Process Automation is a very useful and powerful tool in Salesforce. The reason being, every business has its own business needs and requirements and Salesforce provides all the necessary tools to customize the system anyway they want. In fact, it is one of the reasons that make Salesforce more outstanding than other CRM system. Anyway, this topic actually weighs the second highest (13%) in the Salesforce Advanced Adminstrator Exam! Anyway, let's get straight to the topic then!

NOTE: This post is written in April 2019 and content might be changed/updated overtime. The content is inspired by focusonforce.com.

Approval Process

• Most common issues with approval process are:

  • Unable to submit Approval
    • entry criteria not meet or user is not valid submitter
  • Not receiving email notification
    • user have opted out of receiving approval request email in personal setting
    • incorrect approver email address
    • email is marked as spam by mail server
    • IP address blocked or filtered
    • email deliverability setting access level sets to No Access or System Email only (default is All email)

• Process Visualizer can be used to see a graphical representation of approval process.

• Approval Requests can be Mass Transfer.

• Approval requests can be requested in Chatter if Allow Approvals is checked in Chatter Settings.
  

• Approval Step cannot be added to an approval process after it is activated. (New Approval Step button is disappeared when active)
  

• Approval process setup steps:
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Note: no Record Unlock for Initial Submission Actions.
  

• Final actions can be either approved or rejected. User might also be able to recall the approval request if recall option is set.
  

Process Automation

• Automation tools available in Salesforce:
  • Workflow Rules (triggered by record create/update)
    • update fields (record or parent)
    • create task
    • send email alert
    • send outbound message
  • Process Builder (triggered by record create/update, another process, platform event)
    • create record
    • update fields (in any related record)
    • submit for Approval
    • send email alert
    • call Visual Workflow (or Cloud Flow Designer), but replaced by Flow Builder now
    • post to Chatter
    • call Apex
    • run Quick Action
    • invoke a Process
  • Flow (triggered by button, link, called from Process Builder, Apex, Visualforce/Lightning Page, custom tab)
    • CRUD (create, read, update, delete) records
    • flow control (accept user input, loop, decision, file upload, and etc.)
    • submit for Approval
    • send email alert
    • post to Chatter
    • call Apex
    • run Quick Action
  • Approval Process (triggered by button, link, Process Builder, Flow, Apex)
    • update fields (record or parent)
    • create task
    • send email alert
    • send outbound message
• Tips to know which automation tool to use - whichever is the simplest solution for process automation
• Use Apex when the declarative tools are not capable of solving a particular business problem.
• Use Visualforce or custom Lightining Page with components to build complex custom user interface or multi-step processes that cannot be implemented using declarative tools.
• Use Assignment Rules to automatically route incoming cases or leads to specific users or queues based on the entry criteria. (work the same as via Process Builder or other methods)
• Use Auto-Response Rules to automatically send email response to customer for a case or lead submission, applicable to Web-to-Case and Web-to-Lead based on the entry criteria. (work the same as via Process Builder or other methods)
• Use Escalation Rules to automatically reassign cases to specific users or queues when a case meets certain criteria and its age is over a certain number of hours. (work the same as via Process Builder or other methods)

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Well, that's it. I will see you in the next post! Ciaoz!

Post was published on 26 Apr 2019, last updated on 2 Jul 2019.

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