What is Salesforce’s Lightning Process Builder?

Fully available in Spring ’15, Salesforce’s Lightning Process Builder is a next-gen workflow tool with extensive functionalities. What’s best about Process Builder is that it allows everything on one screen without travelling back and forth between pages. Unlike traditional workflows, it enables Salesforce Administrators to cover multiple scenarios in one process. It is built with a visual designer to set up complex workflows, which otherwise required APEX triggers. Lightning Process Builder is not only confined with creating, updating and submitting records, but it also allows posting to Chatter, triggering a headless flow, calling a publisher action, and a lot more.

Automating an organization’s workflow with Process Builder offers many benefits:

• Increased productivity and competitiveness
• Quicker response time
• Improved cash flow
• Reduced legal and financial risk
• Consistency and process reliability
• Transparent workflows with continuous document tracking
• Ability to quickly respond to changing market
• Long-term data retention

Why choose Process Builder – the common challenges and recommendations?

Lightning Process Builder provides numerous advantages that help you easily automate your business processes. Here are some common issues that can now be resolved with Salesforce’s Process Builder:

• Inability to automate multiple actions
  Workflow tool allows you to set up one workflow rule for each pick list even if a specific set of actions has to be performed.
  Recommendation: With Process Builder you can create a single process that can con-tain multiple workflows.
• Difficulty with the criteria stage
  Every time you create a field, workflow rule has to be triggered, and it is not possible without a formula or filter.
  Recommendation: Process Builder allows you to select a field as the value of the filter from the lookup table.
• Difficulty in writing custom codesUse of Apex codes for automating simple tasks is a very time consuming and complex process.
  Recommendation: Process Builder provides point and click efficiency to automate your tasks and allows you to call Apex from a process without writing a single line of code.

Takeaways

Here are the best practices that can be helpful while automating your workflow:

1. Check if there are any workflows on the object doing the same thing as the particular process.
2. Check if the Apex, Workflow, and the Process are not interweaved together for the same process.
3. Check if the description field is used to populate information like – when the process was created, by whom and what it does.
4. Check if you are practicing it in the sandbox, should you be using this tool for the first time.

Looking to give Process builder a try?