Business Process Automation with Salesforce Flows E-Book

Srini Munagavalasa

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 206

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The low adoption of most IT projects often stems from a lack of business process automation. While business users get the functionality they need, the excessive manual steps involved in execution impede efficiency. Business Process Automation with Salesforce Flows will address this issue by helping you recognize the need for automation and guiding you through automating such processes.
This book starts by quickly exploring various aspects of process automation using Salesforce Flows, covering flow nuts and bolts, flow structure, flow execution order, and different types of flows, as well as troubleshooting techniques to manage your processes using the Flow Builder tool. You’ll then become acquainted with the Flow Orchestration tool, which enables you to compose and orchestrate complex business processes. Through real-world scenarios, you’ll learn how to effectively automate business processes, follow the end-to-end business process flow, automate it using flow orchestration, and learn how to demystify and simplify business process automation.
By the end of this book, you’ll be proficient in seamlessly automating your business processes without any hassle.

Leseprobe

Business Process Automation with Salesforce Flows

Transform business processes with Salesforce Flows to deliver unmatched user experiences

Srini Munagavalasa

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Business Process Automation with Salesforce Flows

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First published: November 2023

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ISBN 978-1-83508-925-5

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Om Shri Ganeshaya Namah

I would like to thank my wife, Sunanda, and my children, Sravan and Sai, for all their support and encouragement; my Packt team, for their guidance and keeping me on track; and my reviewers, for providing valuable feedback. Finally, thanks to my family members, friends, and all my colleagues at work, who helped me learn and grow from my experiences

- Srini Munagavalasa

Contributors

About the author

Srini Munagavalasa has more than 20 years of global IT experience in Salesforce CRM and PRM, SAP CRM, and HR. He has a passion for learning about new and emerging technologies and products and prototyping and implementing solutions that result in customer satisfaction and business benefits. He has authored more than 10 articles on CRM, HR, and project management with Wellesley Information Services (WIS). He has also presented papers at Salesforce Dreamforce and SAP Sapphire/ASUG. He is currently working as a VP at Salesforce COE at MUFG Americas. He has a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering and holds a post-graduate diploma in operations management. He has worked with renowned companies such as CA Tech, IBM, The Walt Disney Company, and PwC.

About the reviewer

LarsMalmqvist is a 32x certified Salesforce CTA and has spent the past 15 years in the Salesforce ecosystem building advanced solutions on the platform. Currently, he works as a partner in the management consultancy, Implement Consulting Group, focusing on supporting large Nordic Salesforce clients in their transformation journeys. For the past five years, he has been focused on issues around using AI on Salesforce, combining this with academic research in deep learning and argumentation. He has published two books, Architecting AI Solutions on Salesforce, and Salesforce Anti-Patterns, both with Packt Publishing.

I would like to acknowledge my family, Damiana, Ada, and Pino. Without you, nothing else would make sense.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: Understanding Business Requirements and Automation Needs

1

Process Flows – Understanding Business Requirements

Types of business requirements

Identifying the right stakeholders from project teams and SMEs

Techniques and tools to identify requirements

Understanding “as-is” and “to-be” business process flows

Use-case scenario 1 – Partner user onboarding process

Use-case scenario 2 – Quote approval process

Tips for success

Summary

Questions

Further reading

2

Identification of Functional Requirements for Automation

What are functional requirements?

Identifying functional tasks that can be automated

Developing an FSD outlining tasks to be automated

Practical tips for success

Summary

Questions

Further reading

3

Business Process Features to Automate

Automation tools available in Salesforce

Identifying potential automation steps

Scenarios – Rationale for automation

Getting consensus and agreement from all stakeholders

Practical tips on prioritizing requirements

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Part 2: Business Process Automation in Salesforce

4

Flow Building Blocks, Triggering, and Entry Conditions

Flow building blocks

Flows to trigger business processes

Interactive experience flows

Behind-the-scenes automated flows

Flow entry and exit conditions

Key considerations

Summary

Questions

Further reading

5

Salesforce Order of Execution

What is OOE?

Salesforce Platform OOE

Avoiding flow execution anti-patterns

Summary

Questions

Further reading

6

Types of Salesforce Flows

Exploring five basic types of flows in Salesforce

Accessing flows in Salesforce

Screen flow

Record-triggered flow

A schedule-triggered flow

A platform event-triggered flow

An autolaunched flow (no trigger)

Practical tips for flow success

Summary

Questions

Further reading

7

Flows Using Apex Sharing

Data-sharing options in Salesforce

Sharing data using Apex managed sharing

Exploring a real-world business scenario

Testing out our practical scenario

Summary

Questions

Further reading

8

Optimizing and Troubleshooting Flows

Learning about the flow debug window

Simple practical scenario – capture shipping address

Typical steps in the Debug Details window

Understanding flow errors

Troubleshooting flow errors

Practical scenario – failed flow example

Flow tips

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Part 3: Flow Orchestration

9

Flow Orchestration

What is flow orchestration?

Orchestration types

Orchestration – how it works

Putting it all together to create a model

Monitoring flow orchestrations

Debugging orchestration runs

Key considerations when orchestrating flows

Summary

Questions

Further reading

10

Compose and Orchestrate Business Processes

Real-world business scenarios

Scenario 1 – a partner registration business process

Scenario 2 – a quote approval business process

Designing and creating a business process flow diagram

A partner registration scenario

The quote approvals scenario

Transforming business processes into automated solutions

Key considerations during flows

Summary

Further reading

Assessments

Chapter 1, Process Flows – Understanding Business Requirements

Chapter 2, Identification of Functional Requirements for Automation

Chapter 3, Business Process Features to Automate

Chapter 4, Flow Building Blocks, Triggering, and Entry Conditions

Chapter 5, Salesforce Order of Execution

Chapter 6, Types of Salesforce Flows

Chapter 7, Flows Using Apex Sharing

Chapter 8, Optimizing and Troubleshooting Flows

Chapter 9, Flow Orchestration

Index

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Preface

This book will begin by quickly exploring the various aspects of process automation using Salesforce Flow. We will cover the nuts and bolts of flow and execution order, along with distinct flow types and troubleshooting techniques to manage your processes.

The book will also explore flow orchestration tools that let us compose and orchestrate complex business processes. In Part 3, we will take a complex sales scenario, use the knowledge gained from Parts 1 and 2, and automate a complex business process. You will get an opportunity to follow the end-to-end business process flow, automate the business process via flow orchestration, and learn how to demystify and simplify business process automation.

By the end of this book, you will be confident in automating your business processes smoothly and without any hassle.

Who this book is for

This book is for system admins, technical team members, and business analysts with a good understanding of Salesforce CRM software who want to learn ways to effectively automate their business processes using Salesforce Flows.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Process Flows – Understanding Business Requirements, explores and helps us understand the documented requirements and the process flows. Only after a good understanding of business requirements and process steps can we confidently move on to the next step to determine if a process step can be a potential candidate for automation.

Chapter 2, Identification of Functional Requirements for Automation, covers solution design aspects of functional requirements. We will explore in detail how to split requirements into tasks that can be automated. We will dive deep and discuss the rationale for every task we intend to automate.

Chapter 3, Business Process Features to Automate, discusses why it is important to allocate enough time and prioritize requirements automation. Prioritizing does not mean bringing requirements to the top as they come in from business users, but rather distributing around different releases on the road map to add optimum value to the overall business. You will be able to learn methods to identify important tasks and provide business value.

Chapter 4, Flow Building Blocks, Triggering, and Entry Conditions, covers the main building blocks of Salesforce Flows used in Flow Builder - elements, connectors, and resources. Then we will discuss ways to trigger the flow and entry/exit conditions. You will be able to understand the concepts of Salesforce Flows and get equipped to start creating flow at your organization.

Chapter 5, Salesforce Order of Execution, explores the Order of Execution (OOE) of how your system runs various tasks in the backend. OOE was critical in general for technical teams only in the past, but now it is more important for every salesforce team member. Understanding the OOE with real-world examples will help you get comfortable, and this chapter will explore the concepts of execution so as not to cause any technical debt.

Chapter 6, Types of Salesforce Flows, explores five basic types of flows to automate our business processes. You will gain a deep understanding of scenarios for each of the flow types - screen flows, record trigger flow, schedule-trigger flow, platform event-triggered flow, and autolaunched flows.

Chapter 7, Flows Using Apex Sharing, discusses a very important feature and share records via Flows that are not available by any means other than Apex coding. Now with flow, we have this feature available where you, as an admin, shall be able to perform these actions without code.

Chapter 8, Optimizing and Troubleshooting Flows, explores and helps us learn how to use the Flow Builder debug window to optimize and troubleshoot flows. Anything developed either declaratively or using code will run into some kind of bug, and you need a tool to be able to understand the error message and what it means. We will discuss a few scenarios to effectively debug and make sense of the flow for the users.

Chapter 9, Flow Orchestration, explores and sees how we can streamline and enable complex business processes using flow orchestration. We will explore and learn flow building blocks, and how these blocks work, and then discuss steps to create a flow orchestration. We will explore ways to monitor and streamline our orchestration as well as key considerations to make your orchestration effective.

Chapter 10, Compose and Orchestrate Business Processes, in this last chapter, we will look at a practical scenario, a simplified real-world business requirement, business process flow, and finally a flow orchestration that meets our business needs. We will look at making our orchestration efficient, effective, simple, and usable.

Assessments contains all the answers to the questions from all the chapters.

Conventions used

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Part 1: Understanding Business Requirements and Automation Needs

In this part, you will learn and understand the business requirements and the need for automating them so that the system can take care of the repetitive, redundant, and automatable tasks in the backend. We will explore and see how we can take advantage of tools that we can leverage and identify these tasks that can be automated. At the end of this part, you will be able to create a functional design specification that you can use to identify what tasks shall be performed by the end users and what tasks can be automated.

We will also address some of the key challenges faced during this phase:

Not being able to identify the right set of requirements that can be automated.Lack of understanding of business needs and hence not being able to create a solution / design for what to and what not to automate.Too much automation is due to a lack of planning.Not assessing the impact of existing and planned automation holistically, resulting in automation logic executing randomly.

The following chapters will be covered in this part.

Chapter 1, Process Flows – Understanding Business RequirementsChapter 2, Identification of Functional Requirements for AutomationChapter 3, Business Process Features to Automate

1

Process Flows – Understanding Business Requirements

In this chapter, we will explore and understand documented requirements and process flows. Only after a good understanding of business requirements and process steps can we confidently move to the next step to determine if a process step can be a potential candidate for automation. So, this chapter and the next chapter solely focus on aspects around understanding requirements and process flow steps.

We will assume that requirements are accurately captured and prioritized and that process flows are effectively developed. You can find details on these topics in Chapters 1 and 2 of The Salesforce Business Analyst Handbook. In the event that your implementation of requirements and/or process flows is not clearly understood by all, make sure to clarify this before even thinking about automating your business processes.

Our focus in this book is to automate business processes, and this can be best done by first understanding business requirements in conjunction with process flow diagrams. We need a common understanding by identifying key stakeholders, SMEs, project team members, relevant tools and techniques, and collaboratively identifying and understanding requirements holistically, not just potential requirements that can be automated.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

Types of business requirementsIdentifying the right stakeholders from project teams and SMEsTechniques and tools to identify requirementsUnderstanding “as-is” and “to-be” business process flowsUse-case scenario 1 – Partner user onboarding processUse-case scenario 2 – Quote approval processTips for success

By the end of this chapter, you will understand business requirements with the aid of process flows. Process flows aid us in understanding business scenarios end to end with who does what, when, and how.

Note

Understanding business requirements is a must for any project role, be it admins, architects, designers, developers, testers, or any other stakeholder. Elicitation and documenting business needs and requirements may primarily rest with the business analyst on the project, but without all other team members understanding what the business needs are, this will jeopardize your implementation.

Types of business requirements

As an analyst on the project, our goal is to completely understand the full scope and intent of the business needs. By understanding different types of requirements, you will be able to manage the requirements process effectively at all project stages. Remind yourself that we are here to understand the requirements and end-to-end steps for the process so that we get to know the real problem or hidden opportunity and not to provide our opinions or solutions on what to or what not to automate. To understand this in greater detail, take a look at the Identifying requirements section of The Salesforce Business Analyst Handbook.

Let’s look at the four main types of software requirements:

Business requirements: These requirements describe the high-level functionality that the business needs. All stakeholders and anyone even remotely associated with the project should know and understand business requirements. The main purpose of the project is to provide a tool to streamline and automate the requirements to a certain extent.

Example: Enable quote management for our channel partner business unit (BU).

Stakeholder requirements: Features and functions the user needs and how they interact with the system. These system requirements translate into high-level step-by-step process flows.

Example: All users will be able to access quote functionality via mobile devices.

System requirements: These requirements describe the characteristics of the solution. We need to understand this level of granularity to determine and identify candidates for automation – for now, or in the future.

Example: Based on the quote amount and account type, we need three levels of quote approval.

Transition requirements: These are one-time requirements while moving from one system or process to another. Since they are not repetitive in nature, we do not need to worry much about them. Remember – if you have a multi-release roadmap, then you may need a few automated tools/scripts to reuse and simplify processes.

Example: Data migration from legacy systems to new systems.

Knowing and understanding different types of requirements and establishing goals and timelines for identifying requirements will pave a solid foundation for the design, development, and testing phase of your project as well as help us to understand steps in business process flows.

Stakeholders from your project team and SMEs are the best sources of information. They may not explicitly understand business needs (this is where we need you), but they are certainly aware of problems and pain points. In the next section, you will find a quick overview of how to identify and involve our stakeholders so that business requirements can be understood effectively.

Identifying the right stakeholders from project teams and SMEs

One key success factor for any project is to be able to understand business requirements as well as business process flows. This can be accomplished only by involving the right set of users from the start of the project. The project team may be able to get some level of detail from past projects or implementation artifacts, but nothing beats the knowledge from key stakeholders and your end users who run the business.

The following are some tested ways that can help you in identifying and involving these key members:

Your project RACI (short for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) matrix will help you identify stakeholders and SMEs. Make sure you pick the right set of users and not all stakeholders and SMEs. For our task, we need experts in their domain and users who potentially benefit from the project.

Note

A RACI matrix is a document that helps clarify who is responsible for the completion of project tasks and the roles individuals or groups play during the project. Every project should have a RACI matrix that defines project responsibilities on a project. Anyone related to the project will know their role and responsibilities, as well as those of other team members.

Most of the time, some very knowledgeable SMEs and highly skilled stakeholders may not be on the project. Make sure you reach out to the program management team and project sponsor and get their help in engaging these valuable resources. It may not be possible for these users to join all the conference room pilots (CRPs) or workshops; it will greatly help us if we can meet them offline and get their input/feedback. CRPs are workshops where key stakeholders, along with project team members, collaborate at various stages of projects to understand the business needs while transforming them into proposed business solutions.Do your homework and involve the right stakeholder who is relevant to a specific session. If your session is around lead management, there is no point in involving an expert from quote or contract management. Be cognizant of their time; this is very important as they have their regular job to perform.Keep an eye on stakeholders’ conflicting priorities. Things may sometimes get out of control if ground rules are not set. You need to have an established conflict escalation and resolution mechanism. If not, some stakeholders may lose interest or may skip future sessions altogether.After each session, make sure you send the minutes of that meeting, along with visuals such as the process flow chart that was discussed during the session, and solicit feedback. This helps ideas discussed during the meeting crystallize, and if something pops into stakeholders’ heads, it will be a bonus for the project team.Make a list of stakeholders by session and understand them well in advance. Get to know their strengths, influences, likes, dislikes, hobbies, and so on. This will help you manage the sessions productively. Always make sure you know them by their name.Make sure you reach out to the end users; these are the users who perform the tasks every day. They may not be able to articulate confidently or freely. Discuss the project with them in one-on-one breakout sessions and get to know what they have to say. You will find nuggets of wisdom, and they can be game-changers.

Identifying and involving key stakeholders (such as your project sponsor, business SMEs, superusers, compliance, software vendors, and enterprise architects) and end users during a conversation helps get everyone on the same page. Most importantly, this group can help identify the true business needs and the way the business runs.

Note

Do not assume anything when it comes to business requirements. It’s as simple as this – the business wants it or does not want it. So, clarify your understanding and make sure everyone on the team has the same understanding. All assumptions need to be agreed upon by all stakeholders and properly documented.

Techniques and tools to identify requirements

In the previous section, we successfully identified key stakeholders, SMEs, and end users who can add tremendous value in identifying and explaining their business needs and business processes. Now, the question is: How to get this valuable information from these users?

Elicitation is a method to draw out business needs and requirements. To effectively do so, we usually use a combination of these techniques that best fit your organization’s culture. Some of these elicitation techniques are observation, brainstorming, CRPs, prototyping, process models, and user stories.