Flow Orchestration

So far, we learned the building block of Flow Builder, understood the intricacies of various flow types, and observed the power of Salesforce flows. We gained insight into how to transform and automate business needs into business processes and then create an amazing user experience.

In this chapter, we will explore and see how we can streamline and enable complex business processes using flow orchestration. We will explore and learn flow building blocks and how these blocks work, and then discuss steps to create a flow orchestration. We will explore ways to monitor and streamline our orchestration as well as key considerations to make your orchestration effective.

Flow orchestration helps you to quickly create sophisticated, multi-user, multistep processes declaratively. Due to the low code nature of orchestration, admins can now enable business processes quickly and be able to maintain seamless business workflows. You will see how you can amplify the impact...

What is flow orchestration?

Flow orchestration helps with automating complex multi-user, multi-set processes using Salesforce building task management. You will be able to combine multiple interrelated processes that involve multiple teams into one cohesive integrated streamlined workflow.

With built-in task guidance, team members know exactly what they are supposed to do and at what point — so, essentially, handoffs and approvals are streamlined, making your business process automation more meaningful, effective, and impactful.

With orchestration, we can streamline complex end-to-end business processes:

• Unify: Automate multiple workflows in a single end-to-end view
• Scale: Be able to create processes quickly with reusable automated actions and components
• Optimization: Reduce time between tasks by optimizing notifications and work items and creating user-centric workflows

Difference between flows and flow orchestrations

• A flow is an application...

Monitoring flow orchestrations

We can monitor and streamline the orchestrations that we have configured. With this feature, we will be able to identify bottlenecks and opportunities and enhance the performance of individual executions of the orchestration stage and steps.

You run the flow orchestration from the object that you defined. For record-triggered orchestrations, create a record for the object or make an update to the record to trigger the flow orchestration. This action creates a work item and is available in the Orchestration Work Guide on the Lightning record page.

Users will see these work tasks in the work guide, and they will be able to perform them. For instance, more work tasks will be created and assigned to the same user or different users or groups for a given flow orchestration based on input from the prior screen and decision elements in the orchestration. In addition, your admin or your tech team members will be able to monitor flow orchestrations by accessing...

Debugging orchestration runs

The debug function for flow orchestration is different from flow debug; we will review this in a later section. We do not have a debug feature to debug flows from orchestration, so we need to ensure those individual flows are tested thoroughly. Via a flow orchestration, we lined up these flows using steps and then grouped steps logically into stages. A stage is triggered by an action either interactively or in the background. We will see the flow orchestration in our last chapter.

Ensure that all the flows you plan to use in flow orchestrations are thoroughly tested and optimized. During orchestration debugging, the Flow Builder tool for orchestration will provide what steps failed at what stage. Since flows are used in orchestration steps, it is critical that flows are tested and ready to use.

We can debug orchestrations when they are in progress. Essentially, any user interaction orchestration flow can be debugged. This feature will help us better...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how flow orchestration helps us to quickly create sophisticated, multi-user, multistep processes declaratively. We can build end-to-end complex business processes in one single functional module using flow orchestration and amplify the impact of flows. We use simple building blocks called stages and steps that help group flow and create highly interactive workflow actions that can be managed and completed by cross-department business users or groups. We also touched upon features to monitor and streamline our orchestration.

In the last chapter, we will explore and discuss a few complex business scenarios and walk through a complex business process orchestration. We will see business use cases, create a business process flow, identify individual flows, and then automate the process using flow orchestration.

Questions

1. Define flow orchestration stages and steps.
2. Where do your users see orchestration work tasks?
3. What are the main types of flow orchestrations?
4. What is a Work Guide?
5. How can I as an admin find out the status of my orchestration run?

Further reading

• Salesforce flow orchestration documentation: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.orchestrator_flow_orchestrator.htm&type=5
• Salesforce Trailhead – Flow Orchestration Basics: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/orchestrator-basics
• Salesforce Trailhead – Orchestrate Complex Processes with Flow Orchestration: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/build-a-flow-orchestration