Lev Lazinskiy

R1D35 Business Process Management in Salesforce

I know what you’re thinking. “Business Process Management is the most exciting topic that I’ve ever read on this blog.” You are right.

Salesforce comes with some very robust BPM and workflow automation capabilities that require either no code, low code, or optionally all of the code that you want.

This makes it really easy to create complicated workflows when things happen within the system. For instance:

• Modifying other records when some records change.
• Notifying users when some event occurs.
• Creating an approval workflow based on specific criteria.
• Sending data to third party systems when things happen.

If you work in a startup, like me, you will find so many manual processes that could save human beings hundreds of hours. The biggest challenge is getting the automation working. When I first approached some of the automation challenges at my job, as an engineer I dove head first into creating complicated validation rules in Apex, using triggers, and writing reusable API wrappers for various third party services.

I took a step back before diving too far into this rabbit hole and took some training with Trailhead. I learned that 90% of the things that I spent figuring out in Apex are just built right into Salesforce. With my limited time I can spend my engineering skills on the 10% that I can’t do out of the box and let Salesforce handle the rest.

While it is interesting to learn how to deal with triggers, validation, etc. from scratch, as Sweet Brown would say: