Q: How do you determine whether to integrate different Salesforce Orgs* or keep them separate?
When a merger, acquisition, consolidation or spin-off takes place, there are often separate Orgs that reside in different areas of a company. Before any integration process begins, it’s critical to assess what the end goal is for combining them. For example, is the objective greater visibility into all sales and marketing activity? Increased collaboration between distinct business units? Standardization of business operations? Economies of scale? These are all valid reasons for integration, but they need to be established from the start.
Also, are there any regulatory barriers, privacy concerns or other issues that need to be factored into the decision to integrate the Orgs or keep them separate?
Along with this assessment, it is imperative to get a detailed understanding of the business processes (i.e., sales, customer service, marketing, etc.) which the separate Orgs support to determine how they will structurally be merged together.
Q: What are some best practices for combining Orgs?
Some best practices are:
Map key business processes – Review the configurations of the existing Orgs and map business processes to help you determine destination and source Orgs.
Assess the governors and limiters – Ensure that any limits around applications are addressed upfront to eliminate any potential conflicts.
Take a snapshot of each of the existing Orgs – Do a side by side comparison to understand the similarities and differences between them.
Define the data merge characteristics – What rules will you use for merging data? (For example, when there are two records for the same entity, which you will use and why? The most recent? The most complete?) Address standardization as well as de-duplication of data.
Develop a migration strategy – How long will the merge take? How will you deal with interim data? What is your plan for migration of users?
Then, of course, test, test, test — and take this opportunity to clean up historical artifacts that are no longer useful!
Q: What are the advantages to merging Orgs?
When there are separate Orgs, it is impossible to roll up performance results to one management dashboard, so analytics are not as powerful. Also, you may be missing opportunities for cross-sell and up-sell by maintaining separate Orgs. And, without a combined Org, you do not have a single point for integration or data cleansing. So, there are significant advantages to merging Orgs, many of which are a direct result of housing data in a single location. This ensures that users will have greater visibility and accessibility to unified information on sales, service, reporting, analysis and more.
For example, we recently helped a customer integrate two instances of Salesforce after they acquired businesses that were both using the tool. These businesses had very different ways they were using Salesforce, which resulted in vastly different configurations. Because of this, naming conventions had to be standardized, account and contact data de-duped, and business processes merged.
We were able to work with them to harmonize and re-engineer their account, contact, opportunity and activity management and train approximately 100 users. The merged business processes now support a single, unified business development team and the company is looking to use this process as the “gold standard” for several future Org consolidations.
Q: Who needs to be included in the integration process?
Key stakeholders should be involved to provide an understanding of how the Org is currently being used. Senior management needs to be involved to define business objectives, ensure process alignment, and assess any behavioral changes needed. And, people who can articulate and answer why this particular Org was set up the way it was, what were the original goals, etc., should also be included in the integration process.
From the outside, you need a team of individuals who can translate requirements into functional solutions. This is a core competency of Perficient and our experienced professionals would be happy to help you in the integration process.
*Org or Orgs are a company’s Instance or Instances of Salesforce
