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CbradleyCbradley 

Help with defining SIC Codes

We are working on enriching our data - and one thing we are looking at are SIC codes to help define industry.  We have an external program that can append our data with SIC codes, but not the descriptions.  I am looking to create a rule in Salesforce.com that will allow me to say "if SIC code is this - then industry is that".  Has anyone done this or know how we may do it.  Happy to discuss what we have tried so far.

 

I am not experienced in back end coding with Apex but I am very familiar with Salesforce.com functionality.  I would appreciate any help!

 

Thank you!!!

snugglessnuggles
My choice would depend on how many industries and codes there were.  If there were enough to fit into a formula field, i would do it that way.  If there were a lot of code/industry combinations and you wanted the flexibility to easily modify them and add new ones, I would store them in a custom object with a field for code and a field for industry.  Then a trigger on the original object could wait for changes in code, then reference the code/industry mapping table and update the industry field accordingly.
CbradleyCbradley

Agree - there are 450 SIC Codes - each with a industry description matching the code.  We tried formulas but got Syntax errors - not sure if we were using the right ones.  We were trying IF functions.  Any other formula thoughts?  We also tried putting these into a picklist to use the dependent picklist functionality - however there are too many characters to put all 450 descriptions into one picklist.

 

The next thought is to try to go through the descriptions to take out characters that are not needed to see if we can get that approach to work.

 

Any other thoughts or suggestions??

 

 

Thank you!

snugglessnuggles
with that many values, custom formula/picklist fields will be a flimsy solution.  in that case i think adding an extra table to hold the mapping would be much safer.  it would require a trigger to do the updates, but it would be a fairly simple trigger.
CbradleyCbradley

I have never done anything like that before.  Do you know of any resources where I could get some basic instruction?  Is there something on the developer community or maybe in Salesforce.com help?

 

Thanks!