3X More Frequent Releases & Fewer Bottlenecks for Germany’s Largest Vehicle Inspection Company

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The Challenge

Navigating a Development Pipeline Laced with Roadblocks and Risk

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Under the hood, DEKRA implemented Salesforce in 2018 to digitally transform business processes in 60+ countries on six continents. The company uses Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Field Service Lightning to standardise a global CRM process across regional regulations, products and services. 

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DEKRA’s development team leveraged change sets to build and deploy on the Salesforce platform — but this tool proved to be tedious and time-consuming — requiring three full-time employees to painstakingly move changes from one org to another. 

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Next, DEKRA tried a source-driven approach via Git and Salesforce DX to facilitate scratch orgs. However, low-code admins struggled to master Git’s command-line interface — forcing DEKRA to heavily rely on technical architects to pull changes, troubleshoot issues and scope the user story flow from planning to production. 

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As a result, the team’s highly-skilled resources were blocked from creating business value and Salesforce projects were jeopardised by deployment bottlenecks. In addition, the team’s rigid workflow was time-consuming to navigate and made late-stage modifications (based on UAT feedback) only possible with a high level of effort.

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The Solution

Breaking Through the Bottleneck with a Low-Code Salesforce DevOps Solution

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In 2021, DEKRA began searching the DevOps marketplace for an enterprise solution to overcome their struggles with their Git-based custom release process. The solution needed to be native on the Salesforce platform — and it had to offer user-friendly functionality for low-coders on DEKRA’s global operations team. Enter Copado.

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“Copado’s implementation manager made a huge difference,” says Johannes Mayer, Salesforce Platform Architect & Release Manager, DEKRA SE. “We worked closely with Copado Professional Services and went through lots of training sessions to ensure a quick onboarding process. We also leveraged the Copado Community for CI/CD certifications.”

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With Copado under their belts, DEKRA’s Salesforce development team experienced a culture shift — more automation, innovation and collaboration. Before, DEKRA executed around 10 releases per year via one sandbox and a single, waterfall flow of user stories for the entire development pipeline. Now, DEKRA leverages an integrated development environment to easily deploy small changes and independently ship pre-production packages to save countless hours across each team. 

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DEKRA even harnesses the power of CopadoGPT to assist with training and solve technical issues — empowering team members to troubleshoot for themselves instead of escalating problems to pro-code developers.

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The Outcome

Maximum Efficiency, More Deployment Success 

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Today, DEKRA releases on Salesforce every two weeks — more than twice as often as the previous frequency. Before Copado, the team would have to wait as much as 1-2 days for UAT before they had the green light to release to production. Now, it takes only five minutes to handle UAT tickets and approve each deployment. Instead of relying on three full-time employees for manual release navigation, one technical developer can block off 1-2 hours per week on deployment management — and use the rest of their time to focus on conceptual Salesforce architecture. 

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By completely automating staging deployment time, DEKRA saves an additional five hours each week. The team has successfully decreased conflict resolution and development support from 2-3 times a week to once every two weeks for special cases.

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DEKRA has abolished their rigid user story flow in favour of a scaled agile framework that promotes a high level of collaboration and communication. Teams can accelerate the release cycle as needed or temporarily move to a continuous deployment cadence to tackle service requests and minor changes. DEKRA’s streamlined processes has enabled the team to:

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• Increase ticket throughput with better quality.
• Improve parallel validation for enhanced collaboration and faster ticket handling.
• Enable citizen developers to work independently and apply changes on their own.

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The Future

Achieving DevOps Maturity

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What’s the next milestone on DEKRA’s DevOps journey? Achieving true CI/CD across their Salesforce development pipeline. The team has already adopted the right culture and mindset to practise continuous integration and continuous deployment — it’s only a matter of time before they gain the DevOps maturity and implement the automation required to unleash the full power of Copado.

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