Summer is quite possibly my favorite season of all. It’s when fruits and vegetables that have been growing since spring ripen into their full glory. In my part of the world, it’s also when we have mild thunderstorms almost daily – and who doesn’t like a thunderstorm? It’s also the time when many people decide to take a vacation to visit family and friends. In order to prepare for the vacation, there’s a lot that needs to be done. If you think about it, planning and taking a vacation is a lot like being a Salesforce Administrator.
There are certain steps that need to happen to ensure you’ll have a safe and enjoyable vacation, just like there are certain steps that need to happen to ensure you’ll have an efficient and smooth-running Salesforce Org:
Destinations
The first step in planning for a Salesforce release is to understand your goals and what you want to accomplish. Similar to planning a vacation – the first step should be to determine what outcomes you want to achieve. A beach vacation won’t satisfy your desire to get back to nature in the mountains – but what if you want both? That’s when you could enlist the help of a travel agent, your expert in knowing what destinations drive specific outcomes, and the entire path necessary to get there. In Salesforce, think of Panaya ForeSight as your “travel agent” – providing you with all the knowledge you need to get to the places you want and achieve all things you desire within your Salesforce instance.
Organization
Once you’ve determined your destination and travel method, it’s time to organize. You might need to call the kennel to board your dog for the vacation, and you might need to purchase new suitcases to replace your old, well-traveled ones. No more worrying about whether they will survive the trip through the airport’s baggage systems. Similarly, in Salesforce, Admins can organize their data by creating custom fields, modifying page layouts, and implementing processes and workflows. Keeping control over your data in Salesforce can improve efficiency, increase staff productivity, and make it easier to maintain data quality. This is the perfect time to move forward and eliminate reliance on spreadsheets, to use Salesforce as the central repository for accurate, up-to-date data. No more wondering who has the latest version – everyone is working from the same single source of truth.
Cleaning
After decluttering and organizing, it’s time to clean. In your home, you might vacuum, dust, and scrub surfaces until they’re sparkling clean because no one wants to come home from a vacation to a dirty home. In Salesforce, cleaning means removing duplicate records, fixing data quality issues, and ensuring your org is running smoothly. Once you’ve de-duped your data, your team will be more efficient and accurate because they are more likely to avoid errors which reduces confusion, and ensures accurate information will be provided to management and other decision-makers.
Maintenance
Finally, after all the planning, organizing, cleaning and relaxing is done, it’s time to maintain your home and your Salesforce org. At home, you might create a maintenance schedule, invest in organizational tools, or hire a professional for those bigger renovations. Similarly, in Salesforce, maintaining your org means staying on top of updates and new features, training your team, and constantly looking for ways to better optimize processes. All of this will help you ensure that your org is running smoothly and efficiently, and using the smallest footprint possible when it comes to storage limits.
While summer vacations and Salesforce Admin work may seem like two different things, they really have a lot in common. Both require the same thought processes, and similar actions like planning, organizing, cleaning, and maintenance. By taking the time to optimize your Salesforce org, you can improve productivity, increase efficiency, and make it easier to find the information you need. So, this summer, why not take a cue from your Salesforce Admin colleagues and give your org a little vacation sprucing up too?
Soak Up the Benefits with Panaya
Panaya ForeSight can help plan changes and releases, cleanup, optimize and maintain your Salesforce org by giving you full visibility into your metadata dependencies. It lets you identify the impact and risk of changes before going live, and test your changes to maintain a bug-free environment, release after release.
Panaya ForeSight provides you with full visibility into your Salesforce Org. With its powerful features, ForeSight enables you to identify the impact and risk of changes before going live, ensuring a seamless transition. ForeSight empowers administrators with the tools they need to confidently manage their org’s evolution and deliver enhanced user experiences.
Let Panaya ForeSight be your trusted companion for all your Salesforce tasks, ensuring a worry-free summer vacation while it takes care of planning, optimizing, and maintaining your Salesforce org. Enjoy your well-deserved break, knowing that your Salesforce environment is in expert hands.
Take ForeSight for a test drive in your Salesforce org today!