Time Dependent Workflow for less than an hour

Author

mirketa

May 25, 2016

Workflow becomes indispensable to organizations for maximizing efficiency in their business processes. It allows tracking of processes.

Time-dependent workflow has the following actions:-

1) New Email Alert.

2) New Field Update.

3) New Outbound message.

4) Select existing actions.

The existing actions again have the following actions:

a) Email Alert.

b) Field Update.

c) Outbound message.

Values such as days and hours only are supported by Salesforce for Time-dependent workflows. The minimum value for them is 1. What if we get a requirement in which we need to send a mail just after 10 minutes or 20 minutes of a record creation? Well, Time based workflows have 1 hour as the minimum duration to fire the workflow. In this case, we need to by-pass this limitation. For this, we need to use a particular technique. This requires us to write a custom formula field that calculates Date/Time value. Let us create a formula field as Trigger Time 20.

This formula field actually saves Date/Time value to your record which is 40 minutes in the past. If you save the record at 2:00 pm then the value in the “Trigger Time 20” will be 1:20 pm.
The formula for the Trigger Time 20 is:-

Trigger Time20 = (now () 0.02764)

So now we need to create a time-based workflow rule that fires 1 hour after Trigger Time 20. So 1 hour after a time which was 40 minutes ago, is 20 minutes from now.
This formula field will be accessible to all users but need not be present in the layout.
Here is the chart which shows the values needed to be subtracted from now() function for each 5 minutes interval:-
Value in formula Minutes ago will fire in (minutes)
0.04145600
0.03800555
0.03455 10
0.0310915
0.027644020
0.0241825
0.0207330
0.0172735
0.01382 20 40
0.0103645
0.00691 50
0.0034555
0.0006959

Pranshu Goyal, Director of Products at Mirekta, states: “We envision DSM to be used by every small to a medium-sized organization dealing with bad data and want to get rid of duplicates easily with no cost. We have faced issues dealing with duplicates in our organization. That inspired us to make a solution that is not only simple to use but can be used widely to make the organization’s data clean to make them more efficient and productive. We want DSM to be a solution for every organization looking for duplicate management capability better than the Salesforce out-of-the-box solution with no additional cost.”