I recently stumbled upon a “new” feature in Salesforce that allows you to use an Apex class to calculate your milestone trigger time for entitlement processes. Given a new feature that I’m working on for our entitlement process, I thought to myself that this could be a good chance to play with it and see what I could do. If you’re not familiar with the entitlement process in Salesforce, take a chance to look over (or run through) my hands-on training for entitlements so that you’re familiar with the terminology and the concepts since I’ll be jumping right in.

At Dreamforce 2015, I wrote a hands-on training for Salesforce University and presented it both as a Dreamforce session, as well as recorded it for use on their site. I had a great time writing the content as well as delivering it in their studio. However, the problem is that the content is locked in place and the content isn’t 100% correct. Since publishing it, I’ve found some typos in the guide as well as some mistakes in time calculations. Because of this, I wanted to make the training available in a format that was easier to update as well as easier for people to report issues against.

It’s a pretty well known fact that I’m a big fan of Entitlement Management. I’ve given a Dreamforce talk, been recorded by SalesforceU, and even have a github repo for it (it’s a work in progress). So when I heard that the Trailhead team was releasing a new Entitlement Management module I was ecstatic.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are very common in the support industry. Salesforce makes these very easy to apply and manage via the built in Entitlement Processes. These entitlement processes will generate Case Milestones that are associated with your case. These milestones will have a Target Date that shows you when your Case Milestones have to be completed. Typically the date itself is fairly difficult to use however if you convert this into the number of minutes remaining then you get a tangible count down for an action that has to be done on the case. This number is called your Service Breach Time (SBT).

Unfortunately there is no easy way to transfer the Target Date from your Case Milestones to your Case and generate your SBT. These fields cannot be pulled into a formula and you cannot write triggers against Case Milestones. You can however use Apex to get the data onto your Case object.