150% Faster Salesforce Deployments for Fair Trade

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The Challenge

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In 2006, Fair Trade USA became an early partner of the Salesforce Foundation. Over the years, their digital transformation and Salesforce adoption has soared. Today, the organization’s employees use nearly a dozen Salesforce apps to manage everything from sales and marketing to project and donor management — and the technology team of four admin/developers manages them all.

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The team's initial DevOps process was built around Jenkins and GitLab. Despite the adoption of CD, the team continued to face challenges. Difficulties with merging led the team to restrict their actions in development.

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For Fair Trade USA, all configuration work was required to happen in one sandbox, which they’d then periodically pull into the general workflow. The company spent 25% of their time managing deployments. They began to see challenges in keeping up with the changes to the Salesforce platform itself. The platform changes periodically, so keeping metadata within sandboxes becomes time-consuming.

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Fair Trade USA knew their current process and tools wouldn’t scale to meet the growing demands of the business, so he began exploring options for continuous integration for Salesforce environments.

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Key Challenges

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The Solution

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Fair Trade USA replaced Jenkins with Copado, enabling the team with true continuous integration for Salesforce. When they expanded the Salesforce development team a year later, they also expanded their Copado footprint, adopting Copado Branch Management.

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With nearly four years of using Copado, the impact on the delivery process is clear. While Fair Trade USA once spent 25% of their time managing releases, the team’s current Salesforce Architect spends less than 10% managing deployments and troubleshooting errors. They’re also deploying 2-3X more frequently, with weekly production releases.

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The Future

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Like any strong DevOps team, Fair Trade USA isn’t settling with the results they have seen. The team frequently tests different solutions to ensure they’re continuously improving.

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Recently, they experimented with a standalone repository and native Salesforce DX tools. Despite developers who know Salesforce inside-out, they still found more efficiencies on the Copado platform. Copado gives their developers at Fair Trade USA the permissions and power they need to do their own work — and that’s what they need to continue to scale Salesforce innovation.