In Salesforce, Restaurantology admins play a crucial role in maintaining data integrity and automating processes that eliminate bad data at its source. This article emphasizes the importance of creating custom workflows tailored to your organization’s preferences, whether through Flows, the Process Builder, or scheduled jobs.

Note: The Restaurantology managed package does not include process automation. Admins are advised to leverage existing Salesforce tools to optimize data mapping and enhance the efficiency of their Salesforce instance.

The significance of custom workflows for ongoing, automated data integrity

Creating automation to integrate validated, external market intelligence is the future of CRM systems. Although the Restaurantology managed package introduces custom fields with critical industry data, many existing Salesforce instances may already have their own versions of these fields ingrained into company-wide reports. Admins then become responsible for mapping data often deemed “more accurate” from custom Restaurantology fields to pre-existing fields to ensure consistent reporting and data accuracy.

Efficient Workflow Design

Admins should carefully consider the efficiency of their workflows to prevent unnecessary strain on the Salesforce instance’s performance. Evaluating triggers and optimizing workflow design can mitigate excessive calls and improve overall system responsiveness.

An example of how automated updates can eliminate bad data

To illustrate the benefits of custom workflows, let’s consider an example. Suppose you want to automate updates to a field that sales reps often forget to manually update over time, such as the unit count.

Using a Flow, you can compare the recently updated Account > Total Locations Overall field (included in the managed package and updated monthly) with the company’s pre-existing field denoting unit counts. Based on the variance, the Flow can make a decision and update the field with the recently-validated Restaurantology unit count.

This automation ensures that the unit count is consistently accurate without relying on manual updates.

Automating Unit Count Updates with Flows

• Trigger: This Flow is called each time a RestaurantologyLog record is created with three (3) dependent criteria:
  • Restaurantology Is Latest = TRUE
  • Restaurantology Is Managed = TRUE
  • Restaurantology Account is null = FALSE
• Decision: An assessment is performed to decide if an update to the Account’s location count field is required, and if so
• Update: The RestaurantologyLog’s related Account is updated to reflect a more-recently-verified unit count