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Low-code tools are in the spotlight as employees and business leaders work to help their organizations thrive in turbulence. Offered on a broad variety of platforms, these tools can help savvy business users reduce friction in their path to create time-saving process automations as well as enable new processes critical to achieving business outcomes.

While other low-code tools such as Microsoft Power Automate are geared toward everyone, Salesforce’s low-code tools are designed for Salesforce Admins, and likely too complex for a typical business user to adapt. However, these tools have proved to reduce friction as business users work with admins to develop unique automated solutions with Salesforce.

In a previous post, we explored how Salesforce’s flagship low-code automation tool, Flow, opens the door for admins to deliver solutions to complex technical challenges previously restricted to programmatic solutions such as triggers and Visualforce pages. By adopting Flow, organizations can alleviate feature backlogs held up by the lack of Salesforce developers and reduce the average development time to deliver on a new feature. Salesforce estimates that using low-code tools can help teams deliver apps about 68% faster.

Salesforce continues to invest heavily in Flow, providing significant improvements with each of its three releases per year. In the spring ’22 release, Salesforce announced a new tool, Flow Orchestrator, designed to expand the capabilities of Flow. With the release of Orchestrator, Salesforce acknowledged the need for an additional tool to help admins move from automating a discrete process to orchestrating collaborative solutions that span across multiple teams.

Orchestrator builds on the capabilities of Flow to expand the scope of what Salesforce admins can accomplish and reduce the complexity of meeting certain requirements. Specific enhancements that Orchestrator provides include:

• Initiating screen flows and autolaunched flows from a single interface.
• Assigning screen flows to individual users or queues and tracking completion of assignments through work items
• Out-of-the-box tracking of work item assignments/reassignments, completion dates, and time to complete
• Organizing the order of execution of various flows using steps, stages, and a new type of flow, evaluation flows
• Option to request a no-cost Salesforce Workflow Orchestration User license to capture process inputs from employees who aren’t already using Salesforce

This new set of features addresses several challenges admins face when attempting to use only Flow to handle complex, interdependent, multi-team processes, including:

• Additional licensing costs: With Flow, every user who needs to provide inputs to advance the process is required to have a Salesforce license, no matter how limited their contribution.
• Poor user experience: While lightning record pages and dynamic actions have improved the ability for admins to reduce visual noise by limiting the visibility of certain screen flows to specific groups of users, this approach can influence page performance, leading to slow load times and poor user experience.
• Technical limitations: While Flow Trigger Explorer provides greater control over the order of execution of flow automation, the ability to sequence automation remains limited to the creation or updating of a record on a given object. More sophisticated sequencing of automation, such as the ability to listen for changes on a group of records, is not available without supplementing the solution with Apex code.
• Higher costs to develop, document, and maintain the solution: Admins can get bogged down in using flows to create tasks, manage task assignments/reassignments, and trigger email alerts to help teams track process handoffs and bottlenecks. New admins cycling into the business often struggle to grasp how complex solutions involving multiple flows piece together without the help of supplemental documentation, which is often absent or out-of-date.

The following table helps to summarize the advantages of using Flow or Orchestrator to address various process automation requirements and use cases. Organizations still taking a “clicks not code” approach to Salesforce solution development should note how Salesforce’s programming language, Apex, spans along both solutions. Through features such as invocable Apex and the ability to trigger flows and orchestrations from Apex and integrations, these tools offer an opportunity for Salesforce Admins and Developers to come together and partner on delivering an optimal solution. Enabling organizations to instead adopt a “clicks and code” philosophy.

Salesforce low-code process automation tool spotlight: Flow and Orchestrator

To help illustrate the power of Orchestrator, let’s take a deep dive into how the tool can help drive automation across the complex, multi-team process of new hire onboarding (the first use case in our table above) for a fictional company, ACME Gold Mines:

ACME Gold Mines has grown rapidly thanks to its innovative business model and top-notch customer care. However, the company has struggled to maintain a strong employee experience after recently reaching 10,000 employees and passing a new policy to start hiring full-time remote workers.

Top of mind for leadership is how to avoid another disastrous onboarding process for the new remote workforce. A recently hired sales development rep, Dmitri, went over two weeks before receiving his company laptop and mobile phone in the mail. Shortly after Dmitri finally received his equipment, he learned that the desktop application for the company’s call system was never installed. More than three weeks passed before Dmitri was able to start calling leads and producing for the company — yikes!

A deeper dive into Dmitri’s onboarding process reveals how multiple teams must collaborate together in order to provide the type of unified and seamless onboarding experience leadership desires. An oversight by one of the teams or miscommunication between the teams can result in the type of delays that frustrated Dmitri and cost AGM money in lost productivity.

The following demo shows how, with Orchestrator, we were able to quickly create the following proof of concept to help transform Dmitri’s onboarding experience:

There are several more demos available showcasing the capabilities of Orchestrator. Two of my favorites are this demo from Salesforce explaining how Orchestrator can help teams prepare a coordinated response to large-scale service incidents and this in-depth technical demo from Dean Fischesser on UnofficialSF that explores using Orchestrator with OmniScripts to onboard physicians into Health Cloud. Admins hoping to dive deeper into Orchestrator should check out the Flow Orchestration Basics module on Trailhead.

Before embarking on a journey to implement your first orchestration, it’s important to remember that transforming a complex, interdepartmental process requires more than just technical knowledge. It also requires a more sophisticated approach to business process mapping, coordinating change management across multiple teams, and accounting for Salesforce architectural considerations. Before making such an investment, it’s important to validate that the investment is strategic, and will yield the types of returns to help your teams achieve their business goals. In the ever-growing world of low-code tools there are plenty of options to choose from. If your organization has already adopted Salesforce and is looking to automate a complex process spanning across multiple teams, Salesforce Flow Orchestrator is definitely worth considering.