Implementing Enterprise-Grade DevOps & Data Protection for a Leading US Retailer

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The Challenge

Too Many Cooks in the Digital Kitchen

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The retail leader set out to break down the IT silos, abolish the legacy systems and achieve a single 360-degree view of customer data. By rolling out Salesforce licenses for every store and sales associate across the country, the company connected their entire digital operations on one platform.

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But rapid growth is often accompanied by growing pains — and the company’s development teams struggled to scale without stepping on each others’ toes. Each team had a slightly different version of the customer. Stores lacked visibility into cases and tickets. And before long, these back-end issues began to disrupt experiences for end users. 

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“We started getting flooded with reports from end users who couldn’t find records,” says the retailer’s Senior Manager of CRM. “It didn’t take us long to realize data had been deleted. Our ETL tool had an incorrect function that wiped the org clean. Resolution took two weeks, which was extremely painful.”

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Key Challenges

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The Solution: Part 1

Teaming Up with Own for Future-Proof Data Protection 

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The DevOps team headed to the Salesforce AppExchange to find an end-to-end, cloud-native backup tool. They initially checked out a Gearset demo — but soon realized it wouldn’t meet their enterprise-level data storage needs or pass security requirements for a planned expansion into the European market.

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“Own was the perfect vendor,” says the retailer’s Senior Manager, CRM. “It gives us peace of mind by protecting our data, automating our processes and reducing maintenance. And now we have a strategic plan in place to help us continue to scale.”

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Saving Time & Sanity with Own Sandbox Seeding 

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Before Own Sandbox Seeding entered the scene, the development team leveraged a plugin app called Salesforce Apex to seed data. However, this legacy app wasn’t robust enough to keep pace with the company’s Salesforce roadmap. Disconnected sandboxes and too many cooks in the kitchen across different teams pushed back timelines and bottlenecked development. 

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“Sandbox Seeding brought two things into one platform: More speed and better adoption,” says the retailer’s Senior Manager, CRM. “Only two folks used Salesforce Apex, but Sandbox Seeding is easy for the whole team to use. Our processes are more aligned, sprints are more predictable and there’s much less maintenance.”

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Implementing Own brought security and stability to the retail brand’s Salesforce practice. But after the sandbox situation, the company recognized a mission-critical need for a tool to help them resolve merge conflicts and deploy user stories faster. Enter Copado CI/CD.

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The Solution: Part 2

Joining Forces with Copado for End-to-End Visibility & Automated Deployments

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When the American retailer dug deeper into their Salesforce infrastructure, they uncovered a massive number of manual processes and inefficiencies. Layouts didn’t work because they weren’t aligned with the application. The lack of end-to-end visibility made it difficult for developers to collaborate on projects without lots of back and forth (and things would still get missed). 

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Even worse — the Change Set-driven deployment process and waterfall development cycle were far too slow to keep up with the company’s dreams of enterprise scale. Developers had to use Change Sets at least three times to promote changes across the pipeline from development to Quality Assurance (QA) to User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to production. In many cases, teams forgot to include key functionality — and were forced to re-deploy.

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One year after implementing Own, they decided to invest in Copado to replace Salesforce Change Sets and bring their chaotic deployment process under control.  

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“We didn’t really consider another DevOps tool,” says the retailer’s Senior Manager, CRM. “We saw the demo and thought Copado could really be useful — so we ran with it.” 

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With Copado CI/CD, each developer takes ownership over their user story. Every member of the team has end-to-end visibility and it’s easy to dive into projects without fear of merge conflicts or out-of-sync metadata. Copado CI/CD unlocks better collaboration across development teams and peace of mind. 

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“Copado has saved us a lot of time and we’ve become much more agile,” says the retailer’s CRM Business Analyst (and Copado Release Manager). “I can control exactly what goes into a user story.”

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The Outcome

Reaping the Benefits of Both Tools to Power Salesforce Security & Velocity

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Thanks to Own and Copado, the omni-channel brand’s DevOps team is able to accelerate deployments and achieve 2X faster sprint cycles (from 4 weeks to 2 weeks) without any loss or corruption of data. Copado CI/CD helps the company replace waterfall development and manual processes with agile practices and automation. Previously, Salesforce developers would release on Tuesday. Now, they release four days a week (Monday to Thursday). With Copado Robotic Testing, the retailer leverages AI-powered test automation to catch bugs, validate changes and reduce the change fail rate across the pipeline from development to QA to UAT to production. 

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Copado CI/CD and Own work hand-in-hand to reduce the need for emergency change controls and enable this American retailer to derisk end user experiences. User stories no longer clash, mission-critical features don’t get left out of planned sprints and deployments stay on track. Ultimately, end users receive more valuable data and unlock an accurate 360-degree view of each customer. 

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The Future

Eliminating the Swivel Chair Across Applications

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What’s next on this leading retailer’s digital transformation roadmap? More robust robotic test automation, lower fail rates and a higher rate of user stories. The company plans to continue leveraging Copado and Own — in tandem — to unify user experiences, centralize data storage and drive ROI. 

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