With Salesforce moving to Flow as its go to low-code automation tool, and Workflow Rules and Process Builder planned for retirement, it’s a good idea to migrate your existing automations to Flow. Here are best practices to get started on this process BEFORE you begin migrating.
Reviewing Your Current Automation Stack
Depending on how old your org is, it may have a lot of legacy configurations from old or obsolete business processes that don’t mean anything for your organization today. Do you really need to bring all of that technical debt along in your migration process? Or would you rather have an opportunity for a fresh start with your automations?
Before jumping in and migrating all of your current automations, this is a good opportunity to develop a migration strategy so that the changes being made now will meet the current and future needs of your organization.
Develop a Salesforce Flow Migration Strategy
STEP 1: Audit your current workflow rules and process builders
First, inventory your list of workflow rules and process builders and perform an analysis. Here is a template you can use for your audit (click File > Make a copy).
When looking at your current automation, consider the following questions:
- Which automations are active?
- What automations are still relevant?
- How many automations are there per object?
- How complex is each automation?
- Can any automations be combined?
- Which automations make updates to the same record that triggered it?
STEP 2: Decide Which Automations to Migrate
After completing the audit, you will have a better idea of the automations in your org, which are still relevant and need to be migrated, and which can be decommissioned.
This is also a great time to decide on which you will consolidate. Candidates for consolidation are:
- Automations on the same object with the same trigger criteria. For example if you have 3 workflow rules that trigger from a Lead Status change, these may be a good candidate for combining into a single flow.
- Automations that include field updates on the triggering record.
- Automations that have similar components that could be combined into a subflow that’s called from each flow.
STEP 3: Prioritize Your Migration Plan
As you assess the automations in your org, you will become aware of those that are critical vs nice to have, and which can be combined into a single well performing flow. Use this understanding to prioritize the workflow rules and process builders you want to tackle first.
STEP 4: Get Familiar with Salesforce Flow
If you’re not familiar with Flow, and the types of flows available, this should be your next step before jumping in, to help make informed decisions about your flow strategy.
There are many resources available to help you get started.
You can check out my recent blog post for more information and links to a few great resources. Or this one from Mike Morris that outlines a process to manage Salesforce campaign activation with Flow.
STEP 5: Decide on a Flow Strategy
Ok so you know what workflow rules and processes need to be migrated and which to tackle first. So how are you going to actually migrate them?
Salesforce Migrate to Flow Tool
- Salesforce provides a Migrate to Flow Tool to help with the process of migrating current Workflow Rules and Process Builder to flow.
- Support for migrating Workflow Rules is generally available as of Summer ’22.
- Support for migrating Process Builder is coming and estimated early 2023.
- The tool is very easy to use and does pretty much all of the lift in the migration process, creating the flow with start criteria and each action, and even makes it easy for you to deactivate the old and active the new.
- One consideration is that the current version of the tool will migrate each workflow rule into its own flow. So if you have 20 workflow rules and use the tool to migrate you will end up with 20 flows. Will this work for your org?
Third-Party Migration Tools
- The UnofficialSF site has a tool called ConvertToFlow v2 that can be used to convert Workflow Rules and Process Builder. I personally have not used it but it has been recommended in the community.
Building Flows Manually
If you have identified automations that can be combined, or are migrating process builders, you will no doubt build some flows. Before clicking that New Flow button, decide on:
- Will this be a ‘Before Save’ vs ‘After Save’ record-triggered Flow?
- Will the flow make an update on the same record that triggered the flow? If yes then a Before Save flow may be the best fit for better performance.
- Will this flow be invoking an action or creating/updating related records? Then you will want to create an After Save flow.
- Is there an existing flow with the same entry conditions? Can it be updated to include the logic you are currently migrating?
- Is there an existing flow that has the same components involved? Can those components be converted into a subflow to be used in each of the flows?
Step 5: Build your Flow(s)!
Now that you have completed all of this awesome prep work, you are ready to roll up your sleeves and get building!
Questions about using Salesforce Flow?
Let us know how you’re using Salesforce Flow in the comments section, or reach out to us with any questions.
We’re here to help!
