Optimize Your Salesforce Org by Pinpointing Problem Fields… and Cleaning Them Up!

Understand the technical health, reliability, and business impact of your data with a native Salesforce application.

Highlights

• Discover the business impact (both positive and negative) that each piece of data has on your organization.
• Pave the way for AI adoption by uncovering the predictive power of each field.
• Analyze field usage, bad data, and dependencies to manage process improvements and cleanup.
• Fuel data governance with automated insights on data quality, usage, and access.
• Support org migrations and major process improvements by highlighting cross-org mapping requirements and overlapping fields.

A key reason to adopt a platform like Salesforce is to build a data-driven business. However, as time passes, even a well-architected Salesforce instance can get bogged down by missing, outdated, and unnecessary data. Time causes complexity, and complexity hinders the ability to drive business decisions. Put plainly, what once helped steer decisions can instead confuse them. But with the right tool, you can unlock the potential of precious insights buried under the data swamp.

Cuneiform is a native Salesforce data management solution designed to help you do just that. It essentially gives you “data about your data”, providing analytics, visualizations, and trends on the data landscape within your Salesforce orgs. It’s a zero-ETL solution meaning no data leaves your org, ever. Plus, it follows field-level security and sharing rules, and no custom integrations are needed, making it a reliable tool to run data governance operations on the Salesforce platform. 

Available for both the Salesforce Platform and Data Cloud as separate products, we will focus on the Cuneiform for CRM solution in this review. Feel free to take a look at Cuneiform for Data Cloud on their website. 

Features

Cuneiform offers a suite of features designed to help business analysts, data analysts, and business operations specialists identify business data reliability issues within the Salesforce Platform. In addition, the tool supports admins, architects, and consultants to improve data health by quantifying and addressing technical data quality issues commonly found in orgs.

Cuneiform for CRM is split into two versions, the free Field & Data Management and the subscription-based Business Data Reliability. The paid version is installed on top of Field & Data Management as an extension package. 

Here are the features included in both the free and paid versions:

Cuneiform for CRM: Field & Data Management	Cuneiform for CRM: Data Reliability
Free	Paid
Can be installed as a standalone app	Requires installation of Field and Data Management
Profile any Salesforce objects and fields	Profile any Salesforce objects and fields
Single scenario profiling	Single or comparative profiling
Up to three data reliability KPIs per profiling definition	Unlimited data reliability KPIs
Ideal for technical data health: – Identifying unused fields/picklist values. – Understanding storage cost by object. -Ongoing monitoring of record volume, field utilization, and Data Quality KPIs. – Identifying picklist conversion/data standardization candidates. – Assessing data dictionary health.	Ideal for business use case-specific scenario analysis and identifying fields that matter: – Analyzing data patterns behind inconsistent performance. (i.e. Why does one sales team have a much lower close rate? How do Lead sources compare over time?) – Quantifying business risk exposure of bad data. (i.e. How “real” are the Opportunities in my pipeline?) – Identifying predictive fields for AI use cases. – Ongoing monitoring to alert users when data is unreliable. (i.e. Opportunity score or warning in EinsteinGPT response.)

Cuneiform for CRM: Field & Data Management

As the free version of Cuneiform for CRM, the Field & Data Management app allows you to run technical data health diagnostics. It will go a long way to helping you understand issues in data quality, but it doesn’t contain all the ‘bells and whistles’ regarding business relevance and predictive power found in their Business Data Reliability app. With the free app, you can drill down to the field and field value level to inspect field insights and statistics. 

To start, you create a profiling definition to collect data statistics on Salesforce objects (population rate, record count, metadata, field value frequencies, governance details, etc.). A profiling definition acts as a lens to understand data quality from a particular perspective.

When you set up a profiling definition, you can optionally add a record filter using the common boolean logic you’d use when setting up a list view or Flow (i.e. AND/OR statements). For instance, you can create a profiling definition for “Opportunities: New Business”. This allows you to adjust the level of data granularity to understand how data quality changes over time and in different contexts.

Once you run a data profile, Cuneiform provides extensive insights on object, field, and field value usage. Here are some highlights:

Object Configuration Overview

Cuneiform’s Data Quality Configurations and Statistics view is excellent for getting an overview of the object’s data shape and associated validation rules, duplicate management rules, and custom field dependencies. With it you can easily spot problematic objects, as well as field-level dependencies to account for when performing data cleanup.

Field Utilization

How systematically have the object’s fields been populated? What fields are unused, sparsely populated, and always populated?

Cuneiform allows you to spot unused and rarely used fields easily. The Profiling Summary Result groups the object’s fields by population rate and shows changes over time in each band, allowing you to see major and minor changes in field utilization.  

In the screenshot below, you’ll see the terms “populated” and “net-populated”; the former referring to the percentage of records that have a value in the field, and the latter discounting those that only contain the default value. This is to note, since the standard Salesforce features don’t make this distinction, and the use of default values can obscure the actual level of field usage.

Value Frequency 

How often are specific field values used? What are the most and least used field values?

At the field level, you gain additional insights. Value frequency is an important metric for regular and multi-select picklists. A typical scenario would be that there is a demand to build a process around a picklist, where each value would increase the workload and complexity of the solution. With Cuneiform, you could easily spot the practicality of the picklist and its values. You can also dig further and see usage trends to spot if the values differ over time.

Record Details

What are the detailed statistics for the field (including distinct and default value usage, description and help text, data governance details, and metadata dependencies)?

There’s nothing mysterious about this profiling view – you get an organized view of basically everything including all the metrics and attributes collected by the field profiling. This is useful when you want to troubleshoot a particular field, or when you want to understand the field usage in detail before using it as a trigger for a Flow, for instance. It’s also convenient to have the information in one place and easily reportable.

Data Reliability KPIs

How does the field in question perform against the data quality KPIs that you have assigned? What is the level of completeness or validity for this particular field?

KPIs are formula fields that measure data quality and reliability first on a record-by-record basis, which is then aggregated to a profiling definition level. Cuneiform uses two kinds of KPIs: data quality and business impact. The former refers to metrics like completeness, consistency, and validity – essentially measuring the data quality for a given field. Business impact refers to object-specific business outcomes, such as Opportunity time to close, Lead time to convert, and Case time to resolution. Unlike Salesforce Lab’s Data Quality Analysis Dashboard, Cuneiform support standard and custom objects.

By adding KPIs to profiling definitions, Cuneiform tracks the KPI calculations for each profiling run – allowing you to see how your data quality or business impact KPIs change over time. You can use KPIs to monitor the data quality of individual or groups of related fields that are important to your business. 

As a user, you must set these formula fields up yourself, but Cuneiform provides instructions and examples via their Confluence documentation. Since different objects have their own fields, these KPIs must also be set up separately for each object. While this sort of ‘hands-on’ approach is good for customization, as an end-user, I would appreciate formula templates on standard objects to speed up the process. 

That said, an experienced admin, business analyst, or consultant should be no stranger to configuring formula fields. It is also good to note that if your org follows a strict CI/CD approach, you should factor in the time used for deploying new fields to production and documenting them.

Cuneiform for CRM: Business Data Reliability

The Business Data Reliability app builds upon the Field & Data Management app. With it, you can go beyond technical data health to uncover the business impact of your data. 

You can assess business data reliability by profiling your data within different business contexts. For example, comparing won and lost Opportunities or converted and rejected Leads. This paid version offers an unlimited number of data reliability KPIs for comparisons and analytics, and a key feature of this version is also the ability to detect your predictive and generative AI readiness by identifying objects and fields with predictive power.

Comparative Profiling

How do different fields predict specific business outcomes? How do field values behave in different business scenarios? Does field utilization change in different business contexts? 

Having the option to do multiple profiles and scenarios for a single object may not seem like much, but it is a game-changer when you consider predictive power and business impact. Let’s start with what predictive power means in this context, it is the correlation between a Salesforce field value and a target business outcome. 

With comparative profiling, you can compare field values against multiple business scenarios, such as won, lost, and canceled Opportunities, or solved, escalated, and stalled Cases. You can then see how well each field correlates with different outcomes. For instance, the number of sales calls may correlate with won Opportunities but have little to no correlation with lost ones. Identifying fields that matter to business outcomes and ensuring they have the right data and metadata will help you prioritize your work and iterate improvements over time.

Unlimited KPIs

How do you measure data quality for a given business process? How about business impact?

The free app comes with only three KPIs per profiling definition – in other words, three per Salesforce object. You can just about use those for running a health check, but for most enterprises, the number of KPIs per object is a lot more than three. Adding KPIs is essentially like adding new lenses to your data, they must be configured as a custom formula field and are specific for each Salesforce object.

Use Cases

Cuneiform for CRM is an all-around data management application that is well suited for technical data health, as well as data reliability and impact assessment. Technical data health is especially important for occasions like major Salesforce development projects, hitting org limits, and org migrations. Data reliability and impact, on the other hand, yield value on an ongoing basis. 

Next, we’ll explore some of the more common use cases for Cuneiform for CRM.

Business Data Reliability 

Cuneiform allows you to lead data quality improvement initiatives based on business impact. The app allows you to identify the relationship between KPIs and actual business outcomes and then assess what results may be at risk. This provides insights to where hidden risk exposure may exist in critical business processes.

AI Readiness Assessment

Not all fields can predict the future, and some are better at it than others. As we know, an AI model is only as good as the data you feed it. With Cuneiform, you can automatically detect the predictive power of objects and fields. 

This means that you can pinpoint the fields that best predict Lead conversions or Opportunity wins and avoid those with low or zero correlation to the desired outcomes. Cuneiform allows you to assess if you have enough of these predictive fields to make AI modeling worthwhile – after all, what good is a model without the fuel it needs for its predictions?

Data Dictionary

AI is putting new urgency on an often overlooked and sidelined task – data governance. Einstein relies on field descriptions and data classification metadata fields to understand how to interpret the data in your fields and the sensitivity of that data. Orgs without well-documented fields will see low-quality, potentially inaccurate responses to Einstein Copilot. Even worse, AI could be accessing and surfacing sensitive data in prompt responses.

Cuneiform can quickly visualize the current state of your data dictionary and highlight gaps in data classification, descriptions, and help text. When combined with comparative profiles, Cuneiform can prioritize the fields that matter most to your business goals.

Unused Fields and Values Cleanup

As time goes by, CRM systems like Salesforce tend to accumulate unused fields. Retiring outdated fields as new ones get added is not standard practice in all orgs, and poor documentation, extensive customization, and unidentified dependencies only exacerbate this. Detecting old and unused fields is made even trickier by default values which are difficult to detect with standard Salesforce features.

Cuneiform for CRM helps clean up clutter by highlighting unused fields or picklist values for each profiled object. It also detects the use of default values and identifies these “hidden unused fields” that would usually go undetected with standard Reports and Dashboards.

Automated Data Monitoring  

Data management is never a one-off exercise. It must be a continuous practice that is preferably automated to its fullest extent. This is where Cuneiform for CRM shines. The app ships with ready-to-use schedule-triggered Flow templates that can be configured for your org’s special requirements. Create a copy of the template, define your automation schedule, and specify the profiling definition to execute, then the user can run as is. 

Record Deduplication

Duplicate management is a key challenge for any Salesforce Admin. Standard duplicate and matching rules go a long way, but they alone can miss opportunities for better data management in your org, especially in the case of custom objects. Cuneiform helps uncover additional fields to use in matching rules and fake data that should be removed before matching.

Data Integration and Migration 

A key starting point for a data migration or integration project is to understand which data is currently being used and how. Cuneiform provides visual tools to understand which fields are in use and which ones aren’t. If a field hasn’t been populated in a long time, and only filled out in 10% of cases, odds are that the field is no longer valid. This saves a great deal of effort and allows you to focus on integrating or migrating the data that is essential. Monitoring changes in record volume over time can help validate migrations were successful and provide insight into the performance of integrations. 

Roadmap

PeerNova, the company behind Cuneiform, is planning to introduce generative AI features in the future. They are aiming to integrate Business Data Reliability with Einstein Copilot as Salesforce brings that product to maturity. This integration will provide data quality insights captured by Cuneiform within generative AI processes. 

This could be a massive productivity booster, since interpreting data profiling results can take up significant time for the admin, analyst, or technical consultant. You could also make these insights available in prompt responses to users to warn about potentially unreliable results and offer suggestions for data quality improvements.

They are dedicated to improving the usability of their app by extending the analytics and data visualization. Currently, additional reports, dashboards, and analytics (CRMA/Tableau) are being worked on Business Data Reliability to help users visualize what’s driving their success or setbacks and hone in on the data insights even faster. They are also working on improving the alerts and notifications feature, which is currently available but requires the use of a Flow template.

Impact

It doesn’t take an Einstein (pun intended) to see where Salesforce stands on AI and data. Salesforce’s long-term strategy has been to weave AI features into all its platforms, and as a result, AI is virtually everywhere. 

AI is fuelled by data, and as such, organizations must take a hard look at their data quality and take action if it is not ‘up to par’. It can be disheartening to have an AI-driven dream and have that shattered to pieces by the realization that your data is not good enough – but taking action to clean up subpar data is not easy.

A tool like Cuneiform goes a long way in unlocking the full potential of Salesforce. Cuneiform makes data quality a visual and tangible thing – something that a business analyst or admin can view and act upon. It paves the way to AI adoption, better business decisions, and more. 

Cuneiform coalesces data quality insights on easy-to-view dashboards, and does most of the heavy lifting for you. With Cuneiform at your disposal, your admins and specialists will be able to pinpoint problems and work effectively to solve them.

Setup

As a Salesforce-native app, the installation of Cuneiform for CRM is done conveniently through AppExchange. Cuneiform for CRM: Field & Data Management is an installation prerequisite for Cuneiform for CRM: Business Data Reliability and Cuneiform for Data Cloud. This means that customers must install Cuneiform for CRM: Field & Data Management in their Salesforce org before installing either of the two paid extension apps. Field & Data Management can be installed as a standalone solution for free also, albeit with less features (see “Features” for more details).

System administrators have access to Cuneiform CRM by default. Granting access to other users happens through two permission sets: admin and read-only. The permission sets are quite self-explanatory, the admin is used by users who need to do the actual profiling on Salesforce data, whereas the read-only permission gives access to the profiling results only.

To ensure the highest level of security, Cuneiform uses a connected app to communicate securely with Salesforce REST APIs.  For admins or consultants unfamiliar with connected apps, you essentially need to configure two things: a self-signed certificate and the connected app itself. To maintain security, Salesforce does not permit independent software vendors (ISVs) to configure the connected app setup on your behalf; it must be done by a system administrator instead. For more detailed instructions on the certificate and connected app, you can visit Cuneiform’s documentation.

From here you are ready to create the actual profiling definitions. You can also optionally create data reliability KPIs which can be added to profiling definitions or schedule profiles to run at regular intervals. As you begin using the product, you may wish to customize reports and dashboards to better visualize how to improve data health for your specific use case. 

Support

PeerNova does a good job of providing access to user support. They have extensive user documentation complete with videos, screenshots, best practice tips, and additional resources, available via their Confluence page. 

For specific inquiries and feedback, you can use their support email address [email protected]. Email support is subject to their SLAs (1–3 days for paid subscriptions, “best effort” for free and trial versions). Furthermore, Cuneiform has an external Slack channel that you can join by filling out a Google Form.

Pricing

Cuneiform for CRM: Field & Data Management is free for all Salesforce users. Cuneiform for CRM: Business Data Reliability and Cuneiform for Data Cloud are paid extensions that add upon the Field & Data Management app. 

The Business Data Reliability app is priced at $2,000 USD/month/org. The Data Cloud app starts at $1,000 USD/month/10 Data Lake Objects. Discounts are available for nonprofits. Trial periods are available for the paid extensions.

Summary

It’s all too easy to neglect your data quality management. Too often, it is done sporadically and with a limited scope, due to lack of resources or technical capabilities. With Cuneiform for Salesforce, you can run data quality management continuously, and at scale. Instead of doing a “spring cleaning” project once a year, which can be a costly and ineffective measure, you can react to data quality issues as they arise. Plus, you can automate most of the detective work and opt to receive email notifications whenever something requires your attention.

With the paid version of Cuneiform for CRM (Business Data Reliability), you can go beyond technical data quality, and get a better understanding of the business impact of your data. Moreover, if you plan to rely on Salesforce Einstein features, you should definitely consider adopting a tool like Cuneiform to assess your AI readiness. To see if Cuneiform for CRM is the right tool for you, you can download the free app or request a demo and 14-day trial for the paid app.