BACKGROUND:
Cargill, the leading global provider of food and agricultural products and services, operates in over 125 countries, connecting farmers with markets, and customers with ingredients, and ensuring people and animals thrive through the food they need.
Salesforce serves as a mission-critical platform at Cargill, supporting functions such as Supply Chain, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support for various global business units. Initially, business units at Cargill managed their Salesforce instances independently.
CHALLENGES
- Lack of Standardization: Each unit has different tools, processes, and standards. This led to a lack of consistency across the organization, making it challenging to streamline operations. Moreover, this also resulted in a lack of adherence to governance and compliance standards.
- Duplication of Effort: The disparate processes often resulted in duplication of effort as teams unknowingly worked on similar tasks separately, wasting time and resources.
- Technical Challenges: The use of different processes and tools led to technical issues such as code conflicts and overwrites between developers, causing delays and inefficiencies in the development and deployment of new applications.
- Post-Deployment Issues: Many technical issues only became apparent after changes had been deployed, requiring additional time and effort to resolve. This means that there were delays in releases as well as poor customer experience.
SOLUTION:
Cargill recognized an opportunity to improve their Salesforce strategy, as well as release velocity and operational efficiency. They decided to evaluate Salesforce DevOps solutions based on several requirements driven by the team’s current challenges. Cargill’s DevOps solution feature requirements moving forward included source-driven development, governance and support for their complex organizational structure, code conflict resolution, change history tracking, and rollback capabilities, to name a few.
After a thorough investigation into current platforms on the market, Cargill selected Flosum as the best fit for their needs and requirements. Flosum also met stringent global security requirements based on its Salesforce-native architecture.
Flosum DevOps helped Cargill manage parallel development processes for numerous business units. This effort included a centralized operational group-sharing process, resulting in adherence to corporate governance standards, operational efficiency, and improved release quality. It also provided velocity to bolster enterprise-wide Salesforce innovation.
Cargill's transformation with Flosum not only addressed challenges but also ushered in a new era of efficiency, collaboration, and success in Salesforce application development. The partnership with Flosum has proven instrumental in achieving Cargill's objectives and setting a benchmark for streamlined Salesforce operations in a complex global environment.
RESULT:
- After the first year using Flosum, Cargill experienced results including a 60% increase in deployment velocity, and a 50% reduction in bugs. The two statistics go hand in hand - with the enhanced speed and efficiency, Cargill teams are able to execute quick sprints and hotfixes while focusing more time on new functionality, less on troubleshooting and deployment activity.
- Developers and release managers point out helpful features such as Flosum Rollback and Conflict Resolution that helped them achieve these impressive efficiency gains.
- Adoption of the Flosum platform was quick due to its user-friendly, clicks-not-code interface. Onboarding members of Cargill’s team often don’t know where Salesforce ends and Flosum begins as the UI is integrated into their Salesforce platform and their own processes so smoothly.
Paul Kobs of Cargill is a Global Salesforce Portfolio Owner, responsible for strategic direction
and operational efficiency.
“Cargill has a complex organizational structure and Flosum was able to fully grasp and assist in managing the complexity while planning for future scale. Flosum's spirit of partnership allowed us to implement many critical capabilities for our Salesforce operations while receiving unparalleled support."
Arijit Banerjee is the Salesforce Engineering Lead for Cargill's central Salesforce operations and
administration group. He is responsible for technical leadership, process and systems to ensure
success of the company's Salesforce-based programs and initiatives.
“Flosum customer success listened, offered the help and support necessary for our success." He stated, “Our Flosum representatives were happy to discuss topics in length such as org management or best practices, and the flexibility in license management for enterprise and business units set Flosum apart.”
ROAD AHEAD:
Cargill and Flosum are currently working on integration of new tools to enhance Cargill’s DevOps process and drive greater efficiencies. With the new benchmarks for success, Cargill also plans to expand the usage of Flosum to remaining business units as part of a future roadmap.
The future is bright for the Flosum-Cargill partnership, and the team is excited to continue improving the lives of Cargill’s Salesforce operations team and the success of Cargill at an organizational level.
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