Powering Perfect Deployments at Enterprise Scale for Valmet

The Challenge

Searching for a Smarter Tech Stack

By 2019, over 3,000 Valmet professionals were using Salesforce to enhance customer engagement across the globe. However, under the hood, Valmet’s IT team lacked a single source of truth to combat rising complexity and keep external development teams on the same page — creating a climate of low visibility, merge conflicts and high-risk software delivery. 

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Developer environments weren’t up-to-date with production changes and Valmet needed a smarter way to manage releases. That’s when an external Salesforce vendor recommended Copado CI/CD to help Valmet tackle release management through the power of cloud-native DevOps.  

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“We implemented Copado CI/CD to be proactive and solve issues before they grew into bigger problems,” says Valmet Salesforce Manager Xavier Borel. “We could see what would happen if we didn’t add a release management tool to improve the process.”

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Dipping a Toe into the Test Automation Pool

With release management under control, Valmet’s turned to the test automation marketplace to support the groundswell of Salesforce development and lock down a high level of software quality. Manual regression testing was taking far too much time to cover the growing scale of Salesforce development. 

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“We had to test everything by ourselves,” Xavier recalls. “As the amount of development items continued to increase, it became nearly impossible to execute regression testing in time for each Salesforce release.”

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Valmet’s first foray into the test automation landscape ran into a major roadblock: They couldn’t implement end-to-end test cases. The IT team wasn’t interested in building a custom Robot Framework solution on an onsite server — they wanted a cloud-based solution designed for the Salesforce platform. In 2021, Valmet implemented Copado Robotic Testing to deliver end-to-end test automation across Salesforce and multi-cloud environments.

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“We started off with a few test cases for Salesforce and they were very successful,” says Valmet Salesforce Manager Katja Nisumaa-Saarela. “Copado Robotic Testing helped us create scripts that covered end-to-end test cases across emails, servers and beyond.”

Key Challenges

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The Solution

An Unstoppable DevOps Duo: CI/CD & Robotic Testing 

Copado CI/CD and Copado Robotic Testing work hand-in-hand to ramp up the volume and velocity of Valmet’s Salesforce pipeline. On a weekly basis, developers merge changes and robots automate end-to-end regression tests to find and fix bugs on new Salesforce features before they go to production. 

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Today, Valmet’s IT team includes over 20 people across application support, QA and development in a multi-vendor environment. They work across two production orgs to serve 7,500 internal and external Salesforce users across the globe. 

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To drive digital transformation and support the needs of customers and suppliers, Valmet has expanded their Salesforce usage via a set of applications built on top of Salesforce Experience Cloud. And Copado is the single source of truth that enables Valmet to scale without growing pains.

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The Future

Continuous Development and DevOps Maturity Across the Clouds

Valmet’s IT team continues to pilot new integrations and search for new ways to fuse Copado CI/CD and Robotic Testing to improve continuous development. 

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Test automation has had a very positive impact on the overall quality of our release process,” says Katja. “Now, our testers can really focus on testing and create more effective tests.”

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From quality gates to version control, Valmet wields a wide range of cloud-native DevOps capabilities to serve pulp, paper and energy enterprises in over 30 countries.

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