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Jeremy Horan is the Architect and Director of Development at Hubbl Process Analytics. Prior to this role, he was a Technical Architect at Traction On Demand, where he led hundreds of projects in financial services, customer support, direct-to-consumer, healthcare, and other industries.
In our conversation with Jeremy, we wanted to understand his thinking behind building a process mining tool as a native Salesforce application.
Jane: First tell me about your role as a Salesforce Systems Architect
Jeremy: A System Architect is charged with translating human requirements into technical specifications. We need to marry business needs with technical capabilities. However, before we’re able to design an efficient system that meets business goals, we need to know what processes in the system are broken or causing problems.
So, most of our time is spent on two actions: discovering the design needs, and modifications during the deployment. And as a Salesforce consultant, it’s in everybody’s interest to shorten the cycle of business discovery and rollout testing across every client we have.
Jane: Tell me more about business discovery?
Jeremy: I’ve been parachuted into a lot of clients, in my time. Usually, I had a short window to understand the business before I started showing value.
Before we can design and configure a new business system or application in Salesforce, we need to understand the current state. What’s working, what’s not, and what people need to accomplish. This process requires meetings with stakeholders across business functions. They tend to talk at a very high-level, and there’s a danger we miss information about what’s happening on a technical level.
We validate what users say with what is technically happening in the system. We look to understand the state of the system quickly and easily, and to know where the processes are not working or are blocked entirely. We try to build a holistic picture that shows where users are dropping out of the system or not using the available tools. Maybe the problem is not the system, but user behavior. That kind of information saved our team design and configuration time.
Jane: Tell me about that, perhaps with an example of time savings.
Jeremy: Knowing the business needs and the technical capabilities, you can design an efficient system. Then comes the rollout phase where you test your system design. This rollout phase requires a feedback loop that can create its own set of process problems.
Maybe you’re rolling out a project in phases. That will require a constant feedback loop. Or maybe you’ve deployed new features and people aren’t using them. Just like in the first phase, you need to quickly see how the system is working so you can tweak the configuration and speed the rollout phase and satisfaction.
Jane: Why exactly did you build a process mining tool?
Jeremy: That discovery process I mentioned, that’s not exclusive to system architects. It’s something that business analysts, sales and revenue operations analysts, and even salesforce admins need to do effectively. Salesforce is a fast and flexible platform where we are constantly updating the configuration to meet the needs of the business, so we are in a state of perpetual discovery. Process mining radically alters the discovery process. It slices the time required and is more accurate because it uses actual data over hearsay.
In discovery, it is critical to talk to people about their needs. Afterward, Hubbl Process Analytics will visually display inefficient processes within minutes, which helps you validate and expand on what you learned from business users.
Likewise, we are continually configuring and re-deploying applications. Typically, we rely on the business users’ feedback to know how we’ve done. Quantifying the impact of a major change requires further analysis, and given normal priorities, that’s not something we have time to go back and do. Process mining makes it simple to see the effects of a system change, allowing you to compare the performance of a business process before and after, again without having to build a set of reports.
From a Salesforce configuration perspective, you can see if you need to build a new tool or if people aren’t using the features already built into the system. Understanding user behavior prevents your team from adding features that are unnecessary.
When you do rollout changes, you run Hubbl Process Analytics again to see how the new system is functioning. The feedback loop becomes automated, speeding this phase of the design and ensuring the tool is working and being used as intended.
Jane: What were the advantages of building Hubbl Process Analytics as a native Salesforce Application?
Jeremy: All the Process Mining tools we looked at required companies to remove their data, load it into an external tool, and run complex analysis before reaching insights. In our research, we found the data acquisition exercise was time consuming, taking weeks, possibly months. Or it required connectors or consultants, both of which are expensive alternatives.
By being native to Salesforce, we’re able to access data directly from Salesforce Object field history logs and Shield to get an even deeper level of detail about how processes are performed. We see the small changes that are taking place as a business process is executed, this allows us to create personalized insights for each user.
Hubbl being a native salesforce application built on the Lightning Platform lets us remove data prep, saving time and money. Furthermore, data never leaves the platform and therefore meets the data residency requirements already in place for Salesforce, which addresses a huge security concern for many organizations. Our customers have been pleased that Hubbl Process Analytics is as secure as Sales Cloud itself.
Jane: Are there any other advantages of being on-platform?
Jeremy: Yes, a couple of major benefits to our clients that are using Hubbl.
Being on-platform allows us to not only easily read from Salesforce, but more powerfully write back to it. Which means we can directly modify a process flow on the fly. Hubbl Process Analytics lets you nudge people to take small actions while in the system that creates big changes. For example, if forecasting is off because people aren’t asking for budgets from prospects, you can build a field into the system to ask for a budget up front. Then, the system will nudge users to put in the budget number when creating a new contact for more accurate forecasts. As each person changes their behavior, the entire organization improves.
Hubbl can directly access the data going into Hubbl Process Analytics and the data coming out of it. For a Salesforce SI partner or Center of Excellence, this means that process metrics we create can be added to other dashboards. By modifying the Process Analytics’ dedicated objects, you can analyze data from sources off the Salesforce platform. As an advanced user, the world’s your oyster.
Jane: That’s was a great overview of Hubbl Process Analytics, it seems a very powerful and useful tool
Jeremy: Thank you Jane, our focus at Hubbl is speed and simplicity. In hindsight, the decision to build Hubbl Process Analytics on Salesforce Lightning was a good one. We are helping Salesforce Admins, Operations Analysts and System Architects like myself move as fast as lightning.
