FloQast unlocks the value of standardized DevOps for business systems with Salto

FloQast’s business systems team looked for ways to improve code deployment, environment management and recovery capabilities for its SaaS platforms - Salesforce, Salesforce CPQ and NetSuite.

Ultimately, FloQast’s Business Systems team began using Salto to facilitate DevOps for business systems at FloQast.

Standardization through DevOps for all business systems 

Recognizing the importance of standardization and operational efficiencies from DevOps methodologies, FloQast sought a change management platform to support planning, execution, and documentation, automate processes, and enhance visibility. The ideal solution would enable collaboration among admins and developers, drive efficiencies in deployments, and enhance compliance.

Achieving efficiency in deployment schedule

Before introducing Salto, FloQast’s Salesforce team was using change sets. While some of the main capabilities of proper sandbox usage were covered, a deployment would still take a full day. Using Salto, the team was able to introduce improved and much more efficient processes. This, along with the automation of previously manual tasks resulted in a reduction of over 50% in the time it takes to package and deploy, according to Sr. Director of Business Systems Hyung Lee. The FloQast team now only requires a couple of hours for deployments that take roughly 30 minutes and encounter fewer deployment issues.

Visibility leads to reduced MTTD and a happy compliance team

The productivity gain is not limited to the time saved in the deployment itself. Gaining advanced visibility into the configuration and the dependencies among the many and varied configuration elements means a significant reduction in MTTD when errors occur. The team is now able to very quickly discover issues, understand where their origin is, and fix them. This added visibility and output has also elevated the business application team within the company in terms of impact on actual business outcomes. 

Lee added, “We got huge love from the compliance team – the fact that we have logs connecting to Jira, to GitHub, and all that stuff. Our privacy team was thrilled that we just did that proactively, and now we can simply hand them our logs whenever they need them, without the painful manual work.”

Enabling employee up-skilling, stress relief and collaboration

FloQast’s team was thrilled to find a platform that enabled using DevOps methodologies for managing NetSuite. “This is the only company that I know that actually does DevOps tooling for NetSuite,” said Lee. When FloQast introduced Salto into the NetSuite administration flows, the team was able to align permissions with roles, ensuring that business users can still construct change deployments and ask for a review of the deployment, but still maintain actual change permissions in the hands of admins.

Due to the standardization of tools and processes, knowledge is flowing across the bigger organization: “The finance side of the house is now looking at the Salesforce side of the house and going, okay, let's learn how you guys do it, because you're really efficient now,” Lee said.

Business System’s team members also gained a powerful morale boost. “My team was so pumped to be able to get a platform like this,” said Lee. They now feel they are building their toolbox and enhancing their set of skills –  now having the same capabilities as regular engineering teams.” Lee said he is certain that “If you talk to our team now, it is so not stressful for them because they just worry about building the enhancements and not worrying about all the other stuff.”

Adding more applications

In the future, FloQast may expand the use of Salto to manage configurations for Okta. This would further enhance operational efficiency and open up even bigger opportunities for collaboration and knowledge transfer, not just between business application teams, but also with the IT operations team.

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