Often customers want to highlight the status of process and alert  users to take corrective action before it is too late. There is nothing better than a visual field that gives you the process health – Red, Yellow or Green. This can be especially used to highlight the leads that are not acted upon or the opportunities that are stuck.
Use Formula Fields to Highlight Process Status
One of the greatest strength of Salesforce.com is ability to create Excel like formula fields. We can use Force.com formula field IMAGE function to highlight process status in Salesforce.com. Here is an example of how the Salesforce.com list will look if you create a Formula field with image as the output.
You can write your own business logic based on a status or stage field in combination with the date fields. It is always advisable to write the logic you want to build first in a document for clarity.
Here is a sample code for the formula field with IMAGE function
In the above example we have used two date field on a DeliveryDate__c and FactoryShipmentDate__c along with Stage__c field. You can try with your own logic of date and status fields.
Use Cases of Formula Fields with Images
Here are some of the business use cases that I can think of (I am sure there are many more – you can suggest):
- Show the status of  lead vis-a-vis created date and status. Highlight the Leads as red that are taking more time then bechmark.
- Show the Opportunity status based on opportunity stage against current date and close date. Highlight the opportunity in Red that are taking more time in a stage than then the benchmark.
- Show the order delivery status against delivery date, shipping date and stage (like example above). Orders is a custom object.
- Highlight the cases in Red that are violating the service levels.
- Highlight the Accounts or Contacts that do not have important information captured.
