Watch out for Time Based Workflows

Time Based Workflows are very useful to action something in the future, which saves you writing scheduled jobs. But be careful, very careful.

I will tell you a story. I had a very critical Time Based Workflow which if it didnt fire as expected it would severely affect revenue, but it had always run very smoothly so there was no expectation of that changing.

Well we ended up creating a number of Time Based Workflows and typically each record would fire about 6 at different times. But since orders are coming in from many agents there were a lot of workflows firing. Unfortunately we not only hit our limit of 1000 per hour, but a large number were queueing up to enter the 1000 queue and so we could only see in monitoring section the same orders queueing and we thought that the Time Based Workflow had broken somehow.

So, if you want to control when your actions will fire relative to say the creation or update of a record of course Time Based Workflow are ideal, but if the queue is clogged your actions wont fire as expected. So what do you do?

You can take various actions, I will try to provide most cost effective methods to avoid coding which will be expensive:

1. Create a scheduled report to keep a track of how many records you expect will be in the queue. This will match the criteria clause of your Time Based Workflow. If the report shows there are too many queued make sure you have a script that manually process any remaining records.
2. Carefully calculate how many you expect to be entering the queue at any specific time so you can plan if you will be well within your limits or not. If you expect the limit to be broken simply put in a business case to Salesforce for this to be increased. They will listen
3. If its not 100% necessary for all actions to occur at specific times relative to the workflow criteria then you can create a scheduled job to process any other records