Last Updated on February 17, 2024 by Ahmed Khan
If you are a Salesforce administrator or an architect, it will be your responsibility to have a solid data management strategy in place. If you want to leverage the fullest power of Salesforce data, it is essential to have an adequate data lifecycle management plan in place. On looking forward to implementing a solid Salesforce data management plan, it is necessary to have a strong strategy in place in this cloud era. For all aspects of business, data is now playing a critical role.
For Salesforce admins, it is crucial to evaluate the data management process regularly and revisit the best practices from time to time. There are high chances that you may come across various strategies that may dramatically improve the quality of data and productivity while implemented. Let’s improve some of those, which you can explore.
Reviewing 5-year goals for your data
Using the right set of data for analytics can transform business decisions and boost overall productivity. The majority of the enterprises, which had been proved to be successful, are running on the Salesforce platform lately with a long-term data management roadmap in place. This will cover all the critical aspects of using the data archives to meet essential business goals. If you don’t have a future-ready data management plan in place, it is less likely that such a business may succeed over time. Reviewing the data requires setting up various analytical initiatives for the companies.
Data integrity
One of the essential things that decide the impact of your data management strategy is data quality. The data stored on your Salesforce system should be of optimum quality to leverage for business decision-making.
To get the maximum benefit from the data, all custom objects, reports, data, and info stored in the given system should be named appropriately as per specific naming conventions. Doing this will ensure that the records of underlying information can be understood clearly at a single glance, and also, all forms are differentiated easily from one another.
Duplicate data records may also become big trouble as it will create the need for increased database size, resulting in a waste of effort in terms of sales and marketing, etc. So, you need to get rid of duplicate records periodically, and also, you have to archive the data by using the data import wizard of Salesforce. You must also select the matching fields to identify duplicates using Salesforce’s built-in duplicate data management tool.
Another vital aspect is diminishing data quality and integrity over time. It is recommended to keep the data always up to date. To achieve this, several add-on applications can be easily used to enrich the data quality and de-deduplication.
Data backup and restoration
It is highly recommended that any Salesforce ecosystem have a reliable data backup and archiving strategy to ensure your business continuity. As the data flows inconsistently and is highly vulnerable to corruption, damage, deletion, etc., it is essential to have a proper backup strategy. At any point in time, you may end up with the need to restore your data in case of damaged or loss, for which it is essential to have a proper salesforce data backup and recovery.
The frequency of the data backups may vary based on the database size, several users accessing the data, and how often data is changed. Various options are available to help back up and restore the information when needed. Salesforce offers native data backup options such as data export services, report export, Data Loader, etc. More robust third-party applications are available at the Salesforce App exchange app store for data backup and restoration. Salesforce also recommends the use of such third-party applications which can offer solid data backup and restoration support.
Along with the data backup and archiving, another vital option to enhance the data security and performance of the Salesforce system is implementing a data archiving strategy. Archiver applications help Salesforce enterprise customers archive their business data within the Salesforce system natively by using Big Object and making their data storage foolproof. In case of archiving historical data being used significantly less, it can be moved onto external storage where it can be stored and accessed if required in the future.
Validation of data
Salesforce data validation is another most effective data management practice, which generally includes creating regular Salesforce algorithms. Validation will help manage all the systems quickly and effectively at an individual level. The more comprehensive data management tools using validation rules can block the creation or editing of records once a predefined criterion is met. Likewise, at the organizational level, those who regularly do the shipping and share marketing materials with their customers may implement third-party validations for addresses and other demographic information, etc. This simple feature for validation can ensure big-time cost savings with relatively lesser effort on the part of the organization.
Data documentation
Even if you build the data management process thoughtfully and derive all procedures effectively, it all goes in vain if it is not documented and made available to all concerned parties. The best practice in data management is writing and teaching the same to all involved. Documentation and teaching include orienting all users on how to manage the data independently and independently report the same. This can be effectively executed by having help texts with Salesforce program guide wand user processes to input information and complete all appropriate measures.
For all these to be successful, it is also recommended that at least a person in each department of the organization be trained on the operation of data management tools. This is a viable option as it can remove the admin’s shoulders and share it with all.
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