Salesforce Workflow vs Process Builder vs Flow - Which One?

hi so in this video we're going to be looking at the differences between the salesforce workflow process builder and flow designer to help you understand which you should be using to automate your business processes at your company as i've said before i don't code but that hasn't stopped me forging quite a successful salesforce career and subsequently building quite valued environments for businesses across the world so let's have a look together now so you can feel more confident in salesforce and help you achieve those salesforce career goals hey salesforce friends and welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is adam feusten and i'm an independent salesforce consultant based in the uk on this channel we help explore the tools strategies and best practices that can help us live happier more productive salesforce lives so today we're gonna look at the tools in salesforce that you can use to build out and automate business processes and requirements without the need for code specifically we're gonna look and focus on the differences between the salesforce workflow process builder and flow designer and between those find out which one is going to be the most appropriate for your needs before you start any kind of automation in salesforce first outside of salesforce review the requirements ask some questions and do some investigation challenge the business to find out how that fits into any existing processes and events the company has investigate the salesforce org itself to see if there might be any conflicting processes that have already been built there we don't want to be creating something that will fire on an object or record and end up with conflicting and duplicated actions and remember to try and challenge yourself to use clicks not code when you use code yes you could do lots of great things but don't let that be the first thing you go to by using these tools in salesforce not only is it easier for you to be able to build things you're also making it easier to maintain as well which leads us on to our first thing that we're going to look at workflows now i first discovered salesforce workflows back when i started in 2006 and along with approval processes uh these two were my favorite tools because i was able without code to be able to create quite complex automation in the system now workflows allow you to do a number of things the things you can do are create tasks update a field send an email alert and even send out an outbound message to be honest i've never used the outbound message action uh but from the sales force's description it sends a secure configurable api message in xml format to a designated listener effectively it's a notification to another system outside of salesforce with field data but what sort of approach so it's easy to use as you can see it's easy to see in the workflow rule itself all the actions that are firing but here are some of the cons and why you probably won't be using it workflows are limited to the actions that we've seen there and there's also no guarantee when the actions will actually fire even if you create them in a certain order they won't fire in that order workflows are not being enhanced or developed further by salesforce as well uh think of them as kind of like the classic way of automating something like i said i was using this back in 2006. therefore i would not recommend the use of workflows and instead we'll look at the next tool process builder and why that is probably something you'll use for 80 of the automation needs in relatively straightforward or even medium complex business requirements so here's why it's so great the pros of it are that it's a drag and drop ui it allows you to create records rather than just a task and you can update related records submit it for approval you can invoke other processes so you can create some more complexity in the branching of the logic you could post to chatter launch a quick action the other great thing about process builder is unlike workflows you can order the execution of the events as you need so you're confident that they will fire in the correct order version control is also fantastic because you can clone the processes that you've been creating and see the history and the versions of all the previous ones in case you need to roll back to a previous one i recommend the use of process builder as well even if you're an administrator or developer that might be confident in using apex code and the reason is because you get to see everything in one place even if process builder doesn't do exactly what you need and you need to use apex eventually well you can fire it from the process builder itself so again you're seeing everything in one place finally we've got the flow designer yes the very shiny new well i say new has been around for years but the flow designer will allow you to build much more complex processes than process builder itself the pros of it are that you can do pretty much everything like i said that process builder and workflows can do and more you can create update and importantly delete records you can create variables of data sets and perform lookups on them creating loops through the data to assess any changes that allows you to create more complex logical branches and with process builder being a little bit trickier to use there are some templates that you can use from the app exchange to get you started now despite me saying that process builder is good for well for me 80 of what most companies will need to do i do feel that process designer will be the future i feel that salesforce will want to remove as much coding requirements as possible and put it into the clix not code mantra that salesforce want to impose now flow designer allows you to do that again like i said it's like apex coding but all visual with drag and drop features so by enhancing that ui and the templates on the app exchange more i think you'll find that flow designer will be something as your best friend as the years go by in salesforce so process builder will be your first port of call is my recommendation but secondly start getting to use flow designer because it will be so useful to do something that again normally only apex could do so if you like this video or found it useful and want to know more about actually building a process or even a flow then click to watch these videos up here and you'll be able to feel confident by following me in building one of those out and don't forget to subscribe and click the notifications button for the channel to get more like this each week see you there i made the sales force be with you

Channel: Adam Foyston

Views: 4,269

Keywords: Salesforce, salesforce process builder vs workflow vs flow, salesforce process builder vs workflow rules, Salesforce Process Builder, salesforce, Salesforce Flow Designer, Process Automation, CRM, Consultants, Administrators, Developers, Salesforce Process Builder, salesforce process builder vs workflow, process builder, automation, salesforce process builder vs workflow, workflow vs process builder vs trigger in salesforce, salesforce demo, salesforce company, salesforce account

Id: sxlHFIDGHAc

Length: 6min 28sec (388 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021