You are reading a guide that explains how to build up your organization's Operational Knowledge. This article covers how to accomplish stage 1 in operational knowledge maturity scale.
Why document the linkage between metadata and business processes?
Salesforce Orgs can quickly grow complex, with hundreds of objects, thousands of fields, and countless automations, reports, and managed packages. Without a clear understanding of how metadata supports specific business processes, architects and admins risk making changes that could unintentionally disrupt key operations.
By linking Salesforce metadata components to business process and architecture diagrams, you:
Make Operational Knowledge Accessible: Everyone from business analysts to admins can clearly see how metadata supports the flow of business, reducing siloed information.
Enable Better Decision-Making: Admins can assess change impacts upfront—knowing exactly how a field, object, or automation supports a process, rather than relying on tribal knowledge.
Streamline Change Management: For example, before removing the field “Value__c,” you can confirm it isn’t just unused in automations, but is also still critical to a business process.
When should you document metadata and business processes?
Documenting the linkage between metadata and business processes should be done during key project stages:
Requirements Gathering: When identifying what processes your Salesforce system must support, start linking existing Org metadata to business process step to avoid redundancy and ensure existing features are fully utilized.
You can read more about requirements gathering from To-Be analysis solution guide or Using Elements in pre-sale discovery solution guide.
Fit-Gap Analysis: During fit-gap analysis, linking metadata helps highlight existing features or components that could be reused, minimizing the need for new custom development.
Click here to learn more about fit-gap analysis in Elements.
Architecture / solution Design: At this stage, documenting metadata links ensures that we know which metadata can be re-used, which needs to be created, and any future changes to the Org will have the benefit of easy access to design documentation to understand how the solution works
Click here to learn more about using Elements for Org solution design.
Prerequisites
In order to follow this guide you need:
Salesforce Metadata Management license
Synced Salesforce Org into Metadata Dictionary
Edit rights on the Metadata Dictionary
Edit rights to create Diagrams
Perform Metadata Documentation and Linkage
Step 1: Capture Business Process and Architecture Diagrams
Begin by documenting your key business processes and system solutions using UPN (Universal Process Notation) for processes and Salesforce Diagram notation for architecture.
Once you know what you need, you can see if existing Salesforce features match your requirements.
An 'average' Salesforce Org has over 300 standard objects, 230 custom objects, and 18 managed packages. Then there are tens of thousands of fields and reports, as well as thousands of automations.
There is a good chance some existing components can be reused when a new change request comes up.
Step 2: Find matching metadata that can support your needs
Once your diagrams are captured, ask yourself, "Is there an existing component or feature that serves this purpose? Use the metadata search capabilities in Elements to find similar components by keyword, and avoid building from scratch when unnecessary.
For business process diagrams, right-click / open context menu on a process activity. From 'Add documentation' menu item choose 'Find Salesforce node'. You will have to select the Org you wish to search through (as you can have multiple Orgs connected). Metadata type is useful to narrow down the search to subset of metadata based on type (e.g. dashboards, flows, objects, fields etc.)
Search is done on metadata component's name. If you type in a string, the default search query will be to look for metadata where name 'starts with' that string.
If you want to do a 'contains' search, simply add * at the start of the string.
For example, in a business process where users “Submit Purchase Orders,” you might link metadata components like the “Order” object and associated automation rules that facilitate the process.
For architecture diagrams, also right-click / open context menu on an entity. From 'Add documentation' menu item choose 'Find Salesforce node'. You will have to select the Org you wish to search through (as you can have multiple Orgs connected). Metadata type is useful to narrow down the search to subset of metadata based on type (e.g. dashboards, flows, objects, fields etc.)
For example, in a solution diagram you can document your order of execution and link all relevant automations, ensuring you keep track of what fires when and in what order.
Next Steps
This solution guide provides the foundation for documenting metadata against business processes and architecture designs.
Once you've established these links, and as you continue to do so with each project or change, you are building up your change intelligence.
This knowledge can then be leveraged to assess the operational impact of planned changes to your systems. See our solution guide on how to assess operational impacts of metadata changes for more detailed steps on this critical next stage.