Automation Process in Salesforce

What is Automation process?

A process or task which basically you want to automate for your business. In other words common tasks which we do on regular basis in our organization, if we want that task automatically done by salesforce(without manual intervention) is called Automation process. Like sending an email, field update, calculate value etc.

We can achieve automation process through Formula fields, Rollup-Summary fields and Workflows.

Process Builders and Flows are two more latest additions to the automation tools in salesforce.

Formula Fields is a read only field, the value of formula filed evaluate from expression defined by you based on the requirement. If you update any source field value used in the expression, it automatically updates formula field value . We can create formula fields on both custom and standard object.

Roll-up summary field is used to perform aggregate functions mainly. We can perform different types of operations with your roll-up summary fields based on the requirement. You can count the number of child records related to a master record or you can also calculate the sum, minimum value, or maximum value of a field in the detail/child records.

Workflow can help us automate the following types of actions based on your organization’s processes:

• Tasks— this action is used to assign a new task to a user, role, or record owner.
• Email Alerts— this action is used to send an email to one or more recipients as you specify.
• Field Updates— this action is used to update the value of a field on a record.
• Outbound Messages— this action is used to send a secure, configurable API (Application Programming Interface) message (in XML) to a designated listener.

Process Builders are an alternative to workflow rules which provide almost all of the functionality like workflow rules (apart from the “Outbound message”) and provide some unique functionality of its own like calling an apex class and many more, which we will cover in process builder section in depth.

Flows are a User Interface (UI) based automation tool which can allow an admin to design and develop UI based automations for the end user, apart from being able to just use flows for completely backend automation too.