Did you know Salesforces’ original business automation tool was workflow rules? This allowed Admins to automate and perform limited actions behind the scenes, based on specific criteria, this was limited in its capability and in Spring 2015, a new way of interacting with customer records was introduced, Process Builder, this enabled salesforce administrators to perform multiple tasks and actions against records based upon rules filling a gap of some feature workflow rules could not do.

The new Variant (….to soon?)

The Spring release of 2019 Salesforce introduced a new variant of automation, Flow, this utilised may of its predecessor’s abilities and more, including screen, schedule trigger, record trigger, auto launch and platform event triggered flow, making it a more powerful toolset than workflow rules and process builder and without their limitations,  but this gave Salesforce an additional headache, having to maintain all three tools.

In 2021, Salesforce announced the feature retirement of both Workflow rules and Process builder and now in the Summer 2023 release you will no longer be able to create new Process Builder processes.  In the Winter 2023 release you will no longer be able to create new Workflow Rules, you will still be able to maintain these in your orgs, but now is a good idea to start looking at how you can migrate these processes across to their replacement, Flow.

What is the difference between flow builder and workflow rules?

Workflow rules always execute behind the scenes, whereas flows can provide on-screen guidance to users too. Flows can work across many objects at once and can create, update and delete multiple records across multiple objects.

What is the difference between process builder and flow?

Process builder processes are time consuming to build, are less flexible in the logic that it can run, do not allow for multiple scenarios within its logic, can only update one record and its child records and can take time to run.  Flows are less time-consuming, very efficient, can cater for multiple scenarios of logic and perform an action multiple times across different records.  There are a lot more actions that an admin can configure within its logic to save users time on manual tasks.

What do I do now, if I want to migrate my processes or workflows?

Spring’s 2023 release saw Salesforce added functionality to migrate both workflow rules and process builder processes into flow.  This is not a ‘magic bullet’ it will not always convert 100% of what your rule or process were doing and will need some intervention from an admin.  If you are not comfortable with this, then reach out to Marketing Logic, we will discuss the best options for you and work on a plan to get your rules and processes working in flow.

If you are looking to maximize your Salesforce capabilities for customer segmentation, please contact us today and let us help you get the most out of your Salesforce platform.