How to automate project creation

This week the Cloud Coach team discusses automating your project creation, and answers the question, “How can I quickly turn a sale into a project?”

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello everyone, thanks for joining us this week. I’m Nic from Cloud Coach and today we’re answering “how can I quickly turn a sale into a project?

So, I’m going to start here on my opportunity. Now this is about to go closed won so we’re ready to launch a project, and I could go down here and I could click on “new project” and create something from scratch or from a template, which is great, but we want to do this quickly and quickly means automation. Now, we’re going to go instead to process builder where we’ve created a very simple process that you can use to automatically create your projects. So, from here we just picked our opportunity to start with and you can see we’ve created a couple nodes so do we want this to be when a project’s under a hundred thousand or over a hundred thousand? Simple criteria that just says the opportunity here goes closed won and the opportunity amount is greater than one hundred thousand.

Then here’s the magic part, the action. When you create an action you get a number of options to choose from; the one you’re going to want to pick is apex. Now, we actually include this invokable apex class, clone a project—you put that in and you just have to fill out a couple of quick ID fields. You just put in the ID of the project that you want to clone like a template right here. You put in the name, and you can do something clever like a formula if you want to or you can just hard code it. Of course, you give it a start date, and again you can do something like a formula like today or today plus seven if you wanted to start a week from today. And finally, a related record ID because we want it to relate back to the opportunity.

So, you can put in just a couple of those fields and activate your process, so that now when I go back to my opportunity and I set the stage to closed won it’ll automatically make a project. I’m going to click OK, let’s go ahead and save it and right here, and you can see the amount is over a hundred thousand dollars. So, we’ve pointed that to a certain template so what’s going to happen is once this is done saving we’re going to get a brand new project right down here. It’s going to happen automatically and most importantly it’s going to happen quickly without me having to go in click on new project and navigate to the right template and know exactly what I need to put in there.

So, it’s a nice easy process that allows you to create that project automatically. Here we go, a brand new project “CRM implementation.” I can click right here on my Project Gantt, see it all laid out here before me and I did all of this just through that simple little process builder. So there you go, you can create a project without having to go in and do anything other than just close the opportunity. Now I have my implementation project and I’m ready to hit the ground running.

So, that’s it. Thanks for joining us today, and make sure to come back next week when we do another two-minute question. Take care everyone.