Teaming Up with Slalom to Deliver a Quick Implementation & Easy Deployments for Amica Insurance

The Challenge
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Triangulating Tooling, Transformation and Trust for an Insurance Leader 

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Named one of “America's Best Insurance Companies of 2024” by Forbes, Amica has cultivated a long-term partnership with Slalom built on trust. This includes the insurance firm’s initial Salesforce implementation, migration to Financial Services Cloud and additional integrations with insurance software. While Amica’s Salesforce development lifecycle was powered by comprehensive documentation, the company’s feature development and intake process was slow and inflexible. Rigid environments that couldn’t be used for proof of concepts and features that weren’t initially identified during planning had to be tackled in outside environments with no efficient, documented way to move them into the main pipeline. 

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"We were trapped in a monthly release cycle, rolling out incremental changes like it was a big production,” recalls Michael Coluzzi, Salesforce Application Manager at Amica. “It wasn't just slow — it lacked the agility we needed. And our tools (especially the command-line ones) were intimidating for our team.”

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To make things worse, Amica was forced to rely on multiple artifacts and approvals at each step to reduce risk and regression — which bottlenecked the release process and made it difficult for the team to capture a true end-to-end view of development activities in one place. 

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To solve their headaches, the mutual insurance firm set out to find a cloud-based solution that offered end-to-end visibility, scalability, centralized governance and easy integration with their existing toolset. At a higher level, Amica was searching for a way to provide value faster in order to enhance and grow adoption across the business.

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“I wish every client was like Amica,” says Tom Gelo, Senior Director of Salesforce Enterprise Architecture and DevOps at Slalom. “Michael Coluzzi and his team understood their problems and had already seen the benefits of Copado. Amica was sold on Copado and Slalom supported their decision.”

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Before implementation day, Slalom worked closely with Copado to make sure the right tooling was in place — assessing sandbox refreshes, version control integrations and ALM (application lifecycle management) tools. During the pre-implementation planning phase, Slalom leveraged Copado’s training metrics, certifications and step-by-step documentation to prepare Amica for a culture shift and equip the company for long-term DevOps success. 

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“Everyone involved in any aspect of Salesforce delivery — whether it's QA, testing, low-code development — needs to have access to Copado to see the benefit of the tool itself,” says Gelo. “End-to-end visibility is the key to success. The more you get people involved in the process, the easier it will be for you to scale up.”

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The Solution

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Getting Amica Up and Running with Copado in Record Time
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Thanks to Amica’s thorough infrastructure planning and documentation, implementing Copado only took six weeks — more than twice as fast as a typical implementation for Slalom. One key factor that enabled Amica to accelerate their adoption of Copado: gaining exposure to the DevOps platform ahead of time via the Copado Community. 

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“Amica was up and running on their own almost immediately,” says Gelo. “They were already active in the Copado Community and earning Copado certifications. They understood the rigor of Salesforce release management and had already documented a lot of the unknowns we would normally have come across when it came to using Copado.”

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With Copado and Slalom, Amica’s Salesforce development process underwent an end-to-end transformation to reduce deployment risk and elevate team morale.

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• Flexibility and Agile Development: Amica deploys incremental Salesforce changes on a weekly basis to reduce risks and increase Salesforce quality.
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• Efficient Testing and Swift Responses: Copado enables Amica to practice targeted testing and resolve issues faster.
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• Effortless Releases: Amica shifted their deployment cadence to every other Thursday morning. No more late nights or weekend work!

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The Outcome

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Another Successful Collaboration for Slalom and Copado
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Amica’s implementation and release management journey is just the latest milestone for Slalom and Copado partnership. Slalom’s DevOps practice empowers their clients to harness the power of Copado for release management, CI/CD and automated testing.

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“We partner with Copado because our teams don’t have the skill set to handle every DevOps problem or Salesforce implementation issue,” says Gelo. “Copado has to be part of our day-to-day implementation.”

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Copado enables Slalom to drive org strategy conversations and unearth platform concerns that lead to bigger and better things for their clients. It opens new doors in different parts of an organization and enables Slalom to operate as a center of excellence in the DevOps space. 

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“We not only bring DevOps to our clients in the beginning — we lead them on a long-term journey to reach maturity,” says Gelo. “There’s a lot of consistency around how we deliver at Slalom and how Copado delivers their DevOps product. And that has flourished into a lot of co-selling, co-winning and co-delivery for our clients.”

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The Future

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Moving to New Clouds and Building More Integrations for Amica 
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During Slalom’s implementation of Copado for Amica, the consultancy simultaneously implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud to level up the insurance firm’s omni-channel customer campaigns. In the future, Slalom hopes to leverage Copado’s solution for Marketing Cloud DevOps to build a unified pipeline across Amica’s multi-cloud infrastructure. 

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“We spoke with Amica very early on about the benefits of multi-cloud DevOps,” says Gelo. “This would reduce dependency risks, decrease developer workflow, accelerate onboarding time, and improve quality through a consistent and compliant process.”

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In addition, Amica plans to integrate Copado with Jira to achieve deeper analysis, transform data into actionable insights and eliminate friction from the end-to-end process.

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“Leveraging Copado’s native Salesforce reporting and the data it brings over has allowed me to report more quickly and clearly,” says Coluzzi.

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