What are the Issues faced by Salesforce users?

In general, modern organizations that use salesforce also use other applications for dealing with other departments such as Human Resources, Finance, Operations, and so on. Usage of separate applications for different purposes serves to enhance their operational efficiency and quality. However, survey of Salesforce users conveys the issue of integration to be one of the major issues when using Salesforce.

As an overview, Salesforce’s CRM application suite consists of various cloud based applications such as Commerce Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, etc. The three major classes of applications that could be used in a typical organization are as follows:

  • Purchase
  • Selling
  • Internal

Some of the common issues when integrating Salesforce along with other systems are the following:

  • Need to handle business rules and clean data before it is integrated across systems
  • Lack of timely data synchronization across systems, resulting in inaccuracies, mistakes, and lost opportunities
  • Data mapping mismatch between Salesforce fields and other systems. For example, Salesforce permits single address field whereas some systems permit multiple addresses.
  • Salesforce allows repeated names, whereas many applications treat names as distinct
  • Salesforce creates unique ID for each entity handled by it. In case the external systems already have IDs, then we have a problem of linking these IDs or overwriting one of them.
  • Preserving referential integrity or links between data fields have to be handled

What is our analysis?

Creating organizational structures that enabled each individual department to operate at maximum efficiency was for a long time accepted as the best approach to managing a large enterprise. Among other benefits, this approach fostered the development of specialist skills in staff, who could apply those skills to specific aspects of an overall activity such as a manufacturing process, in order to accomplish the tasks involved better, faster, and cheaper. Each department receives inputs from the previous department in the process, applies its own business processes to the activity, and sends the output to the next department in line.

In today’s world where speed, flexibility, and sensitivity to changing markets make all the difference between success and failure, this method of working is no longer appropriate. Organizations have been trying for some time to overcome the limitations imposed by traditional organization structures. Due to the costs associated with the re-engineering efforts, organizations today recognize that they need not abandon functional or departmental organization altogether. They can enable the right people to come together in cross-functional or matrix teams so that all the skills, knowledge, and expertise can be brought to address any specific problem or business opportunity.

This problem space has also been coined as “The Boundaryless Information Flow” by many customers of The Open Group and many similar organizations worldwide. It is essentially the problem of getting information to the right people at the right time in a secure and reliable manner, in order to support the operations that are core to the extended enterprise.
The Open Group’s follow-up analysis on this problem space has resulted in development of a reference architecture model called the Integrated information infrastructure model (III-RM). The major components of III-RM are Information Producer applications, Brokering applications, and Information Consumer applications. Moreover surveys of the Salesforce users also seem to hint on the problem of a similar nature. The information present in Salesforce need to be in sync with other data of the organization.

Conclusion and Recommendation

After going through the above analysis and surveys, we suggest the Salesforce users to use an integration platform like Dell Boomi as good salesforce integration can offer the following benefits:

  • Integrated flow of information available with the different departments and Integrated access to that information so that the staffs can access that information they need in a single convenient interface
  • Data that exists in Silos such as Customer, Product, Procurement, Contract, ERP, Inventory, Engineering, Logistics, Requirements, Order, etc. will need to be integrated for efficient functioning of cross functional teams
  • Operational agility and reduced costs due to increased speed, flexibility and responsiveness
  • Cloud based integration tools such as Dell Boomi integration with salesforce or Mule Soft can handle integrations with Salesforce which is also cloud based
  • 360° view of customers improves the customer experience
  • Storing and handling data in a unified location improves data accuracy

For a quick demo on Boomi Salesforce integration, please drop a mail to [email protected]

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