Salesforce Single Org VS Multi Org – What is your Salesforce architecture?

Salesforce Single vs. Multi-Org strategy – what fits your business model?

While setting up a Salesforce architecture or assessing the performance of an existing organization, the most perplexing question that haunts anyone is to decide between Single-org architecture and Multi-org architecture. With the frequent technology transitions happening, organizations believe that determining the best-fit Salesforce architecture plays a pivotal role in structuring a successful business model.

Thus, having a deep-rooted understanding of the Salesforce Single-Org and Multi-Org strategy will aid you in choosing a strategy that resonates with your unique business requirements. 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.

What is Salesforce Org Strategy?

Salesforce Org Strategy is a crucial decision you make about how you structure your Salesforce instance to best suit your business needs. It is a significant decision because it impacts key activities like implementation, functionality, and overall success.

Salesforce Single Org Strategy

The Salesforce single-org strategy is an approach that utilizes a single central hub. It simplifies management, standardizes processes, improves collaboration, enhances data consistency, and reduces cost.

Salesforce Multi Org Strategy

Multi org Salesforce is an approach that involves multiple specialized orgs. Each of these orgs cater to specific business units, departments, or regions. This offers crucial benefits like data security, advanced customization, and scalability.

With new features added to Salesforce in the latest Salesforce Spring 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.

In an effort to throw some light on this question, let us walk through the benefits and risks of Salesforce Single-Org and Multi-Org strategy.

Single org vs Multi org: An in-depth Comparison 

Why Single-Org Salesforce Architecture?

Single-org architecture is ideal for organizations that rely on a single business process with reduced architectural complexities. To put it simply, a single-org architecture is where all the data, functionalities, and business processes are organized under one Salesforce instance. Salesforce Single-Org strategy works best if you are looking at either of the below two key essentials –

1. Standardize business processes
2. Merge/Acquire another company using Salesforce.com

Benefits of Single-Org:

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

 1. 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

2. Standardized Processes – You can streamline all your processes with an organized workflow pattern, and this includes

• Lead Management
• Opportunity Management

3. 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

4. Global Standardization & Economies of Scale – Easy to set and follow best practices and global standards

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

5. 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 the Salesforce Multi-Org strategy 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 improve performance.
• Improved time to market and the freedom to innovate.
• Fewer teams are 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.

To understand how these concepts work together, understand how products integrate across different architectures. This resource provides complementary insights to deepen your knowledge.

Difficult to decide the best-fit Org strategy? – LevelShift is here to help you!

As more organizations adopt the latest Salesforce features like Lightning to gain a competitive edge, you must consider the above guidelines when you sit down to make that crucial decision on the type of Salesforce architecture you need.

We know it’s a tough one to decide. Considering the diverse deciding factors like application architecture, functionalities, Salesforce limitations, and operational model — choosing the perfect Salesforce Org strategy ain’t a cakewalk. This is where LevelShift comes to your rescue. Strategic architecture consolidation transformed their sales operations and efficiency. Read the complete org consolidation and sales process unification success story for full implementation details and business outcomes. Our team of certified Salesforce experts can help guide you through this process. We can provide you with the technical assistance needed to determine the best Salesforce Org strategy for your business.

FAQs 

1. What is the difference between single org and multiple orgs in Salesforce?

Salesforce single org is an approach with one central Salesforce instance for all business functions and data, while the multi-org approach involves multiple specialized Salesforce instances.

2. What is multi-org in Salesforce?

In Salesforce, a multi-org strategy utilizes multiple specialized instances for specific business units, departments, or regions. This offers enhanced security, customization, and scalability for individual needs.

3. What are the different types of org in Salesforce?

Salesforce offers various types like Production, Sandbox, Developer, and more, each with specific purposes.