Let’s introduce to you the enterprise level business process management tools that comes with SugarCRM in the form of its robust Advanced workflow module. This is a feature that was made available to all back in Sugar 7.6 for the Enterprise and ultimate editions. What makes it bigger and better than before is its intuitive visual design canvas that makes building processes easier. It also includes a simple drag and drop interface that lets you gain a 360-degree view of the entire process from start to finish. Understanding the importance of a CRM is necessary as it is the foundation for delivering customer experiences that win pipeline.
However, this is not all fun and games. The entire experience can be compromised if certain aspects, designs and area considerations are not understood and addressed. Let’s look at these avenues in more detail. What exactly is it that you should be looking out for when designing workflows so your application performance and runtimes do not suffer.
Data Scalability Issues
Growth is an essential part of every business and with growth comes many benefits, but, it is not without its setbacks either. With growth comes an increase the record volume of your accounts and your overall data of the business. Evaluating all these records can be time consuming, adding a lot of pressure on your workflows in SugarCRM. Frustrating runtimes and stressed out employees with tons’ worth of workload is inevitable. But nevertheless, there is always a solution to everything. In this case, SugarCRM has introduced many performance and scalability improvements in their more recent iterations of the software. This means you should definitely be using the most up-to-date and latest SugarCRM release and avoid using excessive number of in-flight processes.
Excessive Start Events
Start events are all the actions that trigger the process and contain conditions as to whether they apply to newly created records or updated records. They in general affect the flow process and should be managed with a close eye. SugarCRM maintains a log of each event including all of its triggers. However, it is not something to use whenever you want, wherever you want as extensive logging in Sugar affects application performance. Hence, it is necessary to use start events wisely.
Unnecessary Field Evaluation
Keeping a log of unnecessary record and data is inefficient and highly counterproductive. The more records you have the more evaluations will be in line that you have to get done with thus meaning more strains on the resources you have allocated to keep your CRM up and running. Therefore, it is important to understand what records and data are important for your company and only evaluate those that determine the proper execution of business processed you are implementing in Advances workflows. Custom ACL checks can also be implemented to limit field evaluations based on roles and user types and effective use of gateways can help optimizing handling of multiple conditions reducing unnecessary traversals across the workflow.
Related Record Management
The relationships between records can affect application performance as they may to unnecessary complications and evaluations also resulting in timeouts and prolonged save times. As mentioned above, evaluating data not relevant to your business or not being of any use is a waste of time. To avoid this, you should limit the evaluation of 1-to-many related records be defining a criterion such as evaluating only recent records or those created by a specific role or user. All these criteria’s and optimizations are dependent of your businesses processes.
Overusing Business Rules
Business rules are reusable which is the best thing about them. They serve as building blocks for multiple processes and designs. However, a single business rule will not apply for every action or process, they are evaluated on an integer value and multiple business rules combined in a workflow increase its complexity and the time it takes to save a record. This makes it seem like the applications is down and not responsive. It is important to note that when business rules are defined on multiple SugarCRM custom fields, it leads to a greater number of evaluations hence affecting the applications overall performance.
Not scheduling Logic Hooks and Workflows
Logic hooks define the various actions to execute when an event is triggered. It is important to know that workflows and logic hooks can run simultaneously in SugarCRM, failure to address these tends affect the time it takes to save a record. In order to deal with this, you can set up conditions to schedule these processes in such a way that workflows and record saving comes into play after a certain number or logic hooks have been executed. Alternating these processes will improve record saving time.
The Bottom Line
So, everything comes down to having a good idea of your business process that you want to automate through Advances workflows in SugarCRM. But that alone will not cut it, you will need to understand how to effectively use all your tools and resources that are at your disposal and get your head around all SugarCRM services available for you.
Rolustech is a SugarCRM Certified Developer & Partner Firm. We have helped more than 500 firms with various SugarCRM integrations, Sugarcrm customizations and Sugarcrm migrations. Get in touch today for your FREE consultation session. We will be happy to assist you.
