Understand the Technical Health, Reliability, and Business Impact of Your Data with a Native Salesforce Application
Highlights:
- Assess Business Impact: Identify the positive and negative effects of each data point on your organization.
- Prepare for AI: Reveal the predictive power of each field to facilitate AI adoption.
- Analyze Data Usage: Examine field usage, bad data, and dependencies to streamline process improvements and data cleanup.
- Enhance Data Governance: Gain automated insights into data quality, usage, and access for better governance.
- Support Migrations: Assist with org migrations and major process improvements by highlighting cross-org mapping requirements and overlapping fields.
One of the key reasons to adopt Salesforce is to build a data-driven business. However, over time, even a well-architected Salesforce instance can become cluttered with outdated, missing, and unnecessary data. Complexity increases with time, which can hinder your ability to make effective business decisions. What once guided decisions can now create confusion. With the right tools, you can unlock valuable insights hidden within the data swamp.
Cuneiform is a native Salesforce data management solution designed to help you achieve this. It provides “data about your data,” offering analytics, visualizations, and trends for the data landscape within your Salesforce orgs. This zero-ETL solution ensures that no data leaves your org, follows field-level security and sharing rules, and requires no custom integrations—making it a reliable tool for managing data governance directly on the Salesforce platform.
Available as separate products for both the Salesforce Platform and Data Cloud, this review focuses on the Cuneiform for CRM solution. To learn more about Cuneiform for Data Cloud, visit their website.
Features:
Cuneiform offers a comprehensive suite of features tailored to help business analysts, data analysts, and operations specialists identify data reliability issues within Salesforce. Additionally, it aids admins, architects, and consultants in improving data health by addressing technical data quality issues commonly found in orgs.
Cuneiform for CRM is available in two versions: Field & Data Management (free) and Business Data Reliability (subscription-based). The paid version is an extension of the free app, adding more advanced capabilities.
Cuneiform for CRM: Field & Data Management
The free version, Field & Data Management, allows you to conduct technical data health diagnostics. While it provides deep insights into data quality, it lacks some of the advanced features related to business relevance and predictive power found in the Business Data Reliability app. With this free version, you can drill down to the field and field value level to inspect insights and statistics.
To begin, you create a profiling definition to collect data statistics on Salesforce objects, including population rate, record count, metadata, field value frequencies, and governance details. This profiling definition acts as a lens through which you can understand data quality from specific perspectives.
When setting up a profiling definition, you can add a record filter using common boolean logic (AND/OR statements) similar to those used in list views or Flows. For example, you could create a profiling definition for “Opportunities: New Business” to adjust the data granularity and understand how data quality changes over time and in different contexts.
Once a data profile is run, Cuneiform provides extensive insights into object, field, and field value usage. Here are some key highlights:
- Object Configuration Overview: The Data Quality Configurations and Statistics view gives a clear overview of an object’s data structure, validation rules, duplicate management, and custom field dependencies, helping you identify problematic objects and dependencies for cleanup.
- Field Utilization: Cuneiform helps you easily spot unused and rarely used fields by grouping them based on population rate. The Field Utilization tab shows trends over time, indicating which fields are empty, always populated, or sometimes populated.
- Value Frequency: This feature shows how often specific field values are used, especially useful for regular and multi-select picklists. It helps you assess the practicality of a picklist and its values, and track usage trends over time.
- Record Details: This view offers a detailed look at each field’s statistics, including distinct and default value usage, governance details, and metadata dependencies. It’s useful for troubleshooting fields or understanding their usage before integrating them into processes like Flows.
- Data Reliability KPIs: Cuneiform allows you to measure field performance against data quality KPIs you define, such as completeness and validity, and tracks changes over time. KPIs also measure business impact, such as Opportunity time to close or Lead time to convert. Although you must set up these formula fields yourself, Cuneiform provides guidance through documentation.
Cuneiform tracks changes in data quality and business impact KPIs over time, allowing you to monitor the data quality of individual or related fields critical to your business.
While setting up KPIs requires some hands-on configuration, experienced admins, business analysts, or consultants should find this straightforward. However, having formula templates for standard objects could speed up the process for end-users. Additionally, if your org follows a strict CI/CD approach, be sure to account for the time needed to deploy and document new fields.
Cuneiform for CRM: Business Data Reliability
The Business Data Reliability app enhances the capabilities of the Field & Data Management app by enabling users to assess the business impact of their data in various contexts.
Key Features:
- Comparative Profiling: This feature allows you to analyze how different fields correlate with specific business outcomes. For example, you can compare how field values behave in scenarios like won versus lost Opportunities or converted versus rejected Leads. By identifying fields that are significant to business outcomes, you can prioritize data improvement efforts and better align your processes with desired results.
- Unlimited KPIs: Unlike the free version, which limits you to three KPIs per profiling definition, the paid version supports an unlimited number of KPIs. These KPIs measure data quality and business impact, offering deeper insights into how data quality influences business processes.
Use Cases:
- Business Data Reliability: This app allows you to lead data quality improvement initiatives by focusing on fields that have the most significant business impact. By identifying the relationship between data KPIs and business outcomes, you can mitigate risks and optimize processes.
- AI Readiness Assessment: Cuneiform can help you determine whether your data is ready for AI applications. By assessing the predictive power of fields, you can ensure that your AI models are based on reliable data, thereby improving their effectiveness.
- Data Dictionary: The app also assists with data governance by highlighting gaps in field descriptions and metadata, which are crucial for AI-driven processes like Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot. Properly documented fields lead to better AI outcomes and reduce the risk of exposing sensitive data.
- Unused Fields and Values Cleanup: Over time, CRM systems accumulate unused fields and values, which can clutter the system and complicate data management. Cuneiform helps you identify these obsolete elements, including those hidden by default values, making cleanup more efficient.
- Automated Data Monitoring: Data management is an ongoing task. Cuneiform offers automated data monitoring through schedule-triggered Flow templates, allowing you to maintain data health with minimal manual intervention.
- Record Deduplication: The app enhances Salesforce’s standard duplicate management features by uncovering additional fields that can be used in matching rules and identifying fake data that should be removed.
- Data Integration and Migration: Cuneiform aids in data migration and integration by providing insights into which fields are actively used. This helps you focus on migrating essential data and ensures successful integration by tracking changes in record volumes.
Roadmap:
PeerNova, the company behind Cuneiform, plans to integrate Business Data Reliability with Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot. This integration aims to provide real-time data quality insights within generative AI processes, improving business outcomes and ROI. Additionally, they are working on enhancing the app’s analytics and visualization features, as well as improving alerts and notifications.
Impact:
Salesforce’s focus on AI underscores the importance of data quality. Cuneiform plays a crucial role in helping organizations clean up their data, ensuring it meets the standards necessary for effective AI adoption. By making data quality tangible and actionable, Cuneiform enables better business decisions and maximizes the potential of Salesforce.
Setup:
Cuneiform for CRM is installed through the Salesforce AppExchange. The free Field & Data Management app must be installed first, as it is a prerequisite for the paid Business Data Reliability and Data Cloud extensions. Access is granted through two permission sets—admin and read-only—with admins able to perform data profiling and other users limited to viewing profiling results.
For security, Cuneiform uses a connected app to communicate with Salesforce REST APIs, requiring admins to configure a self-signed certificate and the connected app. Detailed setup instructions are available in Cuneiform’s documentation.
Support:
PeerNova offers extensive user documentation, including videos and best practices, via their Confluence page. They also provide email support with varying SLAs depending on your subscription level. An external Slack channel is available for community support.
Pricing:
Cuneiform for CRM: Field & Data Management is free for all Salesforce users. The Business Data Reliability app is priced at $2,000 USD per month per org, while the Data Cloud app starts at $1,000 USD per month for 10 Data Lake Objects. Discounts are available for nonprofits, and trial periods are offered for the paid extensions.
