AST Corporation

We use the Elements’ platform for our clients to figure out where we can automate and make them more efficient and productive. At the end of the day, Elements allows us to show our customers where we can automate, where we can improve efficiency, and basically increase productivity across their business.

Tom Valaika, Sr Director, Pre-Sales/Sales Public Sector & Commercial Industries

AST Corporation’s Elements.cloud Success Story

AST Corporation, a Salesforce consulting practice, and partner, are often asked by their customers to assess their Salesforce org.  Prior to their use of Elements.cloud, they had to extract reports directly from Salesforce and then compare and contrast them to figure out what was going on within their clients’ orgs. Tom Valaika, a Senior Director at AST Corporation, stated,

“We knew that our clients had very long-term and complex orgs, that they’ve been around for many, many years, and we also knew that they had customized those orgs using a lot of the tools that they had available at the time.”

To solve this problem, AST Corporation began using Elements to analyze and gain a deep understanding of their clients’ orgs in a very short timeframe. As Tom Valaika explains,

We used Elements to really analyze and figure out what was going on within those orgs, across the entire organization, and that means the user profiles, objects, processes, procedures, page layouts, everything. And Elements helped us do that in a very, very short timeframe.

Recently, AST Corporation engaged with a client who had acquired a company that also had its own Salesforce instance. The holding company wanted to understand if they should merge the two Salesforce orgs or keep them separate. 

AST Corporation began an assessment project that had three steps. The first step was a metadata analysis, using the Elements platform to look at all of the objects, fields, profiles, sharing rules, and all the business processes that the client had already built within their Salesforce org. “Metadata analysis was key to understanding it,” says Tom Valaika. 

The second step involved one-hour workshops with the users to capture what they did, how they did it, and any impediments or things that they were missing. Other systems, data, and processes that they would like to see automated were also captured. 

The third and final step was gathering all the artifacts, architectural maps, and business processes that were documented.  By taking these three steps, AST Corporation was able to get a complete picture of the holding company’s Salesforce org.  Using the same approach, AST Corporation was able to assess the acquired company’s Salesforce org. 

AST now faced the challenge of comparing and contrasting the two assessments for the org merge project. However, this is where the Elements platform proved to be instrumental. According to Tom Valaika:

“Elements was key to that because it allowed us to take a closer look at technical debt, such as objects and fields that hadn’t been used in over two years, and to identify and eliminate legacy processes and customized features that were no longer necessary.”

Based on their assessments, AST Corporation recommended that the client merge the org they had acquired through the acquisition into their main org. The client wanted one source of truth and one set of data to make data-driven decisions going forward for their business. Tom Valaika says:

We use the Elements’ platform for our clients to figure out where we can automate and make them more efficient and productive. At the end of the day, Elements allows us to show our customers where we can automate, where we can improve efficiency, and basically increase productivity across their business.

In addition to streamlining Salesforce orgs for a merger, AST Corporation’s Salesforce assessment solution, which utilizes the Elements platform at its core,  has also delivered impressive results such as a 30%+ improvement in Salesforce user productivity, 25-30% overall reduction in Salesforce configuration “re-work,” 50% decrease in Salesforce project implementation discovery and requirements gathering, and an 800% increase in Salesforce administrator productivity.

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