The Power of Perspective: Reflecting on 1 Year at ProQuest
It has been nearly 12 months now since I joined ProQuest and made the leap into the world of Salesforce consulting. The time has absolutely flown by, every day has provided a new challenge, something new to learn, or some inspiration to be drawn from how our clients and consultants work and solve problems together.
When I was considering joining ProQuest, I knew that there would be a lot of tools, features, and processes that I would need to get across. At that point in time I’d been the super user for my previous company’s Field Service implementation for a few years, and had built what I thought was a pretty solid understanding of how the features of Field Service addressed their specific needs.
But I also knew that there would be more out there, different solutions to similar problems and completely different use-cases within other businesses. What I have really come to appreciate over the last 12 months is just how much you can learn from others, and how the broad and varied experiences we gain in consulting can enhance the way we think about and build solutions.
Creativity and Collaboration to Generate Solutions
Looking back at one example from my old role, we’d been internally grappling with how technicians could complete service reports for multiple jobs on the same site. We were using the Bundle feature in Field Service, but had a specific edge case where technicians might need to pick up jobs that had not yet been scheduled. Ultimately we would require a Field Service Mobile Flow, within which the technician would select the work orders they were completing. But Field Service Mobile Flows are far more restrictive than other flows in Salesforce and we couldn’t come up with a clean solution to handle a dynamic number of jobs.
Fast-forward to now, and the experience and creativity of other ProQuest consultants has led to a much cleaner solution. Another ProQuest client had a requirement for technicians to search for and add a dynamic number of parts to a job via a Field Service Mobile Flow, using a record choice set that updated each time the flow was run. The ProQuest team could then apply the same approach back to our original service report use case, greatly enhancing the integrity and user experience of their job selection process.
Different Problems, Reusable Learnings
Even in my relatively short time at ProQuest, I’ve lost count of the number of times the learnings from one client or project have helped us with another. Recently I’ve been lucky enough to work on some really cool Document AI implementations, where we use the AI tools within Salesforce to automatically extract and process content from PDF documents.
With one client we were extracting data from purchase orders, and with another we were extracting data from medical referrals. Even with two completely different businesses and processes, we were able to take learnings from each to make their respective solutions as robust as possible. Even something little, like variations in how dates were formatted on PDFs generated by external systems, could cause errors in our flows and code, but by seeing such a broad variety of documents across the two projects we were able to account for as many scenarios as possible.
Those learnings will carry through to our next Document AI project as well. The beauty of being specialist consultants in Salesforce is that very rarely, we are starting from scratch. There are always previous projects and experiences that we can draw on to improve our process, philosophy, and solution.
The benefits aren’t purely technical either. Every business we work with has their own strengths and challenges, and it has been so interesting to be able to sit back and observe them all.
Reflecting and Looking Forward
It doesn’t matter whether it’s something complex and multi-faceted like field service technician optimisation, or something simple like what information shows when a sales rep logs into Salesforce for the day. Every company has a different way of going about it, and being exposed to all of those variations as a consultant is a wonderful way to offer best-practice solutions to our clients.
Having been a ProQuest client many years ago, I really appreciated how the team could challenge my thinking when they had a suggestion for best-practice. Now being on the other side of that equation, I can really see how the breadth of experience we get as consultants means we can really partner up with our clients, ensuring they aren’t going it alone in forging their journey with Salesforce.
Reflecting on the last 12 months, I’m so grateful for how much opportunity I’ve had to learn. Every day I also grow increasingly aware of the vastness of what is possible with Salesforce, and how there will always be so much more to discover. Every project exposes me to something or someone new, and there’s always a key takeaway that can enhance the next project. Here’s to the next 12 months!
