Compose and Orchestrate Business Processes

In the last chapter, we discussed in detail how to streamline and enable complex business processes using flow orchestration. We explored and learned flow building blocks, saw how they work, and then discussed steps to create a flow orchestration. We also reviewed ways to monitor and streamline our orchestration.

In this last chapter, we will look at a practical scenario, a simplified real-world business requirement, a business process flow, and finally, a flow orchestration that meets our business needs. Also, we will look at how we keep an eye on making our orchestration efficient, effective, simple, and usable.

We will cover the following topics:

• Real-world business scenarios
• Designing and creating a business process flow diagram
• Transforming business processes into automated solutions
• Tips and tricks

First, let us look at real-world complex business scenarios (a simplified version) and understand business...

Real-world business scenarios

In this section, we will look at two scenarios and review business process flows. We will look at the conceptual and detailed business process flow for partner registration and quote approvals. Of the two scenarios, we will walk through the orchestration process from start to finish for the quote approval scenario.

Scenario 1 – a partner registration business process

Partner registration is an end-to-end process, involving registering and onboarding your channel partners so that they can be part of the partner program. Partner users will be able to access your system and collaborate with internal team members of your business.

Our scenario is to enable the channel team to capture data from partner users and be able to complete onboarding activities – request account, contact, and user creation – so that partners can access Salesforce data and collaborate and work with the sales team in generation and closing deals.

Let...

Designing and creating a business process flow diagram

Let’s take our simplified flow and see how it is transformed into detailed process steps. These business process flows not only help everyone on the project team understand the business needs but also help us identify what parts of these process steps can, and should, be automated. A good business process flow is a key success factor for any flow orchestration.

A partner registration scenario

In this scenario, your project team needs to create these business process flow diagrams irrespective of automation or manual steps. For the most part, based on my experience, we should start small and automate only key steps, focusing on implementing functionality so that your business users can use a tool, module, or system.

It’s always beneficial to add automation iteratively and incrementally.

Let’s go a few layers deep and see how we can refine the initial business process flows we created in the prior...

Transforming business processes into automated solutions

In this section, let’s explore flow orchestration for partner registration. This is an excellent example, as we have screen elements as well as backend automation.

Let’s implement a simplified scenario:

1. Flow orchestration runs when the parent account is active, and partner enabled is checked.
2. The channel team fills out the onboarding form, inputting contact and account details. Let’s assume this is our first release and the channel team will input the data accurately.
3. Sales operations will get notified so that they can verify and authorize or decline the account and contact creation. (Think about this scenario – what if an account and/or contact already exists? How would you address this?)
4. On approval from Salesforce, the account and contact will be created in the background. The account from where flow orchestration is triggered is added as a parent account to the account just...

Key considerations during flows

Let’s look at some key considerations that can help you avoid running into issues with your orchestration:

• You, the project team, and business stakeholders should understand the business “as-is” and “to-be” processes from start to finish. Take time to plan in creating and getting a common understanding.
• Just because you need to create a flow for your flow orchestration, do not create redundant flows. Reuse an existing flow. If needed, adjust it to fit your needs.
• User proper naming conventions, and document where possible for every flow, stage, step, and so on. When implementing flow orchestrations, it would be beneficial to provide a link to your KB articles (including BRD, process flows, etc.). The best location to add documentation and all relevant links is in the description field when you save your orchestration.
• Do not complicate orchestrations by adding too many features; add what is needed...

Summary

In this chapter, you got a good glimpse of how to orchestrate your business processes using flows. Flow orchestration, like any other tool when used wisely, can add immense benefit to your business user. Flow by itself performs much more complex automation, where it can simplify the tasks performed by your business users, remove redundancies, and maintain high-quality data in a system. Flow orchestration goes above and beyond, by notifying and creating work items only when you need your business users to take some action. Orchestrations are not just for complex business processes; you can use them even for simple business processes to streamline and create meaningful workflows. Flow orchestration is relatively new, and we will see many new features and functions in the future.

We have reached the end of this book. Thank you for taking the time to explore business process automation using flows with me. Start with drawing the process flows, even if you must draw them on a...

Further reading

Flow Orchestration Limits and Considerations: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.orchestrator_considerations.htm&type=5