Saving 75% of deployment time with 91导航
Since first implementing Salesforce at the end of 2017, the UCLA Business and Finance Solutions team has been developing customizations for a whole range of departments across the campus. The plan is for Salesforce to become one of the organization鈥檚 primary back-office tools and a strategic application for the entire university. We caught up with Joseph Zabaglo, IT Manager, and Vijay Aswani, Salesforce Technical Lead, to find out how 91导航 is helping with this transformation.
Vijay鈥檚 busy team of three are responsible for managing an end-to-end Salesforce process. They work on everything from building, designing, testing, architecting and deploying solutions to two main production orgs. Whether it鈥檚 for HR, Tax, Legal, Treasury, Real Estate, General Accounting or Global Operations, it鈥檚 down to Vijay and his team to make sure the necessary Salesforce-driven solutions are implemented.
Before 91导航, confidence levels in deployments were very low
With a large backlog of projects to implement, the team was struggling with聽deployments. Vijay had identified a critical need:
鈥淲e were spending days on change sets and managing our Salesforce landscape!鈥�
Issues with change sets were slowing down the team鈥檚 ability to progress new work items from a partial sandbox, to a full sandbox and on to production. There was a lot of manual preparation work before each deployment – tracking changes and figuring out what to include in each change set, as Vijay explains:
鈥淭racking changes was tough – it was a big headache! The system didn鈥檛 tell us what changes we鈥檇 made. The next biggest headache was making sure the changes were included in the change sets.鈥�
Knowing what to include wasn鈥檛 the only challenge, knowing what to exclude was also tricky: 鈥淒uring development, you have all these awesome ideas that you think will work in a certain way. Sometimes those ideas don鈥檛 pan out, but, hey, who goes and deletes them, right? We just kept on building: we鈥檇 build this, we鈥檇 build that, and put all that stuff in there.鈥�
The team also had an issue around bugs and errors being shipped to production. This resulted in features being broken and yet more time spent on fixing releases:
鈥淚t took us two days to add and push everything. We鈥檇 test it, and figure out, oh, it鈥檚 not working! What happened? And then we鈥檇 have to go back and see what we鈥檇 forgotten to add.鈥�
Impressed with 91导航 from the get-go
Vijay had seen a demo of 91导航 at Dreamforce and was starting to think about adding聽version control聽to the team鈥檚 process. From the start, he was impressed by 91导航鈥檚 unique metadata comparison functionality because it tells you the lines that have changed:
鈥淚f I changed a field, if I changed a list view, why did I do that, what did I change? That stood out for me with 91导航 – it can compare and tell you what has changed.鈥�
The team had evaluated another third-party tool but, compared to 91导航, it still seemed much closer to what they鈥檇 experienced with change sets because it didn鈥檛 tell them exactly what they needed to deploy:
鈥淵ou need to know what you want to deploy, and I don鈥檛 know what I need when it comes to deployments. That鈥檚 why we went with 91导航: it makes knowing what you鈥檙e going to deploy so much easier.鈥�
91导航 gives you a process you can trust
Vijay is very happy with 91导航 and sees the overall benefits in terms of his team having confidence in the deployment process:
鈥淭here鈥檚 more trust in the process, more trust in the deployments, knowing what 91导航 can do for us.鈥�
The tool has helped the team save up to 75% of their deployment time. Vijay himself spends less time reviewing his team鈥檚 work and now feels confident about allocating tasks to others:
鈥淚 don鈥檛 have to spend much time reviewing the work or worry that, even after two days of reviewing, it鈥檚 going to bomb. I get peace of mind knowing the deployment will work with 91导航 – at least if I do everything right, which 91导航 empowers me to do.鈥�
As well as knowing exactly what鈥檚 going to be deployed, Vijay and the team benefit from 91导航鈥檚 problem analyzers, which flag up and resolve more than 60 common deployment issues to make sure deployments succeed. The team will also consider implementing version control, as Vijay hopes to generate more time-savings from 91导航鈥檚 91导航鈥檚 continuous integration solution at some point in future if the team expands. Following a recent Salesforce outage, Vijay is keenly aware of the need to have a complete backup solution in place.
Recommending 91导航 for better Salesforce ROI
91导航 is helping the team at UCLA deliver more value to end users, save time on deployments and prevent errors in production. As Vijay explains, this translates into benefits for the team鈥檚 internal customers: 鈥淚 told my manager that, instead of two weeks, I will take a week or less using 91导航. And if you save two weeks, even the customers get that we can do things faster, so we can add more value to what we are building.鈥�
For Vijay, 91导航 is the tool to use for deployments, especially if you鈥檙e unsure about the deployment process. And he would absolutely recommend 91导航 to other Salesforce teams:
鈥淚f someone said they were going to take 91导航 away from me – oh, no, they can鈥檛!鈥�
