On Friday, Salesforce dropped a small bombshell during the Admin Winter ’22 Preview when they announced that Workflow and Process Builder would be deprecated, and that the future of point-and-click automation lies with Flow. It didn’t take long before the Twittersphere was flooded with worried admins. Either because they haven’t really used Flow yet and don’t really know how awesome it is, or because they face the daunting task of reworking their entire automations in Flow.
It was bound to happen
Luckily for us, we weren’t all that surprised, nor worried. Why? Well, first of all, this isn’t really new information. Salesforce has been hinting for quite some time now that Flow is the future. The number of improvements and features they packed in the last couple of releases with regards to Flow has been staggering (some might even say overwhelming), whereas the number of improvements with regards to Process Builder and Workflow has been declining with every release.
It won’t happen overnight
Secondly, Salesforce won’t simply flip a switch and delete your existing Workflows or Process Builders. It won’t happen tomorrow or this year. It won’t even be next year or the year after that. Even though they announced the future depreciation of these tools, the simple reality is that Workflow and Process Builder are heavily used in a lot of orgs and the impact of disabling these would be too great. Organisations will have plenty of time to plan and prepare for this change.
We want it to happen
Thirdly, and most important to us, we already fell in love with Flow a while back. It’s one of the things about the platform we’re most excited about for the moment. When the Release Notes drop, the section about Flow (or Einstein Automate as it’s now called) is the first one we open.
So, because we saw the effort Salesforce has been putting in Flow, and because we are hugely convinced of the potential of Flow, we have preferred using Flow over Workflow and Process Builder for quite some time now. For some use cases, we were of course still forced to use Workflow or Process Builder, but with every release, those reasons became smaller and smaller.
This is our sweet spot
But the main reason we’re not worried is because the task of assessing your current automations and how they impact your org is right in our wheelhouse. We’ve already done this exact thing a couple of times now, and trust us, we know all too well how terrifying the idea of having to review your entire org because you need to replace your precious Workflows and Process Builders with something else can be. The first time we had to do this, we were not looking forward to doing this. At all.
However, we soon recognized the immense value this exercise can have. If your org is anything like the ones we have worked with throughout our careers, then yours probably has built up a pretty big number of automations that aren’t really needed anymore. And if you are a bit like we were, then you probably have left them be, because you didn’t want to risk breaking anything. Or in some cases -and we’ve all been there, don’t lie to yourself-, because you have no idea what they even do.
Taking the time to assess your existing automations and cleaning everything up is an excellent opportunity to make sure they are built scalable, future-proof and as performant as they can be. You’d be surprised (or maybe not and that’s the reason you’re here) by the impact your Workflows and Process Builders can have on your org’s performance. It’s also a great way to stop and think for a second on how you’re actually using the platform and to make sure you’re still using it in the best way possible for your business. If you take one thing away from this post, then let it be this: make sure you take that time and don’t simply lift and shift your current automations to Flow.
If you would like to know more about how Upeo can help you pivot from Workflow and Process Builder to Flow, or if you want our help in assessing your current use of the platform, get in touch with us. We’d love to share our experience with you and help you avoid the pitfalls we painstakingly discovered ourselves.