Sending birthday greetings

Hi Alma, you should be able to do this using a Wait event:

Check out the documentation on Wait events for more details: Wait Events.

When the Wait event reaches the specified date, it will advance to the next element where you can send the appropriate email.

-Brenda

Hi Brenda

Okay, but Wait event should have reached the specified date - my Birthdate - once, about 41 years ago...

Could you give an example of a Process Definition of how this is expected to work?

Perhaps, the tricky thing is that the day and month should be separated from the date of birth (date field) and then processed somehow to calculate the next date for sending the greetings.

Thanks

Hi Alma,

Brenda is correct, in that a wait event would help, but as pointed out the birthday date is history and that wait event would wait forever.

A BPM could be written using two new fields in the Contacts Module calculated with the monthofyear and dayofmonth Sugar logic functions.  Unfortunately, you'd need the process running on EVERY Contact forever.  Trigger the process on every contact, wait for monthofyear, then wait for dayofmonth, then send email, wait 31 days and loop back to the start).  Messy, and NOT recommended.

Maybe an Enhancement Request should be submitted?

Best Wishes.

Hello Clubbers,

Sending birthday greetings is a very basic CRM process - probably the first one that comes into my mind when I start decoding the abbreviation “CRM”

IMHO, that would be so weird to ask for Sugar Enhancements in order to fulfill this process on a proven CRM platform with dozens of years of exploitation on the CRM market!

If there is no article about this process in the Knowledge Base, let me suggest a no-code configuration for this process.

 1.
I have added a checkbox SendBirthdayGreetings and two calculated fields that represent Day and Month of the Birthdate – as per Bud Hartley's suggestion

2.
I have designed 2 simple Sugar BPM processes

A. A perpetual Sugar BPM process Mark Birthday Boys And Girls that will select on the daily basis all the Contacts with Birthday today 

That implements Brenda's  idea with Wait Event, however, in this implementation, there will be the only ONE instance of this Process definition running perpetually (avoiding the mess with processes to which Bud refers to)

The matching criterion – select contacts for which the Day_of_Birth and Month_of_Birth are equal to the current Day and current Month and set checkbox SendBirthdayGreetings for each contact found – this part is configured with the Logic Builder configuring tool (https://logicbuilder.integroscrm.com) and this configuration, as you can see, extends SugarBPM process capabilities

B. I've designed the onetime-running plain SugarBPM process definition SendBirthdayGreetings that creates a process instance for each Contact with SendBirthdayGreetings checkbox is ticked.
This Process just sends an email by the template than remove SendBirthdayGreetings checkbox for the Contact:




Therefore, sending greetings looks like this in the Process Management:






Outcomes:
1) No coding for the platform – any Sugar Admin with no coding skills can leverage platform to configure this process.
2) No mess which could be caused by thousands of processes that are pending for a next year birthday per each contact in CRM
3) No Enhancements Requests to  Sugar Product team to cover an ancient Happy-Birthday-To-You-Customer process – must-be in any CRM

Please let me know if any questions

I would also appreciate any other ideas about the automation of "send birthday greetings".
I suppose there should be an option to employ old Campaigns module and SUgar Market for this process.
Any ideas?

Thanks a lot !

Thanks you!

I may suggest a simple scheduled job which daily look for birthday peoples and update a custom checkbox field in the Contacts module. A SugarBPM would listen to that checkbox, uncheck it and send the birthday greetings.

We had done that several times for customers, and it is cheaper than acquiring a tool.

You are absolutely right, Andre, if we speak about the only single task like this one.

But what about the automation of any other similar tasks that presuppose a check of date every day: date of company foundation, customer's first contract/order date, control data for covenant check, the anniversary of partnerships, ...? Every company has its list of such and other small tasks for CRM processes automation. If Sugar Admin has a tool like Logic Builder, they are free to automate any similar users' requests no-code; otherwise, Sugar Admin has to ask a programmer to create code.

Will it be cheaper than acquiring the tool? Who knows. It will be more correct to ask: how long programming still be cheaper than acquiring the tool?

You and Dmytro suggest different options on how to let platform do users' work! :)
This is the power of Sugar Club.

Best regards,

Hi Andre

Any reasons to do coding when the configuration is already available? )))

I have no PHP coding skills - I'd bet, like most of Sugar Subscribers and some lazy Partners' Consultants haven't them

That is why I use visual Studio to add fields, visual Logic Builder and visual SugarBPM to get CRM automation to work - just like developers can use PhpStorm and CodeLite for all of this (or what is used for writing new custom Sugar code?)

I post solutions that could be deployed/redeployed by Clubbers and used freely - that one birthdaygreetings is not less operational than any upgrade-safe code provided by an experienced developer.
Again - no tools acquisitions needed to use it :))

Here is installable ZIP, generated by LB with a click from the flowchart drawn - that one flowchart, which extends SugarBPM capability.

MarkBirthdayBoysAndGirls.zip

Clubbers,

if anyone needs any support in the deployment of "send birthday greetings" suggested above - do not hesitate to ask here - I'll provide step-by-step instructions

Cheers!