When To Use Which Type of Salesforce Flow

Flow in Salesforce is a powerful tool that enables administrators and developers to automate complex business processes. It is a visual representation of your workflow and processes, allowing for designing logical sequences, or “flows”, to execute a series of steps and actions such as creating, updating, or deleting records and interacting with users.  

In this blog, you will:

• learn the various types of Flow and when to use it.

When to use which Flow Type

1. Screen Flows

• • Scenario: A company wants to streamline its onboarding process by creating a multi-step wizard to collect necessary information from new hires.
  • Implementation: A Screen Flow can be designed with multiple screens to gather employee details, preferences, and other required information. Each screen can be customized with different input types and can seamlessly guide the user through the onboarding process.

Benefits:

• Enhances user experience by guiding users through specific steps.
• Validates user input in real-time, ensuring data accuracy and completeness.

Limitations:

• • • Screen Flows can be user-specific and require additional effort to make them versatile for varying user needs.
    • Requires user interaction; cannot run in the background or without user initiation.

  

2. Auto-Launched Flows

• • Scenario: An organization wants to automate updating the lead score of a lead record based on specific criteria and attributes.
  • Implementation: An Auto-Launched Flow can be created to evaluate the lead records based on predefined criteria and update the lead score field accordingly without requiring user interaction. For businesses dealing with vast amounts of leads, bulkification of Flow ensures that these automated processes are optimized to handle large batches of data without hitting Salesforce limits.

Benefits:

• Automates processes efficiently, reducing manual intervention and errors.
• It can be triggered by various events, allowing for versatile automation scenarios.

Limitations:

• • The lack of a user interface means it cannot be used to collect or display information to the user.
  • Understanding and managing error handling can be challenging due to the absence of user interaction.

3. Schedule-Triggered Flows

• Scenario: A business wants to implement a monthly data cleanup operation to identify and merge duplicate records.
• Implementation: A Schedule-Triggered Flow can be configured to run at the beginning of every month, identifying potential duplicate records and merging them based on predefined rules and conditions.

Benefits:

• • Automates time-bound operations efficiently, eliminating the need for manual scheduling and execution.
  • Ideal for batch processing of records and optimizing resource utilization.

Limitations:

• • Limited to scheduled times; cannot be triggered by record changes or user actions.
  • Requires careful design and testing to handle large volumes of data and avoid performance issues.

4. Record-Triggered Flows

• • Scenario: A company wishes to automate the calculation of a custom field value on opportunity records whenever an opportunity is created or updated.
  • Implementation: A Record-Triggered Flow can be set up to trigger the creation or modification of opportunity records and calculate the custom field value based on the values of other fields and related records.

Benefits:

• Provides real-time automation based on record changes, ensuring data consistency and accuracy.
• It can execute before and after the record is saved, allowing for versatile automation scenarios.

Limitations:

• • Configuring can be complex due to the need to handle different triggering events and conditions.
  • Requires thorough testing to avoid unintended consequences, such as recursion and governor limit issues.

5. Platform Event-Triggered Flows

• • Scenario: A company wants to respond to external systems’ events or integrate with other platforms without creating tight coupling between the systems.
  • Implementation: Using Platform Event-Triggered Flows, the company can design Flows that react to specific platform events published by other systems. For example, an external inventory management system might send an event when stock levels drop below a certain threshold, triggering a Flow in Salesforce to alert relevant sales personnel.

Benefits:

• • Enables seamless integration with external systems and services without direct point-to-point connections.
  • Offers near real-time response to events, ensuring timely actions and updates.
  • Increases flexibility and adaptability by using event-driven architecture patterns.

Limitations:

• Requires understanding and setup of platform events, which may need to be clarified for some developers and admins.
• It depends on external systems to publish events; any disruption in those systems might lead to missed triggers in Salesforce.
• Handling high volumes of events may require careful design and consideration to avoid performance or processing delays.

Conclusion

Selecting the appropriate Flow type according to the specific use case is crucial. Whether the requirement is for user interaction, background automation, scheduled execution, or response to record changes, Salesforce Flows offers the flexibility to implement a wide range of automation scenarios efficiently.

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