Solving Business Problems with Composer and Flow with Jennifer Cole

Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Cole, Manager of the CRM & Analytics Team at 908 Devices.

Join us as we talk about business processes, Jennifer’s latest presentation at Dreamforce, and why it’s so important to understand everything about a problem process before you try to implement a solution.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Cole.

Admins are problem solvers

Jennifer swapped to a smaller company in order to make bigger decisions about how the Salesforce ecosystem there would be run, and she’s had the opportunity to hire her own team of Awesome Admins to support that vision. “I’m glad I like hats because I wear a lot of them,” she says, “but I think, as an admin, everything we touch is problem-solving.”

For her Dreamforce presentation, Jennifer focused on what she did when her company came to her to improve their order entry process. And while she was approached by people who wanted specific things fixed about it, she knew from experience that she needed to broaden her perspective. One technique she uses is to start from the initial request and find out who that person is chasing and asking them the same questions about their process, and then the person they chase, and so on. That way, she captures the entire business process and all of the problems that need solving to make it run more smoothly.

When roadblocks aren’t actually roadblocks

One question that Mike raised on the pod is what to do when it seems like a big obstacle to teams working together is that one business unit simply isn’t on Salesforce. “That can be a false roadblock,” Jennifer says, “I know that’s often what admins hear but I don’t see it as a dead end.”

Often, those teams are curious about how moving their process into the system can streamline everything and plug into the powerful automation and analytics tools Salesforce has to offer. The key is to convince them that you can do things to make what they’re already doing better, rather than coming from the angle that what they’re doing is wrong.

Why understanding the problem makes solving it easy

In Jennifer’s talk, she went over how Flow and MuleSoft Composer helped her make big changes to her organization’s business processes. But how did she get there? The first step was to chart out the problem she was trying to solve in a more detailed way. “Think about the entire workflow and the elements needed for success,” Jennifer says, “and if those elements have a risk of not being there or not being complete they become a section of the problem that I have to also solve to make the whole process work.”

While it’s an important first step, understanding the problem is only part of the process of actually solving it. You need to decide what will be your “source of truth” for each record, even if that’s in different systems for different pieces of information. “It’s a slow process but once you have that down, identifying the tools and the way the data moves becomes the easiest part of all of this,” Jennifer says.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• Jennifer’s Dreamforce Session

Social

• Jennifer’s Trailblazer profile: JCole17
• Jennifer on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

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