A private area should solve a practical relationship problem rather than put the public website behind a login.
We design and build industrial customer and partner portals for account-specific documents, controlled product information, distributor resources, enquiries and repeatable service tasks. Each portal starts from the users, the data and the business rules that make it worth operating.
The test is whether the portal removes work that someone is doing manually today. If a customer service team spends its mornings emailing certificates, resending order confirmations and looking up which document version a customer received, that is the brief. Industrial portal development succeeds when those requests stop arriving, and it stalls when the portal becomes a second place to publish content that already exists.
Industrial portal development starts from a recurring task rather than a feature list. A distributor may need current assets, price files and training. A customer may need account documents, saved products, order history or a service request. We map the task, the access model and the source of the information before deciding what belongs in the portal.
That order matters commercially. A portal built around three tasks people already perform every week gets adopted; one built around twelve possible features usually gets a launch announcement and little traffic afterwards. Scope can grow later, and it is easier to add a section to a portal people use than to revive one they abandoned.
Private areas usually connect to CRM, ERP, PIM or document systems. We establish roles, permissions, audit requirements and the source of truth for each field, so the experience is useful without creating an unmanageable parallel data set.
Access control is enforced at the data layer rather than by hiding a link, so a document stays restricted even when its URL is forwarded. Where the operation needs a record of who saw which version and when, that history is designed in from the start, because reconstructing it afterwards is rarely possible.
We build the verification and permission model around the account, distributor and contact records your business already holds in its CRM or ERP, so responsibility for that data stays where it belongs.
The same applies to the personal data a portal collects. You remain the controller; we build to the requirements your data protection function sets, keep the data we process to what the portal needs, and document retention, access and deletion so those questions have a written answer.
Code Industrial is the industrial B2B practice of Code Barcelona, an agency building corporate websites and digital platforms since 2015. The same strategy, design and engineering team works on every industrial project, from the first scoping session through to life after launch.
A distributor portal, a technical document portal and a customer account area share few requirements. Industrial portal development starts from users, permissions, data and the task each portal has to support.
What comes up when a company scopes a distributor, partner or customer portal.
Depending on the relationship, it may hold technical documents, controlled product information, account content, distributor assets, price files, training, service requests, saved lists or quotation workflows. We include the features that answer a repeatable need, since a portal earns its place by removing work someone currently does by email rather than by offering the longest feature list.
Yes. We review the existing systems, the authentication in use, data sensitivity and update requirements before designing the integration model and the delivery phases. Reading account, product and document data from the systems that own it is usually what makes a portal worth logging into, so that assessment happens before the interface work begins.
Normally yes. Prices, stock and documentation drawn from the ERP are what make a distributor portal useful. The constraint is rarely on our side: it is whether the ERP exposes an interface and who owns it internally. Where live queries are not possible, a scheduled synchronisation with a visible timestamp showing when the data was last updated is usually workable.
You are, as data controller. We build to the requirements your data protection officer sets and act as a processor within them, but we do not take on controller responsibilities for the data your portal holds. In practice that means agreeing retention periods, access rules and deletion routes during design rather than after launch.
Access is granted through a defined approval route, usually a request checked against your customer or distributor records, with an owner named for the decision. Just as important is the exit: what happens when an agreement ends, a contact leaves a distributor or an account becomes dormant. We build periodic review and automatic expiry into the model rather than relying on someone remembering.
Yes, where the source system can identify the account. Certificates, order documentation, contract terms and customer-specific pricing are handled by tying the portal user to an account record and filtering everything they see through it. The work is in the data model and the permission rules; the interface is comparatively straightforward once those are settled.
Often it should, particularly when the portal serves controlled versions of public content such as documentation and product data. One platform keeps a single content model and one place to publish. A separate application is justified when the portal is mainly transactional, carries data of a different sensitivity, or has to follow a release cycle of its own.
Someone has to approve users, review access periodically, add documents and answer questions about what a partner can see. We hand over an administration interface built for that work, along with documented permission rules, so those tasks do not require a developer. The effort is modest when it is planned for, and disruptive when it is discovered after go-live.
Portals usually arrive with integration and maintenance attached, because they carry data that has to stay current. These are the capabilities they sit with.
Tell us who needs access, what they need to do and which systems hold the data. We will scope a portal around the work it would remove.