Single or Multi-Org - What is your Salesforce Architecture?

While setting up a Salesforce Architecture or assessing the performance of an existing org, the most perplexing question that haunts anyone is to decide between single-org architecture and multi-org architecture. An organization in Salesforce is meant to be an instance that lets users access, deploy or create applications with various feature sets. An organization strategy should also include a plan to identify the right Salesforce Partner to customize your org architecture for your unique business needs.

With new features added to Salesforce in the Salesforce Spring ’19 Release, you obviously cannot make a decision based on your own whims and fancies or personal experience, but rather need to weigh in the pros and cons of each instance carefully before taking that final plunge. A safe way to navigate this challenge is to have Salesforce partner with the experience and expertise to provide guidance.

The few elements that you need to keep in mind are the need for customization or standardization, the complexity of integration, cross-business collaboration and costs. Keeping in mind all these factors, you need to establish a strategy beforehand, which will save your business from incurring an unnecessary loss.

In an effort to throw some light on this question, let us walk through the benefits and risks inherent to each Salesforce architecture model, and which org will suit your business the best.

Why Single-Org Salesforce Architecture?

Single-org strategy works best if you are looking at either of the below 2 key essentials —

Standardize business processes

Merge/Acquire another company using Salesforce.com

Benefits of Single-Org:

The major benefits you can derive from a single-org are listed below.

Greater Management Visibility — If you are looking to have a clear linear picture of the entire business process, it is facilitated by the availability of —

• Roll-Up Reporting
• Global drill-down into pipeline & activities

Standardized Processes — You can streamline all your processes with organized workflow pattern and this includes —

• Lead Management
• Opportunity Management

Collaboration — Create transparency in the business process by allowing for the below features —

• Know what everyone else is doing
• Realize synergy among business units
• Avoid duplicate effort & conflicts within accounts

Global Standardization & Economies of Scale — Easy to setup and follow best practices and global standards —

• User Training
• Application Release Management
• Application Integration
• Data Management

Regionally Personalized Configuration — This is achieved through

• Granular security model, multiple profiles, records types, page layouts, sharing groups
• Translation Workbench

Single-Org Risks:

Org complexity could become a barrier to progress and this includes —

• Potential to hit specific Org limits
• Org-wide settings (e.g. security and sharing) could become difficult to govern and manage
• Runtime processing could be impacted by the volume of code deployed

Why Multi-Org Salesforce Architecture?

Go for multi-org if you have multiple processes and want to fundamentally separate business processes for similar BU’s. Also, get legal/regulations on data privacy and sharing and support for different processes by BU/Region that cannot be standardized.

Benefits of Multi-Org:

• Record Sharing and Security model is simplified by non-complex sharing rules
• Provides greater BU autonomy through individualized processes and customized functionality
• Greatly reduces the risk of exceeding Org limits (Tabs, objects and code lines, Runtime governor and API limits)
• Org-wide settings are easier to govern and manage
• Lower data volumes within a single Org potentially improves performance
• Improved time to market and the freedom to innovate
• Fewer teams impacted by shared updates
• Reduced complexity within a single Org

Multi-Org Risks:

• Harder to get a clear global definition of processes and data.
• Less reuse of configuration and code.
• Customization required to deliver unified reporting across Orgs.
• Duplicated administration functions required.
• Increased complexity for SSO.
• Third-party license costs increase depending on the solution.
• Salesforce Integration cost increases with process & data integration across Orgs.

As more Organizations are adopting the latest Salesforce features like Lightning to gain the competitive edge, it is crucial that you consider the above guidelines when you sit down to make that crucial decision on the type of Salesforce architecture that you need.