Summary
A global manufacturer for the energy industry standardized on Flosum DevOps to improve Salesforce release quality and velocity while accelerating innovation on the platform.

Need
The Salesforce environment of this company was extremely complex. In addition to supporting many business units and integrating with other enterprise systems, they were held to high governance and security standards. Dozens of parallel projects and workstreams were managed by internal central support staff and project teams, and they were also supported by numerous external service providers teams. Managing parallel development efforts in this environment proved to be challenging, and they were only able to deploy major releases every other month. Additionally, business units faced long lead times for features to be released and often experienced further delays due to the complexity of required quality assurance and approvals for massive major releases. Project teams had no visibility of changes that occurred in parallel, often resulting in complex, time-consuming and risky conflict resolutions downstream by release managers. The release windows were over a week long to manage all the approvals, final checks, validations, and manual activities, not to mention unavoidable emergencies that occurred during the process requiring immediate attention. And after the fact, post- release hyper support periods were common to address release quality issues reported by end users.

Solution
With the Flosum DevOps and Data Management toolset, planning for upcoming releases is no longer a mystery and business stakeholders are kept informed. These solutions empower the central Salesforce support team to know how each project and feature is progressing through the release cycle. Development teams and release managers are alerted upon initial commit to a feature branch when potential conflicts may occur downstream, giving everyone time to "shift left" and collaborate better. And the unique capabilities of Flosum for conflict resolution and deployment failure reduction save project teams and DevOps engineers a significant amount of time. Initial quality testing has “shifted left” as well, as data management tools ensure sandboxes are populated with the right data down to the project team. This avoids a huge backlog of quality issues surfacing late in the process, which could cause a feature to be pulled from a release at the last minute.

Result
Thanks to the efficiencies this team has gained from Flosum they have doubled their deployment frequency for major releases. They are now releasing monthly and able to execute interim releases as needed. To everyone’s relief they have greatly reduced the crisis-mode scrambling that used to be prominent in the days before a release. Now, the process is predictable and reliable, with far fewer late cycle surprises where features or projects are de-scoped from a release. As a result of “shifting left” for functions like testing, conflict resolution and deployment preparation, failed validations and deployments have been reduced by more than 50%. The central Salesforce team has reduced their reactive and project support time, freeing them to proactively focus on more important strategic business priorities.

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