I was asked a fair question: now that the newer automation exists, is the old student intake flow redundant? The quick answer was yes. The correct answer, after actually checking, was no. The distance between those two answers is exactly where quiet damage hides.
On paper the two flows looked like duplicates. Same name, same starting point. The newer one even looked more modern. Deleting the old one would have tidied things up nicely.
Then I traced what each one actually did. The newer flow covered the machine half of the job: a student submits the form, Salesforce creates their Contact and Student Placement record, notifications fire. And then it stopped, right at the point where a human has to take over. Every step after that, the part that actually decides whether a stranger is safe to place with a vulnerable family, lived only in the old flow I was about to delete.
So I merged instead of deleting. Students can self-submit now, so the old "send them back to their school first" branch is gone. Everything else became one end-to-end flow:
The General Volunteer intake flow, which nothing newer actually replaced, I left exactly where it was.
"Redundant" is one of the most expensive words in this kind of work. Two things that look like duplicates are often each doing one half of a job. The automation was doing the half a computer is good at. The flow I nearly deleted was doing the half that keeps a family safe.