Title
A Simplified Deployment Process that Delivers
Summary
Through the combination of Flosum’s feature-filled DevOps solution and insightful consulting, this large product supplier has streamlined its release cycle and can now rapidly respond to business needs.
Need
This large-scale company manufactures products for the hardware business, utilizing both Salesforce Service and Sales clouds. Their customers are high-volume merchants, and any service disruption means potential business and financial impacts. With five delivery teams consisting of approximately 45 developers and admins who were all making changes within Salesforce, overwrites and inefficiencies bogged down their productivity. This company needed a product that could consolidate the multiple development streams and give them the ability to quickly rollback changes.
Solution
The many features within Flosum DevOps were a perfect fit for this organization’s needs.
Topping their list of must-haves was a rollback feature. This organization utilizes Salesforce with all of their various merchants, and issues must be remedied immediately to avoid significant business impacts. Before Flosum, it would be all hands on deck if a problem arose, forcing developers to work in a high-stress environment through the night and weekend until the situation was resolved. Flosum gives them the ability to quickly rollback releases instead of manually combing through each change to find the issue. They can go back just one release cycle or even further, and can also utilize the partial rollback capability if they only want to rollback part of what was deployed.
Their large, dispersed team also benefits greatly from the collaboration and separation features within Flosum. Each developer has their own sandbox, enabling them to make changes without interfering with another colleague’s work. Utilizing both partial copy and full copy sandboxes, they are able to roll up into a QA environment, run overwrite protection, and deploy to production.
Another important feature for them is automated retrieval, eliminating the need for manual retrievals or snapshots. Additionally, they have integrated Flosum into the ServiceNow ticketing system, enabling them to create individual feature branches then merge them together, ultimately resulting in one consolidated release across all of the team.
This team also makes liberal use of the overwrite protection feature. From time to time they do employ hot fixes as business needs change, and overwrite protection ensures they never overwrite any emergency changes that happened since their last deployment.
Result
This formally disjointed team now runs like clockwork, executing a coordinated, two-week development cycle that prioritizes testing and QA. Before Flosum, each business unit would deploy their own changes, but now they are able to work together using branch merges and do just one release. Flosum has been extremely simple for the entire team to use, helping them create a more efficient, consolidated process for their multiple teams.
They are adamant about the value of the rollback capability, declaring that alone to make their investment in Flosum pay off. With rollbacks they can respond to business issues in hours, not days.
Additionally, the organization has benefitted greatly from the expertise of their Flosum partners. The Flosum team is hands on, understanding how each of the development groups needs to deliver their software and providing them with best practices and an optimized process to help them work efficiently. At Flosum, we know the Salesforce space like the back of our hand, and have developed methods to help teams simplify their processes and utilize best practices based on hundreds of use cases and conversations with customers
