Process Builder

Process Builder is a workflow tool that helps you easily automate your business processes by providing a powerful and user-friendly graphical representation of your process as you build it. 

The new Lightning Process Builder has two main features that stand out. The first is the huge amount of functionality the new process builder brings with it. Before, a process that might have taken 10 separate workflows to accomplish with different outcomes now only has to have one process. This is because we can have true and false actions for a criteria, which can then have true and false actions coming off them again. In addition to having multiple outcomes, the amount of actions available have increased, so now, we can post to chatter, launch flows, update record and (this is the BIG one), we can create records. Taking it one step further, we can also default some fields for these automatically created records.

The second feature is how the Process Builder brings a visual designer with it. In the diagram below, see  how you can bring workflows together to create complex processes to automate time-consuming tasks. This makes “old school” workflows look a bit antiquated, especially when you are creating workflows that interact with one another to set off a chain-like reaction.

From the diagram above, you can see how processes can be built quickly and simply. We start at the top and work our way through the diagram to see which actions will be triggered by what criteria. If you follow through this simple flow diagram, you can see that we are working with an account, and the criteria I have chosen is Account Type (my actual criteria is Account Type = Prospect). You can also see that when this criteria is true, I have made an immediate action to create an Opportunity.

Clicking on this ‘Create Opportunity” tab will open up a separate area, where I can choose to default as many fields as I like. Then we can have similar actions if the criteria equals false, and then test another criteria, and so on.