Cox Automotive Achieves 40 Releases Per Month to Accelerate Salesforce Delivery
by the Numbers
1898
Established
45,000
Auto Dealer Clients Across 5 Continents
55,000
Employees Worldwide
$21
Billion in Total Revenue
About the company
Cox Automotive is an Atlanta-based conglomerate with a wide range of subsidiaries that include Kelley Blue Book, Manheim and Autotrader.com. Supported by 40,000+ auto dealer clients across five continents, Cox is on a mission to transform the way the world buys, sells and uses vehicles.
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Cox Automotive approached Copado in 2017 with a clearcut development challenge. While they were leveraging Salesforce to create and deploy low-code software, their manual release process was leading to lots of errors.
The issues impacting Cox Automotive before they implemented Copado was two-fold. First, Cox struggled to deploy partial functionality since team members often forgot to add metadata changes to each release. Also, the updates made directly in production created overwrites and syncing challenges — resulting in bugs and lost work.
To solve Cox’s problems, Copado combined its User Story-centric approach and admin-friendly, configurable deployments.
Direct Changes In Production Led to Frequent Problems
Like many Salesforce customers, Cox’s production org was their source of truth before they adopted DevOps. The problem with this approach? Dev, QA and PreProd orgs are always “behind” production. This means that when you deploy from a staging sandbox to production, direct changes get overwritten. What’s more, using a production org as your source of truth hampers your ability to rollback changes.
KeyChallenges
The Solution
Copado CI/CD Pipelines made it easy for Cox to configure their deployments. Copado’s native Salesforce UI/UX design helps both low-code and pro-code users to follow the process rather than making changes directly in production.
Cox successfully leveraged this approach to unlock more confidence and consistency in their releases. Ultimately, Cox went from no single source of truth and tons of dev downtime to 40+ releases and 60+ User Stories each month. Increased productivity and quality not only drive a better development process for Cox — they also improve team morale and unlock greater ROI.
The Future
Cox took a three-step approach to fix its deployment challenges and shifted their source of truth from the production org to GitHub — enabling rollbacks and greatly reducing overwrites. Cox’s expansion away from build-and-deploy tactics has helped them establish a single source of truth for Salesforce, improve feature quality and standardize processes across eight agile teams.
The process standardization across Cox Automotive’s five Salesforce orgs has boosted team confidence, while developers can now work seamlessly across development teams without overwriting each other’s work.
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