Automating Project Creation

Zach Burcaw

Oct 7 2016 6 min read

One of the great new features in the upcoming release of Cloud Coach is the ability to use Process Builder to automate process creation. This functionality opens up a number of opportunities to tie project creation to company specific business logic. In this post, we’ll look at one use case for this exciting new functionality.

Opportunity Closed – Auto-Create Implementation Project

The first thing we want to consider is what our logic should be to drive the automation. We’ll keep it simple in this example, but this same functionality can be used to auto create projects that map to complex combinations of data. In this circumstance, we will have two sets of criteria:

A project is created when an opportunity is Closed Won AND less than than $100k
A project is created when an opportunity is Closed Won AND greater than $100k

Each of these processes will create a different project. When the deal size is greater than $100k, the project created is more complex.

To set this up, go to Process Builder and create a new process.
The starting object will be opportunity since you want the project to be created when an opportunity is closed.

For the first set of entry criteria we’ll set up are the closed won opportunities less than $100k. Field Opportunity Stage is picklist value Closed Won and Opportunity Amount is less than or equal to $100,000.

From there, we can now invoke our new clone project apex class: project_cloud_InvokeProjectClone

The first ID field is the ID of the project you’d like to clone. Next is a second ‘Project ID’ field which is the name of the new project – in this case it is pulled from a formula that looks at the Opportunity Name + the string “Project”. Below that is the Project Start Date, which is set to the formula Today() so the start date always equals the opportunity close date. Lastly, there is the Related Record ID, which is an optional field that enables you to automatically related a record to the new project. Here we are relating the project to the opportunity that launched it.

With that done, we can move on to the second option, which is auto-creating a project when an opportunity is closed won and the value is greater than $100k. So here everything remains the same except the Operator for the second condition is set to ‘Greater Than’, as opposed to ‘Less than or equal to’.

Once that’s done we can complete the process by creating one more action to clone a project. There are two differences in this particular action. First, it’s pointed to a different Project ID because this hypothetical project is more complex, so may have some additional activities or a longer timeline. The next differences is that the start date is TODAY()+3, which gives the project team a bit more runway to start the project.

With the process set up, we can now test it out.

When the opportunity is set to Closed Won with an Amount of $70,000, a project is automatically created! The name is Opportunity name + “Project” and the start date is today.

Now let’s try out the greater than $100k process.

As you can see, a new project was created and it starts three days after today, meaning the process for the complex project worked as intended. With this powerful new Process Builder tool, the possibilities for automating project creation are nearly endless!

AUTHOR

Zach Burcaw

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