brochures, and other important product data. No more hard-to-find, stale documents lurking in emails-gone-by!

Locations I Manage

When your customers need to manage manufacturing facilities, a common challenge is knowing all of the equipment at that facility, including warranties, service schedules, and equipment status.  This information is now available in an easy-to-read, simple-to-navigate user interface, accessorized with warranty expiration and scheduled service notifications.

IoT

When you are managing internet-enabled devices, having a central console to view the health and status of each device is a no-brainer. Use this widget for the bird’s-eye-view of your organization’s network-enabled devices on one dashboard. If you have information for assets (even manually entered), coming from the field, you can utilize visualizations for your end users.

Security

Summa has employed the LockerService to keep sensitive data secure. That means, the data that goes into a component, stays in the component. No widget can gain unauthorized access to another widget’s data, making it completely safe from cross-site scripting. And, it’s all based in the foundation of the Salesforce platform’s built in Security so you can easily lock down, or free up, data to those who need it.

Tailored Lightning Experience

While our Lightning templates provide a variety of functionality, you can launch with a subset of capabilities and grow the functionality of your community over time.  The templates are fully customizable to incorporate only the widgets your users need.

Typically, community users need access to a common set of widgets, but you may have groups of users who need access to different sets of widgets.   Summa recommends building out separate communities for different groups of users who need access to different sets of widgets. 

For example, you may have a group of partners whose sales teams need widgets from the PRM Bolt template, including Partner Scorecard, Leads, Quotes, and Opportunities.  You would build out one Partner Community using just those widgets from our PRM Bolt Template.  Then, your Partners may have support personnel who need to address trouble tickets, in which case you might build out a separate Partner Support Community including only the Support and  Communication widgets.  Two groups of users, two Communities, one Bolt Template - and zero coding!

What’s in the Box?

As an admin, it’s only natural to wonder just what exactly you are installing. There are multiple pieces to our Bolt offerings, but these are transparent to admins as a two-part install:

The Theme

Our unique theme is available out of the box (or the AppExchange). It includes:

1. Styling (CSS)
2. Page Layouts and Customizable Colors
3. Lightning components
4. JS Libraries

The Package

The second part are the components provided in the package. There are a set of “standard” components immediately available for use.

For custom components fitting more directly into your business, service or distribution process, Summa can install a more complete package that implements more robust, behind-the-scenes business logic, and customization capabilities which drive a richer data display with interactions on the UI.  

Configure Away

Using the New Community wizard, you will be able to easily set up your new communities with any of the whizbang features in the table above.  Your users will thank you!  The clean, intuitive user interface, paired with the rich functionality, is sure to please even the most demanding users - without spinning up an entire development team to do it. Clicks, not code!

I want it! How do I get it?

No programming required!  Coming soon to the AppExchange, you will be able to install our templates, just like any other Salesforce extension, and they will magically appear for selection in the New Community wizard.

541 pages of release notes? How about 45 minutes with our experts?

Watch our Salesforce Summer '17 webinar recording from June 8, 2017 to learn the features and updates Salesforce has in store.