As Plauti Assign evolves and becomes more feature-rich, the fundamental concepts can get lost amongst all the setup guides and how-to documents. This article is only dedicated to conveying the most important concepts of how the app works.

Overview - Plauti Assign Automates Assignment of Salesforce Records
Plauti Assign (PA) takes minutes to install and get set up. Once your rules are in place, PA will automatically assign incoming (or freshly updated) records. 

PA is configured by creating sets of rules that are intended to match with a certain segment of records. Those records will immediately be assigned to specific users in a round-robin, load balanced or other fashion depending on what Operational Mode you have selected.

The configuration 'container' in Plauti Assign is called a Match Group which contains:

• The rules (Match Rules) that are used to match records
• The users (Assignees) that will be assigned to the matching records
• Optionally, Assignee Rules to manage assignees automatically
• Optionally, a Capacity Model that regulates the capping / load balancing of records
• Optionally, one or more SLAs

Processing Records
When we talk about Plauti Assign 'processing' records, specifically we mean when PA reads the record and runs it through the defined Match Groups and Match Rules, looking for a match, deciding whether it assigns the record or not.

Records are processed by Plauti Assign upon update or creation when all the following are true:

1. The Object is enabled for PA as per this guide 
2. The field 'Use Plauti Assign' (leadassist__Use_Round_Robin__c) is set to TRUE on the record you want to assign (either because TRUE is the default value for the picklist or because the value has been set to TRUE using automation)

If any of the above are not true, then the record will be skipped by Plauti Assign.

Possible Outcomes of Processing a Record
A processed record can:

• match the rules and be assigned, and Plauti Assign changes the Use Plauti Assign field to ASSIGNED
• match the rules but is not assigned because Assignees are unavailable due to 'working hours' or 'out of office' and PA changes the Use Plauti Assign field to QUEUED (More here about SRR QUEUED records) 
• not match the rules and the owner is unchanged, and PA changes the Use Plauti Assign field to NOMATCH

The Match Log is Your Friend

• All processed records, whether they match or not, are recorded in the Match Log
• You can use the Match Log to troubleshoot. If the Match Log is saying that the record was correctly assigned, but when you view the record it isn't - that means something after PA has changed the ownership (e.g. Lead Assignment Rules).
• Records that are not processed by PA won't create an entry in the Match Log
• The Match Log is central to how SLA information is recorded and reported

Greedy Match Groups

• A Match Group with no Match Rules is called ‘greedy’; it will match any record that it processes and assign it to the Assignees in that Match Group
• It can be useful to create a greedy Match Group to catch any records that haven't been matched
• Set the Priority of the greedy Match Group to last place (otherwise it will catch everything before other Match Groups have had a chance)

Use Process Builder or Flow to Trigger Assignment 

• The Use Plauti Assign field can be changed manually or through automation (Process Builder, Flow, Workflow Actions, Apex) in order to trigger that record to be processed again by Plauti Assign.
• Complex workflows where the record may pass through different teams can be automated this way. 

Mass Update Records with Plauti Manipulate

• On a small scale you can mass update using List Views - simply expose the Use Plauti Assign field, create your desired List View and mass update the Use Plauti Assign value to TRUE, then update. That will trigger Plauti Assign to process all those checked records. The limitation here is that you can only update 50 records at a time in a List View
• For bigger mass updates, use an update tool such as Plauti Manipulate to mass update the value of the Use Plauti Assign field to TRUE for all records that you wish to update.