With Salesforce officially retiring support for workflow rules as of December 31, 2025, organizations are making plans to migrate their legacy automations to flows. But many are tackling this challenge the wrong way—simply converting every workflow rule to a corresponding flow. This approach risks moving existing complexity, redundancies, and tech debt into a new system, rather than truly optimizing your Salesforce org.
In this post, we’ll break down an effective strategy, honed through real-world experience, that can cut your migration project scope by up to 40%—before any new flow is built.
Most teams start by tallying up their workflows and planning on a direct, one-to-one migration—one workflow rule becomes one new flow. However, if your Salesforce org has survived for several years, it’s likely that flows, process builders, and Apex triggers have been layered on the same objects over time. These additional automations often:
A direct migration simply transfers this mess into the new system, retaining unnecessary complexity and creating future headaches.
An effective workflow migration should always follow this sequence:
1. Delete First
Begin by pruning your existing automations. Look for:
These are your “free wins” and can be deleted immediately with little to no risk. For example, in one recent migration, nearly half the identified workflow rules fell into this category and were safely removed before any new work was required.
2. Consolidate Second
Next, identify duplicates and consolidate them. It’s common to find multiple automations—workflows, flows, even Apex triggers—that handle the same process (such as owner changes), send duplicate emails, or create conflicting updates. Instead of migrating several parallel automations, streamline them into a single, maintainable flow. This not only reduces complexity but ensures your team can manage and understand your automations well into the future.
3. Migrate Last
After cleanup and consolidation, you’re left only with essential, unique automations. Now you can migrate them with confidence. The result? A migration project that is smaller, less costly, and results in a cleaner Salesforce org.
For example, a potential “20 workflow” migration project might be reduced to just 10 well-designed flows.
Some workflow rules—such as time-based actions (e.g., reminders firing 90, 30, and 7 days prior to a date)—require scheduled flows and careful testing. For critical business processes, consider running parallel old workflows and new flows for a period. This parallel run helps ensure there’s no disruption as you transition to flows.
Whether you’re preparing to migrate 10 or 50 workflow rules, resist the urge to jump straight into building new flows. Ask instead:
By starting with analysis and pruning, you’ll dramatically reduce your migration scope, simplify your Salesforce environment, and avoid perpetuating years of accumulated tech debt.
From my initial call with Spencer through project implementation with John and Evan, my experience with the SOLVD team was excellent. They were quick to understand our business needs, clear when explaining the reasoning behind proposed solutions, transparent when reporting on progress and timeline, and all around enjoyable to work with. Would highly recommend and looking forward to continue working with them in the future!
SOLVD was very straight forward with everything needed to complete the project. No surprises, no issues, and cost was aligned with the estimate. They made implementation easy and quick.
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