Reinventing data potential with the help of Salesforce

Reinventing the competitive advantage with Salesforce data capabilities

A global asset management company is faced with an opportunity to establish long-term market dominance by revolutionizing the data they use for catering to their clients' best financial interest.

CLIENT NAME

NDA

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

PROJECT LENGTH

Over 2 Years

TEAM SIZE

TECHNOLOGIES

Our client is one of the world’s leading asset-management and financial services organizations. Serving 30+ million people and 25,000+ businesses, the company helps its customers enjoy financial stability and predictability.

Why Now

Not many businesses would opt for a technology investment when entering a worldwide recession caused by a global pandemic. Instead, most would apply the ’wait it out’ strategy, especially when facing an unprecedented crisis. So, standing on the brink of uncertainty, the asset-management and investment domain had two choices: to wait or to act. Our client decided on the latter because the solution they wanted to build would bring operational agility and analytical efficiency amid the commercial stiffness.

Project Boundaries

>$1,000,000

The Project

The Project's Essence

Preparing your business for winning the market competition is easier than hoping for the competition’s absence. With the markets' volatility rising exponentially, our client knew it was the right time to leverage technology to ensure its business continuity and efficiency by stepping up their data game.

While covering multiple markets in Europe and Asia, the company's two most significant business units operated on two separate Salesforce orgs. As a result, the operational data could not have been used to its organization’s clients' advantage. With no unified data in place, the sales, marketing, and customer engagement teams literally suffered from thousands of repetitive manual tasks, inaccurate analyses, a scarce user experience, and a high tasking overhead on users.

Leveraging Salesforce to establish omnichannel access for its business units to a unified source of truth was something they needed to do. Companies that invest in seeing a broader picture of their business context, both from inside and outside, can only outdistance their competitors.

On the business side, they were looking for a solution to optimize internal company processes and simplify interactions between departments by introducing a common understanding and standardization of data across B2B channels. From a technological point of view, they wanted two outdated platforms with a megaton of various types of repetitive and redundant data to be merged into one Lightning-based org which would enable them to work so much more smoothly and efficiently.

Solution Design and Implementation

We kicked off the project by setting up business analysis and design thinking sessions. It was instrumental to keep the client's business owners and stakeholders involved so as to synthesize the inputs and integrate them into a holistic and cohesive solution vision. An in-depth system audit showed that the marketing and sales departments could only partially drive the enhanced customer experience because of an inappropriate data leverage from distorted data capture points. Varied data processes and solutions stemming from the client's swift organic growth led the company to a cross-channel view of client interactions.

When all the functional and nonfunctional requirements for the new platform had been gathered, we devised a strategy for migrating the client's Salesforce Classic legacy system into a newer Lightning platform with a redesigned user experience and updated functionality. During one of the copious meetings with the client's business owners, our team came up with an idea to conceptualize Salesforce Lightning for the UX and business needs by applying Lightning custom components to the visual style book. Thus, we were able to add custom functionality that would focus on each department's and client's unique needs, while rendering workflow easy and comfortable. With this decision, we were trying to optimize the CRM's capability of stimulating the sales process, the lack of which was one of the client's major pain points.

Close cooperation with our client helped us clearly see the solution architecture design required for successful project implementation. Our team prepared the system design (including components and dependencies), the data security model, software components, tech stack, data models and flows, integration patterns for the existing and future integrations, delivery and deployment flow, and QA processes. Before implementing the project, we ensured that there was no downtime for our client's system, as we kept the old system up and running until the new one was deployed

The project's implementation started with redesigning one of the existing system accounts into a newly-defined UI & interaction design that was based on a customized Lightning visual stylebook. For this purpose, Avenga built a migration POC to ensure the platform we were building recognized the data classes it was meant to run on, as we handpicked, sorted, and migrated the data for this part of the project. Then, the team developed a CI/CD pipeline that launched the needed data packages through Apache’s NiFi-based script, which was aimed at data flow automation between software systems. Now, the client’s users can identify and see any Salesforce package inside of Salesforce org. As the merger pattern proved successful, we embarked upon a full-scale merger of the two Salesforce Classic orgs into a unified updated Salesforce Lightning solution.

Results

The client now enjoys the solution they were looking to build, as it covers all the stipulated business needs with the help of duly implemented Salesforce solutions. Refined and secure data gathering, management, and synchronization between their teams' systems ensure omnipresent management and sales efficiency. With all the new functionality and an improved user interface on their side, the client's teams relish the updated individualized processes and customized features that help them cater to their customers' most personalized requests. Living up to our promise of being our client's competitive advantage, we have turned the rusty data in their hands into an ability to see what their competitors can't.

The Moment of Trust

The history of trust between Avenga and our client goes back years, as we have accomplished many smaller yet complicated projects for the company. However, Project A envisaged an entirely new budget level and thus required a qualitatively higher level of trust toward the tech partner. While there was nothing new to tell the client about our Salesforce capabilities (they knew what we were capable of), our continuous devotion and effort made them decide in our favor. Our head of Salesforce competency traveled to London more than once to showcase our project vision. As a result, the client's team was intrigued enough to visit Kyiv for a week's worth of workshops that crystallized the client's outlook on our approach. Avenga landed a project worth more than $1.5 million because the client saw the needed grit and readiness in us to overcome difficulties and barriers, which was what they precisely expected from a strong implementation partner.

The Eureka Moment

Imagine teaching a French child to sing in Mandarin. What do you do first? You teach them some Mandarin as they need to grasp the basic phonetics so they pronounce the words correctly. Merging two Salesforce Classic orgs into a Lightning-based solution ousting data redundancy was just like that. Our critical task was making the new duplicates-free platform duly recognize, process, and distribute various types of data without creating more duplicates and lookalikes. So, we taught our kid some Mandarin: we installed some of the newly-required functionality into one of the old orgs and set it up as the basis for the future migration and merger. We made use of what the org already knew and taught it some new skills, which were necessary in order to make the data 'behave' when we poured it into the new hierarchical infrastructure. Finally, adding an intellectual look-up tool helped the system differentiate between the cognominal files affiliated with the different organizations.

The Red Moment

After 2.5 years of incredible progress on the project, its release was planned for February-March 2022. In September 2021, the world's leading news sources warned about Russia's plan to attack Ukraine. However, there was no going back for us as we were too deep into the project, and nobody believed (wished) that Russia would really attack its peaceful neighbor. We kept working, while receiving hundreds of calls from perplexed customers, asking, "Are you able to deliver? Are you planning to relocate?" and so on and so forth, which was a completely understandable reaction. No company wants its projects and capital hung up in the psychologically unstable choices of a dictator. Avenga started developing its Service Endurance Plan to prepare us for any scenario and our clients’ unfolding. The solution deployment, which anticipated ten days of non-stop data migration, was planned for February 22. We started as planned. On February 24, we woke up to explosions and air raid sirens.

The Ribbon Cutting Moment

You wouldn't expect your project's main bottleneck to hit you in the form of tanks, missiles, and Russian imperial ambitions. What is more, you wouldn't expect to actually deliver the project when every minute could be the last one of your life. Missile strikes and carpet bombings of civilians commenced on the third day of our ten-day-long migration exercise – February 24. Nobody believed in us and neither did we at first. Yet, we dusted ourselves off and made it; we cut the project's ribbon, launching it live within the deadline set. The team's unprecedented commitment and Avenga's Service Endurance Plan, which gave employees a safe place to reside and work from, helped us stay strong, keep calm, and work under the pressure of tomorrow's unpredictability. That week of workshops in Kyiv helped our client believe that we would come through no matter what. Little did they know that this Avenga team would stick to the task even if it literally meant putting everything on the line.

The ROI Moment

Our client was looking to invest in a project that would free them of the tech debt dragging their business down. As one year has passed since Project A went online, vital data across the organization is coordinating operations rendering them efficient while automating many business processes. Decision-making is now, literally, Lightning-fast, as quick delivery of data analysis outcomes has been enabled by optimized and conformant data searchers with no duplicated data in the system. The client can now reach the market faster than its competitors and can innovate more freely. While having made sure the old system experienced not a single second of downtime as the new functionality was implemented, Avenga turned two Salesforce liabilities into a powerful Salesforce asset.

“I wanted to thank you and the entire Avenga team for being absolutely instrumental in our delivery of Project A. Overseeing development and delivery in the past three weeks has been unprecedented, and I cannot express my gratitude enough for what Avenga, as a delivery partner, has done with respect to your commitment, effort, and bravery. I am so grateful for the partnership we’ve formed over the last seven years, and I cannot speak highly enough of the team, your skill, and your commitment to your clients.”

Scott Parker, Program Director

TEAM