Data Architecture & Management

Question 1

Slow report on a large object in an LDV Org

Answer 1

1. Document your org’s indexed fields.
2. Learn index selectivity rules.
3. Build reports that use indexes.

Question 2

Slow bulk data load on a large object in an LDV Org

Answer 2

1. Cleanse and transform data pre-load.
2. Disable triggers, validations, and workflow rules pre-load.
3. Use the Bulk API.

Question 3

A typical data management plan includes standards for creating, processing, and maintaining data, what are the references used?

Answer 3

1. Naming - Set naming conventions for records. Always include suffixes (Inc., Corp.)? Abbreviations?
2. Formatting - Figure out how dates and money are represented. Use dd/mm/yyyy for all date formats.
3. Workflow - Determine processes for record creation, reviewing, updating, and archiving. Determine all the stages a record goes through during its life cycle.
4. Quality - Set appropriate standards for data quality, including the ability to measure or score records. Put a value on age, completeness, usage, accuracy, consistency, and duplicates, along with any other quality or value metrics specific to your business.
5. Roles and Ownership - Determine who owns records, who’s accountable for changes to data, and who’s notified when there are changes to data.
6. Security and Permissions - Determine the appropriate levels of privacy for data. Make sure to comply with regulatory, legal, and contractual obligations.
7. Monitoring - Outline a process for ensuring quality control of data. Determine the frequency, scope, owners, and checks, including ways for updating data, preventing duplicates, merging records, adding records, and archiving records. Determine metrics that can be easily monitored in a dashboard.

Question 4

Steps before developing governance and stewardship plan?

Answer 4

1. Who is using customer data?
2. What are the business needs for data?
3. Which data is used the most?
4. How the data is being used?

Question 5

How to measure data quality?

Answer 5

1. Age: Time elapsed since date last modified
2. Completeness: Percentage of records that include key data fields
3. Usage: Time since last used in reports or other applications
4. Accuracy: Matches against a trusted source
   5.Consistency: Field formatting and spelling is the
   same across records (state or province, phone, country,
   and so on)
5. Duplication: Amount of identical or very similar
   records that vary in quality

Question 6

Parameters to use to measure or score data quality?

Answer 6

1. Age
2. Completeness
3. Usage,
4. Accuracy
5. Consistency
6. Duplication
7. Along with any
   other quality or value metrics specific to your business.

Question 7

What to consider when defining Roles and Ownership of Data in a governance plan?

Answer 7

RACI Model:

1. Responsible - owns the data
2. Accountable - must sign off on or approve changes
3. Consulted - can provide information and support
4. Informed - needs to be notified, but not consulted

Question 8

Points to consider in a data governance plan?

Answer 8

1. Data Definitions
2. Quality Standard
3. Roles and Ownership
4. Security and Permission
5. Quality Control Process

Question 9

Features of an MDM?

Answer 9

MDM tools provide:

1. Record creation assistance
2. Record maintenance across systems
3. Integration management
4. Regulatory and compliance enforcement
5. Enterprise-wide visibility

Question 10

Steps to implementing a Data Governance plan?

Answer 10

1. Make data entry and management easy
   
   1. a - Internally sourced
   2. b - Externally sourced
2. Keep data lean and effective with regular housekeeping
   
   2. a - Standardize your data
   3. b - Eliminate duplicates
   4. c - Compare your data against a referential data source
   5. d - Create rules and schedule automatic cleanings
   6. e - Track, report, and learn
3. Be flexible with your plan
4. Stewardship can’t be all manual
5. Stewardship needs to be shared across your organization

Question 11

What fields can a skinny table have?

Answer 11

1. Checkbox
2. Date
3. Date and time
4. Email
5. Number
6. Percent
7. Phone
8. Picklist (multi-select)
9. Text
10. Text area
11. Text area (long)
12. URL
13. Encrypted Data

Question 12

Fields that cannot be indexed?

Answer 12

1. Long Text Area
2. Rich Text Area
3. Multi-select picklists
4. Non-deterministic Formula fields
5. Binary Fields(blob, file, or encrypted text)
6. External IDs cause an index to be created on that field

Question 13

The platform maintains indexes on which fields for most objects?

Answer 13

1. RecordTypeId
2. Division
3. CreatedDate
4. Systemmodstamp (LastModifiedDate)
5. Name
6. Email (for contacts and leads)
7. Foreign key relationships (lookups and master-detail)
8. The unique Salesforce record ID, which is the primary key for each object
9. External IDs cause an index to be created on that field

Question 14

What types of fields can be External IDs?

Answer 14

1. Auto Number
2. Email
3. Number
4. Text
5. To create custom indexes for other field types, including standard fields, contact Salesforce Customer Support

Question 15

6 Sales Management Dashboards available on AppExchange?

Answer 15

1. The lead funnel dashboard - This dashboard gives you a view into how sales and marketing are working together. By creating a single dashboard for sales and marketing, both departments can make data-driven decisions.
   
   1. a. - Key Focus: better alignment with marketing; identification of trends and course corrections (agility); accountability; ensuring pipe coverage
   2. b. - Key Reports: Leads by Source, Net Leads Versus Qualified Leads, Leads Attached to Pipeline (Opportunities), Conversion Rate, Lead Engagement
   3. c. - Distribution: sales management, marketing
2. The forecast dashboard - Often thought of as a “managing up” tool for public companies, a forecast accuracy dashboard can also be used for coaching, rewarding, and uncovering flaws in your sales process at any company. Are you on track for the quarter, or does marketing need to generate more leads? At what stage are you losing prospects? Which reps aren’t closing?
   
   2. a. - Key Focus: sales credibility, quota attainment, management visibility, finance visibility
   3. b. - Key Reports: Forecast by Rep, Forecast by Team, Forecast by Stage, Forecast by Territory, Forecast Predictions (AI)
   4. c. - Distribution: sales management, executive team, finance
3. The sales leaderboard dashboard - Recognition is motivating, and leaderboards are a method of gamifying sales performance. This can drive a healthy competitive spirit, open up opportunities for mentorship, and keep reps accountable for their sales activities.
   
   3. a. - Key Focus: sales motivation, management, transparency
   4. b. - Key Reports: Closed-Won Opportunities by Revenue, Won Opportunities, Number of Demos, New Business Versus Upsell
   5. c. - Distribution: all sales, executive team, marketing
4. The competition and win/loss dashboard - The previous dashboards focus on showing how your team is doing against quotas; however, dashboards tracking competition and wins/losses will shed light on the areas you may need to focus on for coaching or intervention. This may spark some deeper qualitative inputs from sales reps about why they lost a deal, or how they’re positioning against competitors. With visibility into these deals, sales can also funnel feedback to the product and marketing teams to help arm them with resources, or improve or alter products.
   
   4. a. - Key Focus: understanding threats, monitoring for best fit
   5. b. - Key Reports: Win/Loss Rates, Competitor Presence, Deals with No Competitor, Competitor Pricing
   6. c. - Distribution: all reps, product, marketing, sales manager
5. The KPIs and sales activities dashboard - Use this dashboard to drive discipline in your sales force. At Salesforce, we consider this part of our secret sauce for managing sales pipeline. Find out where deals stand, which sales reps are actively working leads, who hasn’t logged into their CRM lately, and various other accountability metrics that can be used to reinforce rigor in the sales process.
   
   5. a. - Key Focus: rep behavior, CRM adoption
   6. b. - Key Reports: Activities by Sales Rep (calls, demos, visits), Opportunities Past Due, Number of Days Without Logging into CRM
   7. c. - Distribution: all sales
6. The executive daily view dashboard - As a sales leader, your time is valuable. With an executive dashboard, you can spend less time aggregating data to show your execs that you have control over the business at any given time. You’re no longer explaining your results and creating decks. Now you can spend time in the field or coaching sales reps. Demonstrate ROI, and leverage this dashboard to ask for budget or staffing increases.
   
   6. a. - Key Focus: total transparency, executive communication
   7. b. - Key Reports: Best of Everything — Leads, Sales, Competition, Forecast, product inventory levels, account billing status and so on
   8. c. - Distribution: executives

Question 16

When to use Data Import Wizard?

Answer 16

1. You need to load less than 50,000 records.
2. The objects you need to import are supported by the wizard.
3. You don’t need the import process to be automated.

Question 17

When to use Use Data Loader?

Answer 17

1. You need to load 50,000 to five million records. If you need to load more than 5 million records, we recommend you work with a Salesforce partner or visit the AppExchange for a suitable partner product.
2. You need to load into an object that is not supported by the Data Import Wizard.
3. You want to schedule regular data loads, such as nightly imports.

Question 18

When defining your data loading and configuration strategy, what are the setup options to defer non-critical processes and speed uploading?

Answer 18

1. Organization-wide sharing defaults – When you load data with a Private sharing model, the system calculates sharing as the records are being added. If you load with a Public Read/Write sharing model, you can defer this processing until after cutover.
2. Complex object relationships – The more lookups you have defined on an object, the more checks the system has to perform during data loading. If you can establish some of these relationships in a later phase, loading will be quicker.
3. Sharing rules – If you have ownership-based sharing rules configured before loading data, each record you insert requires sharing calculations if the owner of the record belongs to a role or group that defines the data to be shared. If you have criteria-based sharing rules configured before loading data, each record with fields that match the rule selection criteria also requires sharing calculations.
4. Workflow rules, validation rules, and triggers – These are powerful tools for making sure data entered during daily operations is clean and includes appropriate relationships between records. Unfortunately, they can also slow down processing if they are enabled during massive data loads. We will cover these rules and triggers in greater detail in the upcoming post about suspending events that fire on insert.

Question 19

What are the few pieces of your configuration that are essential or highly desired during any data load?

Answer 19

1. Parent records with master-detail children – You won’t be able to load child records if the parents don’t already exist. We will cover this topic in detail in the upcoming post about sequencing load operations.
2. Record owners (users) – In most cases, your records will be owned by individual users, and the owners need to exist in the system before you can load the data.
3. Role hierarchy – You might think that loading would be faster if the owners of your records were not members of the role hierarchy. But in almost all cases, the performance would be the same, and it would be considerably faster if you were loading portal accounts. So there would be no benefit to deferring this aspect of the configuration.