How To Spot Salesforce Risks Before They Impact Users
It’s an increasingly common experience:
You leverage the power of an enterprise-level Salesforce system. It’s a fantastic tool - full of automations, but the automations that allow you to do more with less introduce a high level of complexity. With complexity comes risk.
Making changes to your system often means months in meetings with business analysts doing assessments before development work can begin. They’ll spend time carefully mapping out your business processes, along with your Salesforce automations & dependencies. It’s slow manual work, but essential. It can make IT projects feel sluggish.
The alternative is making changes to what has grown to be a complex and technically sensitive system without an assessment. That is not advisable since, even minor changes if made incautiously, have the potential to disrupt your business.
So what is a Director of Sales/Marketing/IT to do?
In 2022, Salesforce aimed to address this problem by launching a tool for administrators called Flow Trigger Explorer. Flow Trigger Explorer visualizes an org’s record-triggered flows in an effort to quickly track down dependencies. It’s a fantastic tool if you need to know which automations are being triggered, and through which actions - helpful information if you’re planning to make changes to your org. Unfortunately, it’s not a total solution.
Why?
First, let’s cover what Flow Trigger Explorer does. Here’s an example of how it works:
Your administrator/developer creates two Flow Triggers for Leads.
These Flow Triggers fire whenever new Leads are created.
Salesforce’s Flow Trigger Explorer quickly shows your developer the two Flows they’ve just added to your org.
This is what it looks like in real life:
They can do this for any Object. They can also do it for other DML (Data Manipulation Language) types. It allows them to see all of the Flow Triggers that are attached to a specific Object.
Pretty fantastic, right? Except…what about all the other automations?
In a simple org, your administrators may only be dealing with record-triggered flows. However, in complex orgs they’re likely to encounter Apex Triggers and Process Builders too. Unfortunately, Flow Trigger Explorer has left those kinds of automations out.
So what are the options for getting a handle on the complexity of your org, and seeing it with total transparency? Until now it has come down to manual work on the part of developers. They need to do an assessment.
Our developers saw this problem differently though. They set out to create a new option that would automatically map all of the automations and dependencies inside a complex Salesforce org.
They got to work leveraging existing information in Salesforce and built a new, more comprehensive tool:
We called it our Process Automation Visualizer.
With it, Wingate’s developers can automatically visualize all automations within an org at the push of a button.
Not only does it map all automations, it allows developers to filter the list of automations it’s uncovered. This is important because in complex orgs there are often hundreds of interconnected automations. It would be arduous to sort through all of the automations manually.
In addition to mapping Apex Triggers and Process Builders, it goes one step further to show the process automations’ dependent components. For example, it will provide a visualization of the automations’ subflows and associated hierarchies.
Last, they designed their tool to handle workflow rules, which are considered to be the grandparents of process automations. Unlike other automations, the workflow rules can have specific actions such as email alerts or field updates.
All together, Process Automation Visualizer produces a complete picture of complex Salesforce orgs at the push of a button. This is good news for Directors of Sales/Marketing/IT who are grappling with powerful, but increasingly complex and interconnected systems.
Here are two key benefits to accessing our Process Automation Visualizer:
Having this tool allows us to complete org assessments quickly, with fewer errors. That has allowed us to shorten project timelines for our clients, getting them up and running with new Salesforce functionality in less time.
Second, since Salesforce org customizations never remain static, process automation inventories will always need to be updated. With this tool, Wingate’s developers can take a snapshot of your org at any time by simply running a report. That allows us to stay current on the status of your org, and identify and fix potential problems before they impact users.
If you have a complex Salesforce org and would like to get a complete understanding of all of its automations and dependencies, we can quickly provide you with a full picture.