Salesforce Integration Challenges You Must Be Aware Of

Enterprises use multiple applications to enhance operational efficiency. These applications are purpose-built for different functions like Sales, HR and Finance, Operations, Service, etc. to boost productivity. Most of these applications are used to resolve business complications and issues, however, the problem is they don’t talk to each other. This leads to a siloed system where the important customer information is fragmented and preserved. Salesforce thus serves as a consolidated customer data location, and hence it makes sense for enterprises to enable its integration with the existing platforms seamlessly.

Salesforce integration caters to different layers, like Identity, Data, Process, and presentation layers. Salesforce provides a flexible data security model to secure data at different levels like object level, record level, and field-level security. Salesforce integration syncs data and helps in maintaining the data consistency between multiple applications and Salesforce.

Integrating Salesforce with other applications will surely expand the horizon of opportunities for CRM users. But this integration is not as easy as it sounds. Let’s look at the most common challenges faced by companies while integrating multiple business applications/external systems with Salesforce.

Project Scoping

Scope a Salesforce integration project in an effective manner is key for its success. However, many companies neglect this very important aspect and end-up suffering from poor integration of their applications with Salesforce.

Thus, it is important to involve all the stakeholders in project planning and get answers to some important questions like what all applications are required to be integrated into Salesforce, how the data will be synchronized and stored, etc. Salesforce supports SOAP/REST services, and hence, it’s essential to understand the scope of integration – whether to expose a service in Salesforce or consume external service.

Syncing Data

One of the key issues in ensuring effective integration of disparate applications with Salesforce is mapping data in a proper manner. Different applications use different types of fields to store data. For instance, an address stored in Salesforce may include fields containing details pertaining to street, city, state, zip code, and so on, but another application may not use the same fields. In such a scenario, mapping data from an external application to Salesforce can be a very time-consuming task

As part of field mapping, we must ensure to map the right field type or convert data to a target app-supported field type to map the relevant data. By doing this, you may avoid the trouble of converting all field types to target app-supported field types.

Record Duplication

Every company faces the challenge of data duplication. In many cases, especially mergers and acquisitions, companies face the problem of importing duplicate records into their Salesforce system. It’s important that you have a system that identifies and limits the entry of duplicate data during integration.

When importing custom objects, solutions, or personal accounts, you can use external IDs to prevent the import from creating duplicate records. An external ID is a custom field that contains unique record identifiers, which enable the Salesforce system to recognize a data record imported from a non-Salesforce platform. For example, a company wants to integrate data between its Oracle Financials System and Salesforce. It becomes easy for the company to refer to the Oracle ID records within Salesforce rather than referring to Salesforce IDs. Leveraging the External ID to upsert (insert or update) the records into Salesforce helps in removing duplicate data.

Tip: When using the Data Import Wizard, it is best to import up to 50,000 records at a time. Importing too many records can slow down your org for all users, especially during periods of peak usage.

Auto-ID Creation

Another thing to keep in mind is that Salesforce automatically generates its ID for each entity created or imported into it. It is a problem when the records, imported from external applications already have IDs and are linked to other records via those IDs. Meaning, when we import records from an external system to Salesforce, it manages two sets of IDs in Salesforce (Salesforce Record ID, External system ID). Eventually, the external system IDs are lost if Salesforce overwrites the IDs.

Data Migration

Data migration is a very common challenge companies?face during integration because data storage may vary based on the Salesforce edition. If the external application has duplicate records, importing the data will result in transferring those duplicate records into Salesforce.

However, to avoid generating duplicate records, we can leverage the Salesforce out-of-the-box features (Duplicate Management) or define a custom code. Also, External ID (Unique Id) will play a key role in data migration as it would be the actual field to identify to create/update records during the Salesforce migration.

Effective Data Validation

Allowing bad data into Salesforce from an external system is not good. If the external system pushes old records or unnecessary information into Salesforce, it will result in data duplication. It is essential to remove obsolete data and clean up systems in external systems before integrating with Salesforce. However, we have other ways to avoid the creation of duplicate records in Salesforce which always counted against additional efforts – like, leveraging Salesforce Out-of-the-box features such as “Duplicate Management” or a piece of code.

One should remember that some fields may be mandatory in Salesforce but optional in external systems. So, it is very essential to understand the impact of any changes done at the data validation level.

Misinterpreting Real-Time Integration

It is a wrong assumption to think that importing or exporting data from Salesforce is the same as real-time integration. Usually import/export of records run as batches and data may not be immediately synced compared to real-time integration. Hence, Salesforce/external applications would be out-of-sync for some time until executing the batch.

Customization

Salesforce is a huge software system designed to address the needs of a large variety of companies. It is meant to be customized, not simply activated and rolled out to users. But many companies find that Salesforce is challenging to customize to the enterprise and individual user needs. Salesforce offers all the required tools for whatever customizations a company may require. However, like with any other software system, it takes time to learn what’s even possible – let alone bring those possibilities to life within the application.

To realize the full potential of the Salesforce platform, you need a professional who both understands the business requirements and at the same time possesses the technical knowledge to customize Salesforce according to those requirements.

Salesforce Restrictions

As Salesforce runs in a multi-tenant environment, it strictly enforces governor limits imposed by Salesforce APIs that determine data access – concurrently in a single call and one day. Hence, going beyond these limits results in Salesforce run-time errors during the process. It is essential to understand the restrictions enforced by Salesforce while implementing the solution to avoid any issues.

Identifying Connectors

When you decide to go for Salesforce integration, you should identify if the requirements can be met with out-of-the-box Salesforce features or connectors and leverage them rather than writing the code. You can also leverage external objects that are available with Salesforce to connect and associate with the external data source.

An external data source specifies how to access an external system. External objects are similar to custom objects but record data that’s stored outside your Salesforce Org. External objects are best used when you have a huge volume of data that cannot be copied into Salesforce.

Selecting Apps on AppExchange

Before you begin the Salesforce integration, it is critical to identify the right application from AppExchange (Free/Licensed) that meets your business needs. Picking the right app will reduce coding efforts and save your team’s time. If none of the apps meet your requirements, you can start to build your integration. Also, apps available on AppExchange are available as managed/unmanaged packages. Don’t forget that you can make changes to the unmanaged package only and not to the managed packages.

Understand Objects Relationship

It is essential to understand the relationship between objects in Salesforce and external systems. Because while syncing data between the systems you would be selecting the right object in Salesforce for a relative object in an external system like selecting standard or custom object in Salesforce.

We hope to know the above challenges before integrating Salesforce with any third-party/internal business systems will help you a lot to plan well and save your efforts.

If you want to maximize the benefit of Salesforce to increase your bottom line, FusionHawk can help with expert support geared to your unique challenges