In the world of data management, automation is the natural progression and an important part of mastering your data for two reasons:
1. It helps ensure consistently high data quality.
2. It gives data admins much needed time back in their day.
For many, automation means running as many processes as possible on a schedule without human intervention. You set it and forget it. And there are plenty of data management jobs Salesforce admins complete that can be easily automated on a schedule – standardizing state and country, verifying email addresses, and deduplicating high confidence level matches, to name a few.
But what about those situations where you can get everything about the automation process set up except the schedule?
Is there a way to automate data quality processes with an undefined schedule? Yes! Here’s how.
Automate Data Quality Even If You Don’t Have a Defined Schedule
JobBuilder is the automation and scheduling application for DemandTools. It is also a standalone utility that can schedule other actions, like sending an email or creating a directory. JobBuilder enables automation in two ways:
1. Scheduled automation – Batches of scenarios that are saved and set to run on a specific day and time
2. On-call automation – Scenarios saved together that are to be executed in a specific order, but don’t have a set day or time to be run.
Typically, data admins have both automation needs. Often, it’s the on-call automation that can really be a time saver, especially when a project crops up that you weren’t expecting.
On-Call Automation Example
Let’s look at a step-by-step example.
1. When an organization attends a tradeshow, they track their booth visitors with badge scans. All of that information is spit out into a flat file and needs to be transferred into Salesforce so sales reps can start making contact.
2. The marketing operations manager typically owns this piece of the puzzle and uses PeopleImport’s pre-import matching to cleanly import the data without creating duplicates.
3. Marketing ops then alerts the admin that the data was loaded.
4. The admin’s job, using DemandTools (without DemandTools, this is done manually), is to:
- Filter out records that weren’t created or edited that day by marketing operations
- Execute deduplication among Leads, Contacts, and Accounts
- Standardize field level data on the Account, Contact, and Lead
- Verify the Contact and Lead email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses
All of this needs to be done as soon as the data is loaded because when hot, new leads are added, they need to be actionable immediately. But, manually running multiple dedupe scenarios, standardizations across multiple objects, and verifications in DemandTools still takes more time than necessary. The admin has to create the scenario, and let it run before moving on to the next action.
This is where JobBuilder’s on-call automation piece comes into play. If the dedupe, standardization, and verification scenarios are already set up in DemandTools and saved in a JobBuilder batch, all the admin has to do is double click the JobBuilder batch file, and voila – all scenarios are kicked off on their own. The data is fully processed in less time, and sales can start working those leads that afternoon… and the admin can make it to happy hour.
Cheers!
3 Tips for Getting Started with Data Quality Automation
Here are three tips to start automating data quality with JobBuilder and stop wasting valuable time.
1. Identify processes that can be run on a schedule (think – data maintenance, recurring imports from another system or data vendor, email verification, and standardization)
- Create and save the DemandTools scenarios for each part of the process
- Create a JobBuilder batch, listing the DemandTools scenarios in the order they should be processed (hint: there’s a drag and drop feature that makes this super quick)
- Schedule the batch
- Enable batch completion alerts in DemandTools by enabling the “Create Tasks for Batch Processes” setting under options
2. Identify recurrent processes that don’t adhere to a schedule
- Repeat steps a and b from above
- Save the JobBuilder batch file (.djb) to an easily accessible location
3. Use registry files with your batches to run them in different Salesforce orgs or so processes run under different DemandTools settings. Click here to learn more about registry files.
To learn more about JobBuilder, visit the JobBuilder Help Documents.