A growing number of Salesforce internal product teams are building their products on Flow and Flow Orchestration. One of the first orchestration-based solutions to become available is the new approval process feature in Salesforce CMS. Below, you can see a custom Work Guide on the right featuring a screen flow that’s part of a larger orchestration:
Flow Orchestration has a unique licensing characteristic: when you purchase it, you can request no-cost Salesforce Workflow Orchestration User licenses for employees that aren’t already on Salesforce. These licenses are limited but are designed to enable employees who don’t normally have a need for Salesforce to participate in Orchestrations. This works because Flow Orchestration is paid for on a per-Run basis.
Here’s an example: Coffee Corp. purchases 1m runs per year of Orchestration. They also request 50 Workflow Orchestration licenses so they can bring their Compliance department onto Salesforce to participate in business processes involving regulated securities. They don’t pay anything for the 50 Workflow Orchestration licenses.
This SKU has a zero dollar cost and can be bought with Orchestration Runs skus.
When a customer is provisioned with the Workflow Orchestration sku, they receive:
Additionally, the Salesforce account team is authorized to add:
3. an Additional Custom Objects PSL at no cost.
Note that this doesn’t get added automatically; the account team needs to apply it separately during quoting.
This combination of licenses enables the following:
Users with this combination of licenses:
Aren’t entitled to some user permissions and standard apps, including standard tabs and objects such as forecasts, leads, campaigns, and opportunities
User can’t be an agent, admin/dev, or sales rep.
Subscriptions may only be used to complete tasks assigned by an orchestration within the scope of the user license.
Nothing can be stacked on top of the $0 User License SKU – no addons can be purchased for the user license user to use.
The links don’t work in these images, but you can search for them here.
Editor’s Note: This Guest Post was created by Alkymi. UnofficialSF occasionally showcases companies and products that work with Flow Flow Orchestration.
Collaboration for the AI Era: The Data Action Layer.
Seemingly every day we hear examples of Automation speeding up the business world in dramatic ways. Yet, hundreds of millions of documents, PDFs, Emails, Spreadsheets are exchanged daily while almost all of the data they contain are still extracted manually! At Alkymi, we’re building the Data Action Layer (DAL) from the unstructured, real-world data that businesses run on.
Alkymi’s user-friendly solutions – including Data Inbox, Patterns, and Patterns Studio – empower frontline users to eliminate the tedious manual input tasks and take instant action to meet their business goals – like onboarding customers. And with Alkymi Patterns Studio, anyone can build customizable automation for any kind of document, no coding or technical expertise required.
That’s because one of Alkymi’s founding principles is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to trigger actions in the applications and platforms they currently use like Outlook, Microsoft Power Automate, and of course, Salesforce. For us, there’s no better example of a mission critical business application than Salesforce, and we love working with customers to help them supercharge their Salesforce processes with actionable, structured data.
Automating Workflows in Salesforce Orchestrator
We here at Alkymi love Salesforce Orchestrator. It gives users broad capabilities to build, organize, and execute complex multi-team, multi-step workflows, encompassing many of the multi-step processes our customers are focused on, such as customer onboarding, performance reporting, and alternative asset management, which require handoffs between different teams, each with their own set of objectives and responsibilities.
The genius of Orchestrator is allowing users to custom design these workflows to ensure that their business logic is fully reflected each step of the way. For example, if a team should only take an action after a step has been completed with a certain outcome, Orchestrator will ensure that team is only looped in at the right time, if and when required.
Where Alkymi enters the equation is by helping users get more out of Orchestrator by fueling it with instantly actionable document data, the critical data that’s usually manually keyed in before a process can begin. Think of Alkymi as a booster rocket that accelerates the input of the unstructured data automation, while Orchestrator ensures the rest of the process can run successfully based on the data provided.
Blazingly fast Onboarding that saves hours.
Customer Onboarding is one of Alkymi’s most popular use cases, and many of our Financial Services (Wealth & Asset Management) customers use Salesforce to run their onboarding processes. That’s why we couldn’t think of a better way to showcase the power of an Alkymi Data Inbox + Salesforce collaboration than this complex, multi-team workflow that has mission critical business impact.
Our first video, (“Accelerating Customer Onboarding”), spotlights a customer onboarding process based on real workflows requiring three teams to work together to take actions like sending customer communications, processing documents, approving applications, and more. It also touches a range of business systems in addition to Salesforce and Data Inbox, with parts of the workflow happening in email as well as Slack.
Typically, these would be extremely time-consuming manual processes, with lots of potential for process restarts, and missed handoffs. By extracting data from the critical documents needed to fuel instant actions in Orchestrator, we show how it’s possible to save 2.7 hours per new customer by leveraging Data Inbox + Orchestrator.
In the second video, (“Building Workflows”) you’ll see how easy it is to adjust an existing workflow in Orchestrator based on changing business requirements, simply by adjusting the actions that should occur when certain information is found in a document. This makes it easy to update Work Guides so that the right workflow step is followed based on the data encountered in a document.
Let’s Get Your Customer Onboarding Up to Speed.
Onboarding is a complicated workflow that can present significant challenges for operations teams, and it’s just one of hundreds of thousands of similar workflows that exist across enterprises. Combining Alkymi Data Inbox’s unstructured data automation with Salesforce Orchestrator’s workflow orchestration capabilities empowers businesses to accelerate and streamline this process, yielding significant time savings and reducing operational overhead.
To learn more or request a free Data Inbox trial, visit www.alkymi.io.
Work Guide Plus (“WG+”) is a custom Work Guide component that you can add to record and home pages, similar to how the Orchestration Work Guide works. In addition to being able to display an individual work item, it can show a list of all the work items currently assigned to the running user.
Consider this example, where I have two work items assigned to me that are associated with the Jones Pharma account:
The Out of The Box Work Guide will simply display one of the two, but WG+ will show a list:
Select a work item and click Open Work Item to work on it.
If there’s only 1 work item assigned to the running user, WG+ will simply execute it and not bother with the list.
Screen flows used as step flows MUST have an input text variable named recordId to receive the record Id as context information, if you use Work Guide Plus.
When the screen flow is finished, WG+ will return to the list of Work Items. It has a two second delay to allow Orchestration to update the status of your work items, and this value can be overridden (the idea here is that if you return to your list too quickly, you might still see the work item you just finished work on because orchestration is still in process).
As a side note, this component features the new official Datatable component, which is Beta in Winter ’23. Because of that, however, it requires a Winter ’23 org. We’ll publish an installable package as soon as Winter ’23 becomes generally available. In the meantime, you can grab the component from the repository below and add it directly to a Winter ’23 org.
package will be available in October ’22
Interested in learning more about Flow Orchestration? You’ll find content in these sessions:
Alex here…. If you’re coming to Dreamforce, drop by and say hello and tell me how you’re using Salesforce Automation and what you want to see in the future. I’ll be hanging out at Moscone West on the 2nd floor in back behind the session rooms, where they serve lunch, on Tuesday between 2:30-3:30pm. Would love to chat!
Building on the great sneak preview that Adam White published, here’s the official feature overview. This set of slides introduces all of the innovations in the upcoming Winter ’23 release.
We’ve been using the Google Slides deck provided here to run 90 minute hand-on workshops for Flow Orchestration.
The deck has 3 parts:
Part 3 is the first truly hands-on script. Salesforce Admins without Flow experience have been able to complete it in an hour.
As part of this walkthrough, participants can spin up a demo org with a couple of clicks. Information on that is available in the deck above and also here.
One of the best current demos of Flow Orchestration is this Incident Management recording.
You can now spin up a new org that contains the full implementation of this orchestration, allowing you to examine the different parts of the configuration. All you need to provide to create this org is your email address. The resulting scratch org will last for 30 days.
Once the org is created, you can use the same link to return to the org’s Launch button.
Inside the org, go to Setup–> Flow to explore the parts of the orchestration.