Go with the Flow: Automating Business Processes with Clicks

Go with the Flow: Automating Business Processes with ClicksJuly 10th 2014

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Speaker

Bill Takacs

Product Manager, Visual Workflow

sfdcbill

[email protected]

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Agenda

What is Salesforce Visual Workflow

Why Salesforce Visual Workflow

How to use Visual Workflow

Demo

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Why Salesforce?

IdeaBuild App

Idea

buy & setup

hardware

install complex software

define user access

build & test security

make it mobile &

social

setup reporting & analytics

build app

Traditional Platforms

6-12 Months?

App

App

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Develop, package and instantly deploy apps

Access rich APIs and frameworks

Code in your favorite language

Add fields, design layouts, and manage users

Point-and-click workflow & business logic

Drag-and-drop reports and dashboards

Programmatic Declarative

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What is Visual Workflow

Declarative toolset to build and execute processes related to Salesforce domains: Marketing, sales, service and support

Extensible via APEX and Visualforce

Currently working on the ability to handle process orchestration and long running processes – BPM “Light”

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Why automate your business processes?

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Why use it?

Help maximize your developer resources.

Replace utility APEX and more efficient use of platform:

Easy Automation – repetitive tasks, actions, ect – all declarative

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What Problems are we solving = Automating Work

Reduce repetitive, labor intensive, and computer related effort

Reduce errors and inconsistences in data and process

Productivity – provides increase in productivity through automation

Connect Salesforce to other systems or processes

Reduce the cost of maintaining expensive scripts

Transparency over process and data = visibility, insight, optimization

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Business Value

Lower cost

Cost Avoidance

Revenue / Margin Contribution

Customer Experience

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Understanding Flows

Flows are visual representations of a series of events– They can contain multiple decisions (if / then), branching, and looping logic

– You can do more than creating tasks, field updates, and send emails – you can also create, update, and delete multiple records – and embed a flow within a flow

When creating a Flow, there are a number of things to consider when you’re getting started– What objects do I want to access?

– What are the fields I want to access?

– If creating a new record, what record types do I want to use, who should the owner be, and what are the required fields for creating a new record?

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Visual Workflow – Use Cases

Call scripting

Diagnostics & troubleshooting guides

Guided data entry processes

Product configuration

Sales quotations

Guided selling with sales methodologies

Employee on-boarding

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Flows Components

Cloud Flow Designer

Flow Management

Flow Runtime

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The Cloud Flow Designer

Drag elements from here to here to create your flow

Zoom in and out

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The Step element allows you to sketch out a draft of a flow – I’ll be honest, I never use this, mostly because you can’t activate a flow if it has any steps in it

The screen is where you design what the user sees – text, questions, checkboxes, etc

Decision element is a logic branching point, where you can create an if/then statement, like with Workflow Rules – only, it’s much more robust, allowing you to draw multiple outcomes, and you can have multiple decisions in one flow

The first tab is your palette

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Assignment element allows you to take a variable and assign a value to it – a good example is a date where you want to add 30 days – you can do that with the Assignment element

Loop is brand new for Summer ‘14 – it allows you to take a set of criteria and evaluate a number of records that meet that criteria, and then take action on all those records – for example, if you have VIP Accounts where the next action date is 30 days old, you could loop through all those accounts and create tasks for each one


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These are the elements where you can Create, Update, or Delete a Record – you can also lookup a related record, based on criteria you collect from the user on a Screen, or data you pass into the flow from the button you create

These “Fast” elements are new for Summer ‘14 – they are the same as the regular “Create” functions, but allow you to make a quick record using what’s called an sObject variable (I’ll cover that shortly)


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One of the most powerful aspects of Flows is that you can embed Flows within Flows – this means if you have a standard Flow you want to reuse, like one that updates stale VIP Accounts, you can activate that from another Flow

The “Other Actions” listed here are also new for Summer ‘14. They are your publisher actions that you might know from Salesforce1 – they allow you to quickly create Call Log records, cases, events, etc.


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Variables are your new best friend. These allow you to set a value or a record ID and then reference/reuse it multiple times in the flow. For example, you might lookup an Account at the start of the flow – you can set that Account ID to a variable, and reference it again throughout your flow to do things like make an update to the Account, or an Opportunity or Case related to that Account.

sObject Variables are new for Summer ‘14. These are super charged variables – think of them as variables on steroids. Once you have the ID for a record, these variables allow you access update or reference to every field for that record.

sObject Collections allow you to group together multiple sObject Variables. You can then use the Loop function to evaluate multiple records.

The second tab is your resources

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A Constant is a fixed value you can use throughout your Flow. This is another one I rarely use.

Formula is one I use often. This allows you to perform a calculation, such as the difference in cost between two currency fields, and return that as a number. And new in Summer ‘14, we now support a number of new formula types, including Text, Boolean, Date, and Date/Time.


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Choice allows you to create choices to display to your users on a picklist / radio buttons / checkboxes

Text Template allows you to create a text string using merge fields, like what you’d have in an email template.


Dynamic Choice allows you to pull in a list of choices from an object, based on the criteria you define

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All the variables, choices, screens, events – everything you create will be stored here for you to view, edit, delete

The third tab is your explorer

Best Practice Alert! Come up with a naming convention to help you keep things organized!

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Once you drag the Screen element out onto the Cloud Flow Designer main panel

The second tab allows you to see all the Screen Elements

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Screen Elements

Text fields, both standard and Long Text

Number field, you can choose decimal points

You can set any field as required and you can also set validation rules

Currency, Date, Password, Checkbox options

A number of options for picklists, including the ability to multi-select

Create text to display to the user, including merge field capabilities

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Lead Processing Flow

Looks up lead, assigns lead to correct rep (based on geographic territory, creates task to follow up and emails rep they have a new lead.

Variables We’ll Need– Variable to bring lead into flow

– Variable to hold lead data

– Variable to set lead to the new lead owner (correct rep)

– Variable to hold rep information for task and email creation

Elements We’ll use in the Flow– Screens for user input and debug

– Fast Lookups to get info for lead and rep

– Fast Update to update lead owner

– Text template for email

– Decision logic to set lead to the correct owner

– Actions to create a task and send and email

– Formula to compute task due date

– Assignments to assign inputs for correct lookups ect.

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Flow Management

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Flow Management

Show Flows

Show Flow detail

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Flow Runtime

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Let’s Build a Simple Flow

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Flow Best Practices

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Flow Best Practices

Design before you build

Think through your data and variables– Build a convention for you variables

Use IDs to bring data into the Flow

Use Screens to debug or emails for headless

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Q&ABill Takacs

Product Manager, Visual Workflow

sfdcbill

[email protected]

If we don’t get to your question you can post them at:

Workflow Success Community: http://bit.ly/successqa

Developer Forum: http://bit.ly/devforumqa

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Go with the Flow: Automating Business Processes with Clicks

Technology

Transcript of Go with the Flow: Automating Business Processes with Clicks