Four Key Reasons To Move From Workflow To Process Builder

Blog: If you’re a long-time Salesforce user, the Workflow tool has likely been your savior many times. It may have also seemed like your enemy on occasion because of its limitations. Luckily, Salesforce aims to provide as much declarative functionality as possible, so companies can minimize the amount of code in their Salesforce org…that’s why they invented Process Builder. Simply stated, Process Builder is Workflow with much more power.

The idea behind Workflow and Process Builder is the same — make something happen in Salesforce based on something else. Simple enough, right?

Salesforce launched Process Builder over five years ago, yet many system admins still rely heavily on Workflow. Whatever the reason, it’s time to make a change into the future and move over to using Process Builder as much as possible. Here are just some of the reasons why:

1. Salesforce will continue to support workflow rules but will not add any new enhancements. They want you to use Process Builder because they know it is a better tool with more functionality.
2. A workflow rule can update fields on the current record or the parent record only. Process Builder can update the current record or any related record regardless of the relation or the object.
3. A workflow rule will allow you to update a field, send an email, create a task (only), or send an outbound message. Process builder lets you update the current or related records, send emails, create a record (not just tasks), launch a Flow, post to Chatter, call Apex code, submit for approval, launch a Quick Action, or invoke another process.
4. You cannot set the order in which workflow rules run. You can, however, create a single process that includes multiple criteria and then set the order for evaluation of that criteria.

Although there are more reasons to move to Process Builder, these four are key. Now it’s time to put a plan in place for your transition. Salesforce Trailhead has a good module called “Map Your Workflow Criteria to Process Criteria.” This module will help you build a migration plan for the workflow rules’ criteria. You can access that here. Now get going. You’ll be glad you made the change.