How to Build a Productivity Tracker to Show Your ROI

Right now, everyone is looking for ways to drive efficiency and get more done with less. That’s good news for us admins because we know how to build solutions in Salesforce to help our users get their work done more efficiently. One of the most important tools we have in our Salesforce toolbox is analytics. We can build reports and dashboards that enable our users to get insights they need to make smart decisions and improve how we run the business. We can take this data analysis skill even further and build analytics to demonstrate the value—with actual metrics—that we, as admins, bring to the business every day.

That’s why I asked Erick, who calls himself a declarative architect (love that!), to share how he’s built analytics to show the value he and his team deliver to their organization. I hope this post inspires you to build something similar that you can show your leadership and really drive home how much value you, as an admin, bring to your organization. — Gillian Bruce, Principal Admin Evangelist

Building a Productivity Tracker

In my 13 years of experience with Salesforce, I’ve built some solutions that have transformed the way organizations run. It feels good when I can see the impact I’ve had on making people’s jobs easier, but I wanted a way for other people, especially leadership, to understand the impact of what I’ve built too. And if we can get all the departments to buy into proactively giving feedback and ideas for efficiencies, then hey: even better.

That’s how I came up with this productivity tracker dashboard.

In this dashboard, you can see a few key things:

• An overall view of Annualized Savings: how many hours we’ve saved across a full year
• Our overall Efficiency Pipeline: how many hours to save in the backlog
• Potential Efficiencies added to our pipeline in the last 7 days (to keep the focus on finding ways to streamline)
• Efficiencies about to be delivered on within the next 7 days

Note: This screenshot comes from a mock-up in a sandbox.

Let me show you how I built this productivity dashboard so you can be inspired to build something similar to demonstrate the value you bring to your organization. It starts with a custom object called Time Savings, which has a child relationship to Cases (where we track our internal tickets). In it, each record is how much time can be potentially saved at a department level. So we track the following key pieces of information:

• Case Lookup
• A Status picklist, where we track where we are with this initiative
• General Description of what efficiency is being gained (the problem and solution to address it)
• Department, as a general picklist
• Calculation fields:
  • How many full-time equivalents (FTEs) involved
  • How many times per week this task is done
  • How many minutes per task could potentially be saved
  • Two Formula fields:
    • How much time per week we’re potentially saving (multiplying the three calculation fields above)
    • How much time in a year we would save, which we call Annualized Savings
• A recurring checkbox, to help calculate how much time we’ve saved week-over-week. There are times where you can find efficiency gains as a one-time task (think of a massive lead import, instead of having folks enter it one by one), or times where your efficiency gains compound week-over-week (because you’ve eliminated the need for an entire weekly meeting with a dashboard instead).

Annualized Savings will track how much time you’ll save over the course of a year. But if you want to track how your time savings have compounded year to date, then there’s an extra challenge. As a bonus, we’ve created a child object to Time Savings called Times Compounded.

Here we start dabbling with a few flows. The purpose of the object is to “compound” your time savings that you’ve delivered week-over-week. The flows are as follows:

• Time Savings Record Triggered After Save: If the Status = Closed (or whatever value you decide) and the Recurring checkbox = TRUE, create the Time Compounded record. It should include the time per week and a date value to say “this is how much time we’ve saved this week.” This will kick off the series of the compounding savings for you and your team.

• Time Savings Compound Savings Scheduled: This should run once a week (we like to run it on Sundays). As with the previous flow, we set the same criteria where the Status = Closed (or whatever value you decide) and the Recurring checkbox = TRUE. However, this time, we set that as the Entry Criteria. We then create a new Time Compounded record associated to that Time Savings record, effectively creating the record that says “and we saved this much time again this week.” That way, you compound your recurring time savings every week with this flow.

Now, I’ve got a super clear picture of how my team’s work impacts the company. Showing this dashboard to leadership not only makes it clear how valuable we are, but also helps drive the conversation about what other efficiencies we might be able to find as an organization. I hope this example inspires you to build your own dashboard to demonstrate the value you deliver!

Have a great example of analytics you use to show your value? Share them in the Trailblazer Community!

Resources

• Trailhead: Reports & Dashboards for Lightning Experience