Call for Submissions: Pre-Built Business Processes (Flow Templates) at TDX ‘19

In our Spring ’19 release, we announced a new capability of Lightning Flow that allows businesses to create or install pre-built business processes as Flow Templates that they can clone and customize. This feature creates another Flow solution category in the AppExchange for ISVs to provide value and extend your visibility to our customers. Flow Templates bring us one step closer to our vision of creating the biggest ecosystem of tools to empower our customers to deliver the best customer digital experiences.

The Vision

With Lightning Flows, we empower our customers to deliver the best customer engagement experience across every channel. Customers will have a complete set of tools that help automate, easily deploy, and simplify any intelligent process and experience in the Salesforce Platform. We will qualify an ecosystem of select partners to create, package, and publish industry-specific, adaptive business processes and application integrations.

What is a Flow Template?

In case you missed the release announcement, a Flow Template is a pre-built business process that customers can clone to create customized business processes. Unlike non-template processes and Flows, Flow Templates can be opened and cloned, allowing customers to look under the hood to see how a process is built and further customize to their needs without starting from scratch.

Here are some of the key benefits for the customers:

1. Jumpstart Flow creation — Eliminate blank canvas anxiety when a customer fires up Flow Builder or Process Builder and start with a base to accelerate development.
2. Access industry best practices — Gain ISV subject matter expertise by opening and exploring how the templates are built.
3. Tailor to specific business needs — Evaluate whether the templates match the exact business use case and further customize them.

A great opportunity for ISVs building automation solutions

Flow templates are a great way for ISVs building business process automation solutions to get a foot in the door with potential customers in the AppExchange. Instead of hard-coded custom settings for pages in an app, you can provide customers with declarative configurability through flow. Flow Templates are great lead generators too! By making a portion of your solution viewable and cloneable to the customers, they can evaluate the template and decide to purchase your related apps in the AppExchange.

Sample Flow Template ideas

If you are interested in creating a Flow Template, here are some sample ideas we have in mind:

• Transaction dispute — identifying and giving reasons for disputing a financial/banking transaction
• Mortgage Onboarding — obtaining customer information, address, and financial information when applying for a mortgage
• Return merchandise authorization — identifying order and account information needed to return merchandise purchased from a vendor, including downstream integration for shipping labels, tracking and inventory management.

Keep in mind, the most useful templates are the ones that align with key business processes for every business. I’m sure you will have better ideas than we do!

Join us!

Salesforce is now inviting select partners to build Flow Templates that will be launched at TrailheadDX in May 2019.

Here are a few reasons why you would want to be the first template partners:

1. Visibility at TDX as a process automation expert
2. Early access and visibility into Flow product roadmap
3. Waived security review fees

Check out this Quip with complete details on how to build Flow Templates, along with specifics on our expected delivery milestones.

If you are interested in joining the program, please contact norris.lee@salesforce.com.

(with many thanks to Dary Hsu, Lighting Flow Product Marketing Manager)