IBM

The Elements platform has helped IBM reduce technical debt, increase efficiency, and monitor their client orgs

Jitendra Zaa, Chief Technical Architect

Reducing Technical Debt and Increasing Efficiency in their customers Salesforce Implementations

IBM’s Chief Technical Architect, Jitendra Zaa, has been working on the Salesforce ecosystem for the last 15 years. Jitendra has noticed a change in the type of customers IBM is receiving. While they used to mostly deal with new customers starting with a blank slate or ‘greenfield’  Salesforce implementations, they now also encounter ‘brownfield’ implementations where customers already have a Salesforce org that is over 5 years old and are looking to build on top of it.

Before the IBM team had access to the Elements platform, Jitendra and his team would set up a project team of architects, developers, and consultants to perform org discovery.  This initial discovery process could take up to three or four weeks. However, with Elements.cloud, Jitendra now connects Elements to their client’s org and gets an ‘X-ray view’ of that org in a few hours, depending on the complexity.

When Jitendra introduced the Elements platform to his clients, they were impressed by the insights the platform provided regarding their Salesforce orgs

My client said they are using out of the box, they don’t have any customization. And then the Elements platform is showing me numbers, like 700, 500 Apex classes.

The client at first, will not believe the results. They will debate it. And then we start peeling back the layers and there we find that someone has installed some managed package that is contributing to that number.

Elements.cloud has also helped Jitendra reduce the number of custom objects in his clients’ orgs.

We were able to reduce the total number of custom objects. We removed somewhere between 20 to 21 custom objects from my client’s org because they have built it over a period of time.

Users were not using the custom objects. Maybe they were hidden by the profile and the permission set and they didn’t realize it. However when we used Elements we saw that there are so many custom objects unused and only 6% or 7% had been populated. With this information, we were able to move [the client] to standard objects.

One of the features that I love [from Elements.cloud] is the notifications

“Every day I get a notification of what changes have been made in the org. I immediately get a notification of a new Apex class or a change in an Apex class. And when I see the number, if the number is decreased, I love it. But if the total number of lines has increased, that’s an alarm for me.”  Another feature that Jitendra loves is the process mapping tool. “Elements provides intelligent process diagramming.’ 

In summary, the Elements platform has helped IBM reduce technical debt, increase efficiency, and monitor their client orgs. Jitendra has been able to reduce Apex code by 20% and reduce the number of custom objects in his clients’ orgs. 

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