Item: DemandTools
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with DemandTools

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use DemandTools to manipulate data in our Salesforce environment. We primarily use Mass Impact and Mass Effect, in order to update a large number of records at once. Working in Higher Education, our data is changing all the time and sometimes Salesforce automations just can't be done the way we need them, requiring a manual update. We also have many different programs at our institution, requiring different populations of records to be coded differently. So, rather than make our data entry team work tirelessly updating hundreds or thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of records, we use DemandTools to do it for them.

Our department -- Enrollment Management Services -- currently is the only department of the organization that uses DemandTools, but that's because we're the system administrators of our Salesforce environment.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Mass updating of data
Mass deletion of records
Updating specific populations with multiple data changes all at once
Developing and saving routine data updates to make repeated work much faster

Cons

Information overload for new users, due to the large number of things DemandTools can do (not inherently a bad thing, but still a challenge early-on).
In a similar fashion, it's hard to determine what DemandTools can and can't do out-of-the-box.
Hard to find documentation that gives a high-level overview of whether DemandTools can do what you want to attempt or not.

Return on Investment

Time saving: It can get the jobs done quicker than human processing can.
Increased office productivity: Not having people doing these data changes means they can focus on other work while DemandTools is running.
Makes repeating complex tasks easy: DemandTools makes it easy to save a configuration so that a less tech-savvy staff member can run a complex data update on a routine basis, with minimal support needed from tech staff.

Alternatives Considered

Dataloader.io

We still use Apex Data Loader on occasion, but by-and-large we primarily use DemandTools for virtually all of our data manipulation needs.
The only time we really use Apex Data Loader is to load new data into the system, but that's only because we haven't developed reliable import data mappings with DemandTools yet. We never use Data Loader to actually update data or delete it; We always turn to DemandTools for that.

Likelihood to Recommend

Any time we need to update a large amount of data in an automated fashion, DemandTools is the tool we always turn to. Even for smaller data update jobs, it's often easier to just fire up DemandTools and write a quick job than to ask someone else to do the data changes manually. It gets the updates done in a fast manner, you can see the results before you commit to them, and testing for accuracy and success is easy.

One such example is when we have offered students who have not responded to their offer by the deadline, we will use DemandTools to update those individuals all at once to a different code. What is fantastic is that we can also save the job, so we can routinely run the same job on a daily or weekly basis without having to re-write it every single time.

Comments

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DemandTools: A requirement for large data management with Salesforce

Modules Used