Salesforce.com Chatter Approvals: An Approach for Contract Management

05.21.12

One size does not fit all. The beauty of the Salesforce.com Platform is that you can tailor it to fit the complexity of your business. Out of the box functionality for simple, standard processes and a more customized approach to fully align Salesforce with the way you work.  This is a study of how we helped bring the contract approval process fully into Saleforce.com for a software company. I hope you will find it helpful in thinking about how you might model complex contract approval processes in your own organization.

Business Scenario: The customer Sales Representative creates an Opportunity for software as service products. The Opportunity may need to have a pricing approval depending on the discount percentage. It will also need legal approval for the contract terms and conditions before the proposal form is generated. Both the stage of the Opportunity and the status of the pricing and contract approval need to be transparent to multiple departments in the organization at all times.

Current Situation: All of the pricing and contract approval processes were happening via email. Critical notes regarding why a price was or was not changed or approved were not being saved with the Opportunity. There was no version control on contract proposals being discussed between legal and the sales reps, and here again, all critical notes were not being documented within the Opportunity. The stage of the Opportunity didn’t really indicate accurately where the contract was in the approval process.

Solution: We chose to use Chatter Approvals to manage this process for two reasons. Critical discussions around pricing and legal approval are saved to the Opportunity within the Chatter feed. Chatter easily allows for document version control, as well as allows you to upload files up to 2 GB in size.

Caveats/Solution: Because of the custom nature of this customer’s products and services sold, the approved Opportunity becomes part of the contract with the addition of terms and conditions. Collaboration within the approval process is critical. The solution we configured does not use the standard Contract object within Salesforce. We chose to store the contract information inside the Opportunity object so that all the Chatter collaboration and Approval History is documented within one record – the Opportunity record. The customer is using Conga Composer to generate the proposals/contracts based on fields within the Opportunity, Product, Account and Contact objects and incorporating additional documents as needed. Using this scenario, we were able to use standard Salesforce.com Approval features to configure this process.

Business Process: The Sales Rep creates an Opportunity in Salesforce and adds products and pricing to the Opportunity. If the pricing includes a discount, price approval is necessary. The price discount needs to be approved by management before a proposal can be generated. The manager needs to know what Opportunities they need to approve. The sales rep needs to know if the Opportunity has been approved after it has been submitted. There may be some back and forth communication on pricing. Once the price is approved, the sales rep needs to evaluate if the Opportunity is ready for legal to generate the proposal documents. Once the sales rep is ready to have the proposal generated, they need to submit the Opportunity for approval to Legal. Legal will create the terms and conditions and generate the proposal including the contract information included in the Opportunity. There may be some back and forth communication between legal and the sales rep. Once Legal generates the proposal using Conga, the proposal is automatically posted to Chatter. Lastly, Legal needs approve the Opportunity to signal the proposal is ready to be submitted by the sales rep to the customer.

How we did it:

1. Enabled Chatter Approvals. To enable Chatter Approvals, click Your name |Setup| Customize| Chatter | Settings, click Edit, select Allow Approvals
    
2. Enabled email approval response so that approvers can approve via email and via wireless-enabled mobile devices. This allows the approver to type “Approve” or “Reject” and any associated comments and inserts it into the approval history on the record.  To enable email approval responses click Your name|Setup|Workflow & Approvals| Settings, select the Enable Email Approval Response checkbox and click Save. In addition to enabling email approval response settings, to allow approvers to approve via mobile devices, you must select “Allow approvers to access the approval page from within the Salesforce.com application, or from a wireless-enabled mobile device.” when you set up each Approval Process under Security Settings.  
    
3. Configured Price Approval Processes based on two different sets of price approval process criteria. See Active Price Approval Processes 1 and 2 below:
   
   
   

   See key steps to creating the Price Approval Processes below:
   
   a.  Added customer Opportunity percent field named "Discount %" 
   b.  Added custom Opportunity checkbox field named “Discount Price Approval Final”
   c.  Created Approval Assignment Email Template (custom message to be sent to approver when the “Submit for Approval” button is clicked.)
   d.  Created New Approval Process based on entry criteria where the Opportunity Discount is greater than or equal to “X” and the Discount Price Approval Final equals “False”
   e.  Created Approval Steps needed for each Price Approval Process including an update to check the Discount Price Approval Final checkbox upon final approval
   f.  Created Final Approval Actions including an email update to the Opportunity owner that the Opportunity has been price approved
   
   Price Approval Process named Price Discount >=20% pictured below: 
   
   
    

4. Allowed for manual review by Sales Rep:Once the Price of an Opportunity is finally approved, the Price Approved field is automatically updated to True and a price approved notification is emailed to the Sales Rep. Once the Sales Rep has inserted all the information required for proposal generation (used field validation rules to validate required information is complete) and is ready for the order to be approved by Legal, they change the Contract Stage (custom field) to “Order Generation Request”, and a trigger will cause the approval process to move to the next step in the approval flow. This time, the approval criteria matches the criteria for the Contract Approval process. This part of the approval process is triggered and adds the associated information to the Opportunity Approval History feed as well as the Chatter feed. See Active Approval Process 3 below.
   
   
    
5. Configured Contract Approval process based on contract approval criteria.

 See key steps to creating the Contract Approval Processes below:

a. Added custom Opportunity checkbox field named “Contract Approved”
b. Added custom Opportunity pick list field named “Contract Status” to help easily communicate and track the Approval Status without affecting the Forecast.
c. Created Approval Assignment Email Template (custom message to be sent to approver when the “Submit for Approval” button is clicked.)
d. Created New Approval Process based on entry criteria where the Discount Price Approval Final equals “True” and the Contract Status equals “Order Requested”
e. Created Approval Step needed for the Contract Approval Process including an update to check the Contract Approved checkbox upon final approval
f. Created Final Approval Actions

Note: When the Order is generated through Conga, it gets automatically posted to Chatter and the Owner of the Opportunity is notified according to Chatter settings.

Contract Approval Process named Contract Approval pictured below:

When this approval process was complete, we were able to track all comments surrounding a contract in one Opportunity record using Chatter.

Approval History for the Pricing Approval and the Contact Approval were saved in one related list on the Opportunity Record.

Everyone that needed to be notified during each stage of the approval process was notified either via email or Chatter. Contract documents were automatically saved and posted to the Opportunity. Opportunity Views and Reports were created to filter on different stages of the contract approval process to further enhance visibility and collaboration among departments. This Contract Approval process was a perfect fit for this organization.

Please see Getting started with Chatter Approvals for more detailed help with Chatter Approvals.

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