Consolidating Entity Data with Workflow

Its been a while since my last post, it has been hectic with the new office, new baby and having a new CRM consultant come on board.

I wanted to pass along a tip that may help you with consolidation of entity data.

CRM offers a rich rapid application development platform, which is great for quickly putting together line of business applications. The downside of this is the fact that is so quick, sometimes 2 consultants will build similiar applications in CRM for 2 different functional groups for a single customer. Months later the end users will realize that they aren't sure what group of entities to use because of the similiarities.

We had this at one of our customers, the situation wasn't as clear cut as that but we had 2 entities set up in CRM, one for "initiatives" and another for "projects". Over time with adding new features, fields and child entities, we found that the functionality of these 2 entities were converging and there was confusion by the end user of where to enter data and attach activities.

We decided to consolidate the data and retire one of the entities. Our first approach was to export all the data to excel, map the fields and re-import back into the other entity in CRM. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it can potentially be tedious mapping the data and matching fields, etc.

A simplier and I think better solution came to mind. Why not use CRM 4.0 workflow engine to create a new record and populate it from the old record? This way we can run the workflow on a single or set of "initiatives" and let workflow create and populate the corresponding "project" record. We can even add a step to "deactivate" the old record as well.

This approach saved us a lot of time and we even were able (by adding a lookup on the old entity to the new entity) to move child records over as well. The only tricky part was activities, we had to some custom code for those but we would have to do that with the export/import routines as well.

I hope you find this tip useful!