If you are in Manufacturing using Salesforce, I have listed features in Summer 20 that would help you do more, prevent problems, and make decisions.

Sales

Access Lightning Experience on iPad Devices (Generally Available) – Do More

Enjoy the full desktop version of Lightning Experience on your iPad using Safari. This would be a great benefit for Ipad users who are working remotely now.

Use a Higher Split Limit to Make Opportunity Splits More Effective

Create more granular splits to reflect reps’ quotas. You can now use up to six custom opportunity splits, plus the default revenue and overlay splits. Previously, the limit was three custom splits. This is a great feature to provide much-needed customization on spiffs.

Get Guidance on Your Company’s Processes in Kanban Views – Save Time

Your users can now benefit from the same tips and expertise whether they use paths or a kanban view to work deals. When you use a path to specify key fields and guidance for a sales process or a project, corresponding kanban views now surface that information, too.

Sales Reps stay aligned with your company’s sales processes while they track and update data on their deals. They can open and close the details panel by clicking

(1). When a rep selects a card, the panel shows the first four compact layout fields (2) plus available key fields and guidance (3). The panel shows key fields and guidance when they’re configured for a path for the same object, record type, and picklist as the kanban view. Reps can edit a record’s key fields inline, without leaving the kanban view.

Partner Relationship Management: Account Hierarchy Enhancements – Do More

Connect multiple tiers of external partners to do business together. Create up to 7 levels of distribution on a partner account record with clicks, not code, so you can easily ensure the right data rolls up to the right stakeholders.

For manufacturers dealing with multiple indirect channel partners, this would provide visibility into how to organize your partner accounts. The real cool thing would be to roll up opportunities at the top tier level. Hope this happens one day 😳

Service Cloud

Einstein Reply Recommendations – Save time and More insights

Give your agents AI-powered recommendations for replies to customer requests. To surface these recommendations, take advantage of a deep learning model that looks at the previous messages of a conversation to understand the context and suggest a reply based on a list of your approved response templates.

This is an add on with digital engagement but would be a huge time saver for call center reps who continuously type repeated responses for customers.

Marketing Cloud

Content Builder – Interactive Email – Do More

Evolve the inbox experience, starting with the Email Form block. Marketers can build in-email forms using five different templates. Subscribers can complete the form without leaving their inbox, and data collected from that form can drive actions and personalization in Marketing, Sales, and Service.

With this feature, you can collect data from your customers inside their email and get more feedback using progressive profiling.

Einstein Copy Insights

Marketers can gather language-related insights related to subject lines in an intuitive dashboard to figure out what drives engagement and improves campaign performance.

This would be a key feature for marketing teams to measure the subject lines and email performance.

Pardot: Einstein Attribution

New AI powered multi-touch attribution model that monitors all of the conversion patterns of your campaigns and highlights which channels and campaigns are most effective. Look at the complete journey from marketing to sales across multiple activities that connect a prospect to an opportunity – even if wasn’t linked through an opportunity contact role!

Pardot: B2B Marketing Analytics Plus – Do More

Discover a connected, intelligent, and enterprise-ready experience that ties together data across all your marketing applications and business units, enhanced further with predictive insights and recommendations. Fully understand what happened with your campaign, why it happened, and even what will happen in the future. Smart suggestions help you determine what to do next to maximize ROI at every stage of the funnel.

This is a must-use feature for Manufacturing marketing teams dealing with Accounts which would provide insights on effectiveness for campaigns.

Partner channel

Take Personalization Further with Navigation Menus, Tile Menus, and CMS Collections

You can now determine not only what component a user sees, but also what they see within a component. You can personalize CMS collections, navigation menu, and tile menu variations within their components. Previously, you could only personalize page variations, branding sets, and components.

If you have resellers, distributors, and indirect customers logging into your community, you can now create separate menus for each user and have a personalized experience.

Salesforce CMS: New Image and Document Types, Mass Import, and B2B Integration – Do More

Manage your Salesforce CMS content more easily with new image and document content types. Quickly import multiple content items, such as images, news, documents, or custom content types. And use your CMS content in B2B Commerce on Lightning Experience.

For admins who are tired of using content library and files, Salesforce CMS provides you more options to upload images, product catalog with content easily. If you are trying to upload a lot of product images, you can upload all of the products in one zip file and save time.

Manufacturing Cloud

Plan Account Forecasts Better with Forecasting for Key Accounts and Products

Identify key accounts and products in your organization based on business priorities. Only the identified accounts and products are eligible for account forecasting, thus helping account managers focus and manage growth for these key areas.

Sales Agreement Enhancements

New and improved Sales Agreement reporting gives you more flexibility to analyze business performance. Build detailed composite reports that display products and product schedules for Sales Agreements.

This is a very cool feature for Manufacturers who are struggling to display forecasting data on their accounts for their sales team. You can manage your run rate business more effectively and increase your sales with your current customers.

Salesforce Admins

Use the New Minimum Access User Profile

Now you can assign a least-privilege profile to a user, and then add more permissions via permission sets and permission set groups. The Minimum Access – Salesforce profile includes Access Activities, Chatter Internal User, Lightning Console User, and View Help-Link permissions.

If you have folks in finance or pricing who just want the ability to view records, this profile will help you.

Create Multi-Step Walkthroughs for In-App Training

Create a guided, step-by-step experience for your users inside the app with walkthroughs, the latest addition to In-App Guidance. If you subscribe to myTrailhead, show up to 500 walkthroughs to users. Onboarding, training, and feature adoption walkthroughs are quick to create and easy to show to specific users.

To show you custom walkthroughs to users, subscribe to myTrailhead to get the Access Walkthroughs permission set license and the Walkthroughs permission set. Assign the View Walkthroughs user permission to users you want to be able to see walkthroughs. Contact your Salesforce account executive for pricing details.

If you want to show walkthroughs to your users before subscribing, there’s a free 30-day trial that lets you display custom walkthroughs to users. Look for the Start Walkthrough Trial button on the In-App Guidance Setup page for more information.

Walkthroughs are a series of up to 10 connected prompts that provide a guided path for users across a single or multiple pages for in-context learning.

Onboard new hires to their workspace
Highlight a series of key but related features
Provide a navigational or feature overview
Guide users through a multi-step procedure

Proactive

Work Through Lists with Ease Using Split View for Standard Navigation

Do you often find yourself working through multiple records in a list? With split view, you can see a list view and a record side by side. To move on to a new record, select it from the split view, and the new record opens with the list still in view. No more navigating back and forth between your list and your records. Split view is great for going through records in sequence or for quickly skimming through a set of records. The split view panel is collapsible for extra flexibility.

Search with Everyday Words Using Einstein Natural Language Search (Beta)

Natural language search lets users enter common words and phrases in the search box to find the records that they want. Natural language search is supported for accounts, cases, contacts, leads, and opportunities.

For example, if your sales rep enters my closed cases last year, Einstein Search interprets those words as a person does. The results show every closed case owned by that sales rep in the last year. Examples of natural language search are available in the Help documentation.

Use Quick Actions to Assign Tasks to Queues

Your sales reps can save time when they collaborate on sales tasks. Now you can set up quick actions on record pages or as global actions so reps can assign tasks to queues more quickly.

Send Mobile Activity Reminders (Pilot)

Event and task reminders are now available as push and in-app notifications for the Salesforce mobile app. Previously, event and task reminders were only available on desktop.

This would help your sales team to get a push notification on record updates and will help to increase mobile adoption.

Prevent problems

Speed Up Org Maintenance with the Optimizer App

Introducing the Salesforce Optimizer app, the interactive way to review and act on expert recommendations for maintaining your Salesforce org’s implementation. No need to install a package, just enable the app, click to run, and sit back while we inspect your org. Quickly identify issues that require immediate attention by using the sortable results list view. Read through the Salesforce recommendations to plan the next steps. Use quick links on result pages to go directly to the applicable Setup page. Previously, you could only consume Optimizer content by scrolling through an English language report delivered as a PDF file.

The app makes it easier to be strategic about planning org maintenance. Instead of scrolling through pages of a static PDF report for results and next steps, use the sortable results list view. The Optimizer’s split-view console navigation makes it easy to review results without losing context.

Territory Management

Original Territory Management Is Being Retired

The original territory management feature is scheduled for retirement as of Summer ’21. After the feature is retired, users can’t access the original territory management feature and its underlying data. We encourage you to migrate to Enterprise Territory Management.

You need to plan to migrate to ETM as soon as possible

Get More Control Over Who Sees What

Now you can choose the access level that users get to the opportunities assigned to their territories’ child territories. For example, let’s say you set the access level to view and edit. Now users can edit the opportunities assigned to their territories’ child territories. Previously, view access was granted.

Customize the Territory Object Labels

To reflect your company’s naming conventions, you can now show custom Territory object labels to your users. For example, if your company calls sales territories “districts,” change the Territories label to Districts. The custom labels replace instances of Territory and Territories on end-user pages. For example, the Assigned Territories related list on accounts becomes Assigned Districts.

Where: These changes apply to Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic in Performance and Developer editions and in Enterprise and Unlimited editions with the Sales Cloud.

How: On the Rename Tabs and Labels page in Setup, enter a new name for the Territories tab.

Automation

Trigger a Flow That Performs Actions After a Record Is Saved

Creating or updating a record can now trigger a flow that performs actions such as sending an email after the changes are saved to the database. Use record-changed flows to perform after-save actions and make before-save updates. You can replace most of your workflows and record-change processes that you created in Process Builder.

Perhaps you’re familiar with Process Builder and using a record-change process to send an email. Such a process can send an email automatically for each new account. After-save actions inflows accomplish that same goal, and you don’t have to use a different tool.

Or perhaps you’re familiar with Apex triggers. A flow that performs after-save actions is similar to an after trigger and can:

Access field values that are set only after the record is saved, such as the Last Modified Date field or the ID of the new record.
Create or update related records.

With Flow Builder, you can also do more such as to get records and loops.

Debug More Flows Faster

When you debug an autolaunched flow that saves changes to the database such as create records, you don’t have to revert those changes manually anymore. In Flow Builder, use rollback mode and let it save you the hassle. You can now use the debug option in Flow Builder for schedule-triggered flows. And the debug option includes the Lookup screen component so that you can set record variables more easily.

If you use rollback mode when you debug a flow, Flow Builder rolls back changes that the flow makes to the database after the flow finishes. Flow Builder rolls back indirect database changes too. For example, a flow updates a child record that causes an Apex trigger to fire and to update the parent record. The update to the parent record is also rolled back.

Considerations for rollback mode:

Available for autolaunched flows.
Non-DML statements, such as HTTP requests, are executed and are not rolled back.
Asynchronous actions and asynchronous DML statements are not rolled back.
The Pause element and some actions don’t support rollback mode. If you debug a flow with one of those elements or actions, the flow stops before executing the element or action. All DML statements that executed before the element or action are rolled back.

When you debug a schedule-triggered flow that runs for a batch of records, Flow Builder uses the oldest record that matches the filter conditions.

The Lookup component makes it easy to set values for record variables.

Pass In the Record When Launching a Flow from a Lightning Page or a Quick Action

It’s now much easier to pass records into your flows. Each quick action automatically passes the record into the flow’s record variable named “recordId”. In Lightning App Builder, a simple checkbox lets the Lightning page pass the record into a record variable in the flow.

Previously, passing records into a flow from a Lightning page or a quick action required extra configuration steps. For a quick action, you created a text variable named “recordId” and added a Get Records element to your flow. For a Lightning page, you created a text variable, configured Lightning App Builder to set that variable, and used a Get Records element. Now Lightning Flow does most of the work for you.

To summarize the key features for Manufacturing, here are my top 3 features which will add more value.

Leverage In App guidance to increase adoption with your current users in Salesforce.
Use flows more than triggers on record inserts and updates actions.
Plan to see Manufacturing cloud demos to increase your sales with current customers.

As always, you can feel free to send me an email to buyan@eigenx.com for further questions or post your comments below.