Last fall, Salesforce announced at Dreamforce that they’re planning to retire Workflow Rules and Process Builder. Meanwhile, Salesforce is consolidating both of these tools’ functionality into Flow. It can certainly focus all of its resources into a single tool moving forward. Flow has become a highly desirable skill for all Salesforce Administrators and developers. Recently, Salesforce provided an updated roadmap on what to expect during the retirement. Much of the value in a CRM tool lies in automating manual tasks.
By automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks, we can free up time to perform activities that generate new sales and improve customer retention. Salesforce have always understood the importance of automation and provided multiple tools over the years. Each tool seemed to be a better version of the last, giving new ways to create ever more complex process automation, using clicks not code.
There are currently three automation tools in Salesforce:
- Process Builder
- Workflow Rules
- Flows
Workflow rules have the most limited capabilities. Process builder extends Workflow capabilities, but the most powerful automation tool is Salesforce Flow. Salesforce eventually adding more functionality to Flow, leading to the retirement of the other two automation tools. Existing rules will continue to run for some period of time while migration is taking place.
Why Flow?
Flow is capable of so much more than either Workflow Rules or Process Builder, and the majority of parity gaps have been addressed. In particular they offer:
- Firstly, better overall performance.
- Functionality to improve high-volume automation such as Fast Field Updates (Before Save).
- Powerful error handling and debugging.
- Repeatable and reusable functionality such as the use of Sub-Flows.
- Additional features such as Screen Flows.
The current Salesforce migration tool is a 1-1; this means that 100 Workflow Rules would create 100 Flows. This is a problem… the current recommended best practice number of Flows per object is three.
The following points will help you bridge the gap between Flow and Process Builder/Workflow rules:
- Scheduled Paths are a replacement for Scheduled Actions in Process Builder and Time-Based Workflow Rules.
- Flows can call other sub-flows, which is a replacement for Process Builder’s ability to call flows.
- Flows now support calling Outbound Messages as well as Email Alerts from Workflow Actions.
- Flow supports a variety of ways to track what has changed during a record update. For example, a variable called $Record__Prior which gives you the state of the record prior to the update. This allows you to reference any particular field value, and you can check whether it equals null if you want to distinguish between create and update.
So where should you start?
Learn How to Use Flow
Secondly, go easy with Flow Jargon
Perceive the Magic Number 3 (before (create or update), after (create or update) & before delete)
Explore the Flow Trigger Explorer
Diligent towards Testing and Dubbing
Further examine with Flow Migration Tool
Build All New Automation in Flow
When an Existing Automation Needs Changing, Rebuild in Flow