Summary
A global auto manufacturer adopted Flosum DevOps to power their Salesforce digital transformation efforts and bring much-needed governance and security to their development cycles.

Need
This company was expanding their Salesforce use to fuel their modernization and digital transformation efforts – including an expanded dealer portal with financing and warranty claims – and they needed a DevOps solution that would enable them to fully utilize Salesforce as a strategic platform.

Prior to Flosum, the company was limited by strictly cross-platform tools, such as GitHub and associated add-ons that created many challenges. Deployments were slow, conflict handling was difficult and overwrites were a frequent occurrence. And as project activity and demands upon the central team increased, managing parallel development efforts proved to be challenging.

Additionally, quality gates were difficult to enforce. Historically project teams operated independently in dedicated lower environments and skipped process steps to save time and effort. The Salesforce support team needed better governance as well as the ability to manage the parallel release workflows. They felt that shifting left some responsibility to the project teams would streamline the overall process but lacked the tools to execute this change. In the meantime, project teams and leadership had limited visibility into larger release plans and status. With Salesforce becoming the foundation of more mission-critical business applications, better visibility and accountability was demanded.

Solution
For this company, Flosum DevOps provided a platform and standard process that enabled their different project teams to work and collaborate, kept lower environments in sync, and streamlined the overall process. Real-time integration with ALM tools provides feedback to stakeholders regarding the status of a feature or release as well
as what actions have been completed, passed/failed, and are next up. Flosum branches can be assembled and re-used for deployment from environment to environment, saving time and reducing user error. Other tasks that were previously time-consuming, such as destructive changes and many manual pre/post deployment steps, are now automated and tracked. Flosum's custom-built conflict handling logic anticipates Salesforce's quirky habit of re-ordering elements in XML, saving developer time and effort on false conflicts.

Result
The Salesforce central team is now a resource that is in-the-know and contributing to the firm's digital transformation rather than fighting fires. Management, QA, project managers and business analysts all work in sync with insight into the many parallel projects. They get feedback directly in their primary tools and reports, allowing transparency and accountability. By shifting left critical functions including conflict handling, quality assurance and deployment readiness, the team can work more effectively, resulting in better quality, greater efficiency and improved business results.

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