💃 Field Mapping...Awful. Necessary. Tedious. Educational! 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Field mapping is as exciting as it sounds….

But it is a critical, nay, foundational piece of the integration puzzle.

Let’s get right into a few scenarios ⬇️

Agenda for today includes

• Field Mapping

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Field Mapping

Today we will discuss-

💃 Couple Scenarios 🕺

💃 Why Should You Care? 🕺 

💃 What’s Included? 🕺

💃 How Do You Get It? 🕺

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SCENARIO 1

Adam the Salesforce Admin is helping his company migrate from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Salesforce Sales Cloud.

His next task is to map the Dynamics Leads to the Salesforce Lead object.

He starts by pulling up a fresh spreadsheet. Then he lists out each field from the Dynamics Lead table in one column.

• First Name

• Last Name

• Email

• Phone

• Address

• Status

• Status_id

After he has the Dynamics Lead fields documented, he documents the Salesforce Lead fields in another column.

It’s simple 👌, he will create an identical field in Salesforce, for each Dynamics field.

1-to-1, easy 🙌.

SCENARIO 2

A few weeks later, Adam has completed building out the Salesforce objects and fields based on his Dynamics → Salesforce field mapping.

His next task is to map Salesforce fields to the ERP, where Sales Contract data lives.

Devin the developer is supporting Adam through this task.

Devin: Hey Adam….so, I have good news! And bad news….

The good news is, we have a swagger doc for the ERP API, yay 🎉!

The bad news is, there’s a lot of fields. The product book is diverse and pricing is line-itemed. As well, the fields will originate from multiple objects, some examples-

• the name and email from the Account object.

• the sale status from the Opportunity.

• the products and the sales amounts from the Quote.

Also, the API is event-driven, and the Salesforce events need to be converted into the numerical format that the ERP uses. For example

• 1 = New Opportunity

• 2 = Nurturing Oppty

• 3 = Quote Sent to Customer

• 4 = Opportunity Won

Wow.

This is not a simple mapping like the Lead fields from the first example.

There will be multiple Salesforce objects that need to be mapped to the API fields.

And a data conversion - the Opportunity statuses will need to be converted to numbers, since that is what the ERP is expecting.

As Adam works through this in his head, he says out loud “This is not gonna be a 2-column field mapping exercise…😓”

Devin laughs, “Nope, you’ll have a wide and long spreadsheet for this one! But you will become intimately familiar with the Salesforce schema that builds the sales contract, and the ERP API requirements 😃.”

Adam is oddly excited at the prospect of being a technical expert of the contract writing process, which he knows is critical business process, and will make him a valuable resource 🙌!

WHAT IS IT?

The gist of field mapping is all in the name - mapping fields…from one source to another 😎.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

It’s awful. It’s necessary. It’s tedious.

It’s totally worth it 💯 💯!

Here’s 3 reasons why-

1) Solution Enablement

Quality field mapping enables your systems to have quality integrations. The field mapping is the foundational component of the integration solution 🙌.

2) Business Process

Integrations are business process execution at the data level.

Good business analysts are great at business process 👍.

Great business analysts are great at business process and the underlying data 💪.

3) Takes the Scary Mask Off Of Integrations

The purpose of this series is to de-mystify integrations.

Taking it down to the field-level through field mapping is like taking Jason’s mask off and finding a pretty normal lookin dude underneath!