Salesforce Sidekick

I’ll start this off by saying I’m guilty of not always keeping it simple.  But, I strive for simplicity.  Just because you can build something in Salesforce 10 different ways, doesn’t mean all 10 of those ways are right.  The solutions we implement often have a great deal to do with the skills and budget your Org has available.  Back when I was a Solo Admin, I was very guilty of duct taping together solutions, because the alternative solution was to have nothing.  We didn’t have the budget to hire developers for all of our ideas.

The purpose of this post is to discuss how we can simplify our solutions to make them easier for us to comprehend and maintain.  We’re going to walk through this set of requirements our project champion gave us:

1. On Closed Won Opportunities, Alert Accounting with an Email
2. Automatically Create a new Project for our Account Manager to run.
3. Update the Account Owner to be the Account Manager
4. Alert the Account Manager of their new Project, with a link to take them straight to the project.

Let’s take a first pass at solving this…

This accomplishes everything that we were looking to do.  We can now send the project champion a note saying that it has been completed… right?  Hold on!

Looking at this solution from end-to-end, how easy is this going to be for me to maintain?  On the surface, it’s pretty basic, but would an outsider easily comprehend it?

Let’s take another pass at simplifying it…

We were able to simplify our automation by putting the Email Alerts into the Process Builder and Flow.  This looks easier to maintain and understand than our first process.  I would be tempted to call it quits here, but I think we could simplify the process further.

So, let’s take one last pass at simplifying this…

I’m feeling pretty good about this now.  Everything is in one location, and I can see all of my automation around this scenario in one spot!  Personally, I would go with our third and final solution if I was going to implement this automation.  Don’t go crazy and (when possible) and have Workflow Rules, Process Builder, Flow, and APEX all working together for one piece of automation.