Explore Fulfillment Flows

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain how fulfillment flows help IT teams deliver services through automation.
  
• Describe how to connect fulfillment flows to your service processes.
  
• Explain how Agentforce agents perform intake and fulfillment tasks.
  
• Summarize the recommended strategy for building your IT service catalog.
  

Fulfillment Flows

Now that you understand the components for creating catalog items and capturing service requests, it’s time to discover how fulfillment flows facilitate the rollout of IT services.

A fulfillment flow is a Salesforce Flow that connects to a service process and triggers automatically when an employee submits a request for a catalog item. It’s the execution layer–the automation that takes a completed intake form and carries the request through every step toward resolution.

Fulfillment flows complete a set of defined actions to complete the request for a catalog item. They can route approvals, create tasks, provision hardware, and even close the request when the flow is complete.

While fulfillment flows are powerful, they aren’t required. You can activate catalog items without an associated fulfillment flow, and IT staff can then use the anchor entity to manually plan and execute their tasks. However, we recommend using fulfillment flows to make your catalog more dynamic, automated, and scalable.

Anatomy of a Fulfillment Flow

As with service processes, you can build fulfillment flows from scratch, or connect and customize one of the included template flows to kickstart your work.

You can set up fulfillment flows using one of three methods.

• Use a standard flow for simple processes with a series of predefined actions.
  
• Use Flow Orchestrator to create complex, multistage workflows that require coordination across multiple steps and departments.
  
• Use Stage Management to define and manage stages, transitions, and tasks for various processes, such as incidents, problems, change requests, and releases.
  

Here’s an example of a simple flow that collects intake information from the requester, creates a service request, and sends a confirmation message.

However, this is just the beginning of what your fulfillment flows can do. To understand how fulfillment flows are a game-changer for your IT services, let’s walk through how the Orivian admin customizes the flow for the laptop replacement service.

Approval Routing

When an Orivian employee submits a laptop request using the intake form, the fulfillment flow first checks whether manager approval is required. If so, the flow reads the Manager context attribute on the employee’s user record and sends an approval request for the manager to complete.

If the request is denied, the flow updates the anchor entity status to Closed – Denied and sends the requesting employee a notification explaining the outcome (bummer!).

If the request is approved, the flow moves to the next stage, Task Creation.

Task Creation

The flow then creates a task record and assigns it to the IT hardware provisioning team.

The task record is populated with all of the information the team needs.

• The device type and operating system from the intake form’s service attributes
  
• The employee’s name and department from context attributes
  
• The delivery address and urgency level from the intake form
  
• A link to the anchor entity (in this case, service request) for full request context
  

Provisioning and Shipping

Often, fulfilling a service request requires shipment of hardware or other physical assets through an external system. Luckily, Agentforce IT Service makes it easy to seamlessly connect your org data and flows to delivery systems using pre-built connectors.

Admins can use these connectors in their fulfillment flows without writing custom code, and then utilize external systems the same way they would within any other Salesforce flow.

For example, at Orivian, the fulfillment flow queries the asset management system to locate an available device matching the requested specifications. Then, it reserves the device and marks it as assigned to the fulfillment employee listed in the asset record.

The flow can even generate a shipping label, initiate the delivery workflow, and update the anchor entity with the device serial number, shipment tracking number, and expected delivery date.

The provisioning and shipping stage can be as simple or as sophisticated as your organization’s integrations allow. To learn more about the huge library of available connectors in Agentforce IT Service, check out the IT Service Connector Library article in Salesforce Help.

Final Steps

To complete the Orivian laptop replacement fulfillment process, the flow performs a few final steps.

• It updates the anchor entity status to Closed.
  
• It sends a shipment notification with device details and any setup instructions to the requesting employee.
  
• It updates the laptop asset record to reflect the new device assignment.
  

Fulfillment flows look different for each service process in your catalog. We recommend using a template fulfillment process as a starting point and making adjustments to align the flow to your business requirements and processes.

Connecting Fulfillment Flows to Service Processes

After you build your flow, either manually or from a template, you’re ready to connect it to your service process. This step is as simple as opening the service process and selecting the flow from the Fulfillment tab.

Then, you map the attributes from the intake form fields and context attributes to the corresponding input variables in the flow to make the data connection. This table shows some example mappings between intake form attributes and flow input variables.

The Unified Catalog validates that all required input variables are mapped before activation.

We recommend that you always test your fulfillment flows in a sandbox environment before activating them in production. Test with realistic scenarios, including edge cases, such as denied approvals, missing fields, and integration timeouts.

Faster Resolutions Through AI

So far, you learned how components in the Unified Catalog data model enable a seamless experience from request to resolution. But, when Agentforce is involved, the possibilities for automating your service delivery are endless.

Agentforce subagents and actions connect directly to your catalog items, giving the IT Service Employee Agent the ability to identify which catalog item best matches an employee’s request during a conversation. Then, the agent submits the intake form on the employee’s behalf, and triggers the fulfillment flow–all without human intervention.

This means that, when an Orivian employee launches Slack and tells the IT agent that their laptop is broken and they need a replacement, an AI-powered response initiates the intake process. The agent identifies the laptop replacement catalog item as a solution and asks the employee a few clarifying questions about their preferred device and urgency of the request to complete the intake form. After confirming with the employee, the agent then kicks off the approval and provisioning flow, all automatically.

To learn how to set up your Agentforce agents, subagents, and actions, visit the links in the Resources section.

Catalog Construction: Best Practices

Now that you explored the catalog setup process in Agentforce IT Service, consider this recommended strategy for building out your catalog.

Plan

Start by identifying your highest-volume IT requests and deciding which anchor entity type fits each one. From there, determine which of your catalog offerings can be built using a template, and which ones require a custom approach. Plan in which channels you’ll deploy the catalog and request intake formats, and align with your IT team on approval paths before beginning configuration.

Configure

Next, fire up the Unified Catalog app and build out your catalog structure, including categories and subcategories. Then, create your catalog items and their connected service processes. Define your service attributes and context attributes, create your intake forms, and activate each item once it’s ready.

Automate

Attach a fulfillment flow to each service process to handle approval routing, task creation for IT staff, provisioning steps, and request closure. Map your intake form fields and context attributes to the flow input variables so the right data travels with every request.

Publish

Finally, deploy your activated catalog items to the applicable channels, such as the Employee Services Portal, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. This final step makes the catalog items visible and requestable to employees. To learn how to integrate your catalog with Slack, Microsoft Teams, or your self-service portal, visit the Collaboration Channels for IT Services article in Salesforce Help.

Wrap It Up

In this badge, you explored the powerful capabilities of the Unified Catalog, how it’s structured, and how to put it into action. Now you’re ready to build out your own custom catalog that enhances the employee experience and simplifies IT service delivery.

Make sure to check out the resources linked below to get all the detailed instructions you need to build out your world-class catalog.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Unified Catalog for IT Services
• Salesforce Help: Unified Catalog
• Salesforce Help: IT Service Connector Library
• Salesforce Help: Agentforce for IT Service
• Salesforce Help: Associate an Agent Action with a Service Process
• Salesforce Help: Agentforce for Unified Catalog
• Salesforce Help: Collaboration Channels for IT Services