Blog
May 27, 2015
As Pete pointed out in Part 1of this blog series, you don’t need to have a computer science degree or need to know how to code to successfully build workflow processes with Salesforce Lightning Process Builder. Don’t let my title and certifications fool you; my degree is in PR, and I do not know how to code. Because of this, you can imagine my surprise when our Principal Consultant from ACF Solutions, Alanna Steffens, told me in passing about Process Builder when it was still in Beta.
At the time, I had been brainstorming ways to accurately portray a student’s employment status. This has been a challenge in Salesforce because students may have multiple employment records, ranging from general interest to unpaid internships to declined offers and those choosing to continue their education. Figuring out which one was most current and accurate was not easily done.
I truly thought that it would cost at least $10,000 for a developer to code this, but voila! I was able to create this process by myself with Process Builder. Here’s what I did: I created a process that ran a hierarchical assessment of every employment record in our database to populate a field on the student’s contact record with his or her most accurate job status. (Some examples of dashboard reports are below.) As part of this process, I also developed a work-flow that alerts our specialist by email when a graduating senior’s job status changes so that we can update our reported stats. And I, a non-coder, built this myself in just a couple of hours. Now, we’re easily able to produce great reports and graphs (see below) that satisfy our rankings survey requirements and give our administration a better snapshot of our current employment rates.
Furthermore, we’ve been able to slice and dice this data by top employment companies, certificate recipients, mentoring participants, event participation (i.e. career fair attendance), GPA/test scores and bio/demo/geographic segments.* Once this process was in place, I was giddy with the possibilities that Process Builder offered us!
As a result we now have seven active processes all built by me, including:
- When a student declares his or her major, a customized email from the assigned career advisor is immediately triggered congratulating the student and offering career resources.
- When a student goes on probation or suspension, an email is triggered notifying the academic advisor of the student’s status along with critical information so that the advisor can reach out to the student immediately.
- When a faculty member’s summer pay violates state requirements, a chatter message is triggered alerting our HR department (see example below).
* Reflective of 2015 graduates in their senior year and are not finalized numbers to be used in any capacity other than as a visual for this blog.
Lauren Russo, the Marketing and Career Analytics Specialist and a Salesforce power user, is a fan of Process Builder. She reports: “The processes Joanna and her team have put in place have helped our office significantly in official placement reporting, customer service and data accuracy. I look forward to continuing to brainstorm ways to use this great new tool.” Process Builder has empowered me to save our organization time and money. It is my Salesforce Swiss army knife!
If you are interested in learning more about the processes we have put in-place and how we did them or would like more information on the processes coming down the pipes, please feel free to reach out to me directly at [email protected].
