Automating Business Processes

Robust application? Check. Secure data access? Check. Fast, fun, and collaborative? Check! Our hiring team at Universal Containers has never been more productive. The last chapter demonstrated how easy it is to collaborate in real time with Chatter. Now it's time to find ways to make our app more powerful.

Up to this point, we've created little more than a glorified database—it holds the information we need and lets us search for records based on various criteria, but it doesn't help our recruiters and hiring managers do their jobs more effectively. There's no automation that lets a recruiter know when the status of a candidate has changed or when a new position has been entered into the system. Chatter will let them know about the records they're following, but we want to build automation into our app to keep the processes moving forward.

Once again, the Force.com platform helps us out with more built-in functionality. In this case, the tools that we'll use to solve our process automation problem are called Process Builder and approval processes. We'll take a look at the various ways that we can use the Process Builder first, and then we'll tackle an approval process at the end of the chapter.