Salesforce and Swim Lane Diagrams!

I have heard stories from many people that they use salesforce as a prominent platform throughout their business careers. Many of those people have stated that businesses they work for “do not use salesforce in the right way” or that they, as an individual “have no idea how to use it”. I was very interested to learn about salesforce and the basics of how to use certain aspects of it because I will be able to use this knowledge through all business opportunities. Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM that helps business leaders market and manage customer data and sales. A CRM stands for customer relationship management, which helps businesses keep track of all of the current, past, and potential customers. These customers’ information is readily available, while also being easy to understand and manipulate.

Swim Lane Diagrams are an example of a process flow chart. These allow people to easily indicate who does what in a particular process by setting up a flowchart with each actor involved placed along the horizontal or the vertical side of the diagram. These diagrams begin at the start of that process, being placed in a circular shape to mark the beginning. These circular shapes are only ever used when starting the process as well as the last ending step in the process. Throughout the process, there are actions that need to be made and they are indicated by a rectangular shape. When a decision has to be made, it is indicated by a diamond shape. Professor answered a question during one of our in-class assignments about how to indicate where in a process a decision occurs and the most apparent one is usually when the word “if” is used when explaining that part of the process. The last shape used in these diagrams is a cylinder which holds stored data. The actors involved can be an individual, a group, a division, or a department. I definitely made the mistake on the first-in-class assignment when we drew a swim lane diagram by writing the name of the actor, which is not correct. The reason there are no names is that this is a general process and the person involved one day, may not be the person involved the next, but the process does not change. Businesses use these swim lane diagrams to identify the problems in the process and also figure out how to remove certain excess steps to make the process swifter and more efficient overall. They can use these diagrams as a foundation and can refer back to them when attempting to manipulate an existing process or when creating a new one.