WD-40: Moving Digital Transformation when there are Delays

[dmiller]

What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need of application integrations?

The WD-40 Company’s underlying reason for application integration was to keep our digital transformation program moving while our new ERP implementation was delayed. Our team was challenged by our VP of Technology, Doug Cyphers to connect our legacy ERP with no exposed API suite to our new Salesforce CRM application, SnapLogic played a key role in accomplishing this. The Salesforce application delivered ROI returns that paid for themselves in less than one year. The team delivered needed functionality and traditionally back-office order processing visibility to our sales, merchandisers and marketing teams.
The outdated legacy ERP applications with no exposed API suite was a challenge to connect 12 critical business functions during 3 different releases in 3 different Salesforce Clouds: Consumer Goods Cloud, Sales Cloud and Services Cloud. The team worked fearlessly to connect data types that included:

1. National Account and contact management
2. Lead journey campaign management
3. Requesting, viewing and amending sales orders
4. Inter-department workflow
5. Sales Forecasting
6. Grocery Market Planning and Broker Activities
7. Sales Merchandiser Activities
8. Enhances Mobile and outlook integration capabilities

The business and technical challenge faced by WD-40 Company was the need for a more modern and scalable CRM application, that met the needs of growing business to quickly scale our teams’ capabilities. Application integrations helped by connecting the Salesforce CRM to the other major strategic applications within the Enterprise Application Portfolio and complete technology ecosystem, surgically removing the legacy CRM and replacing it with a modern SaaS solution in Salesforce.

Describe your application innovation strategy and how you executed the strategy.

Our guiding principles & innovation strategy had several focus areas:

1. Provide a Consistent User Experience
2. Reduce License Costs - If it is not their primary application, we don’t want to pay for license costs for a secondary application use, when needed an integration would be leveraged to provide visibility to key data points
3. If one application has the functionality “out-of-the-box”, that would be considered our first option for the source system.
4. Look to Consolidation Tools and Applications – WD-40 Company has a small but mighty team; thus supportability and sustainability needs to be focused on reducing applications footprints. Easy to use, low-code, no-code options should be considered our first option – we don’t have the luxury of an in-house development team.
5. Think Globally and Avoid Bi-Directional Synchronization whenever possible
   SnapLogic was key in fulfilling these tenets by providing a best of class software as a service middleware application and easily scaling to our changing needs/requirements. The Salesforce connectors have been greatly utilized in our use cases and we are very happy with the scheduled, near real time, and real time integrations of 3 major strategic application win ERP, CRM and our advanced supply demand planning tool – Atlas, John Galt.

Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution?

• Shawna Barczi, WD-40 Salesforce Administrator – provided WD-40 Salesforce subject matter expertise and assisted in requirements gathering and testing.
• Carrie Craig, WD-40 Director of Enterprise Business Applications – provided program vision and overall architectural strategy guidance
• Craig Douglas, WD-40 EDI & eCommerce Manager – SnapLogic administrator and provided Legacy ERP integration assistance
• Rhea Jurf, WD-40 Manager, IT Project and Portfolio Management – provided project management for all Salesforce and the integration projects
• Daylene Maughan, WD-40 Enterprise Applications Administrator – provided Legacy ERP integration assistance
• Ali Sharifian, SnapLogic Professional Services Architect – designed and developed the SnapLogic integrations
• Ryan Shaw, Slalom Principal Consultant – provided Salesforce integration consulting assistance.
• Claudia Sittman – Slalom Salesforce Consultant - – provided Salesforce integration consulting assistance.

What were the business results after implementing these application integrations?

Our business results are that we are now able to integrate our applications with Salesforce via 15 integrations in SnapLogic, spanning over 30 pipelines. Over the past year, over half a billion documents have been processed through in the WD-40 SnapLogic Production environment.
This resulted in just some of these added benefits:

• Within Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud (CGC) the merchandiser team did $60K in additional orders in the first 2 months based on information and notifications compiled from Salesforce CGC. The team would not have been able to target a “Host Buy” to those stores in need without that information. Our sales team went into their merchandised locations and notated a “needs order” when there was an item that was in stock according to the system, all with their mobile phones while in the store location. This allowed for 2 host buys to be initiated, one for ~$20K and one for ~$40K. To mitigate these uncovered issues help us get product into these locations. The result for the rest of FY22 was approximately 50% reduction in Out of Stocks and a Net 155K savings.

• There was a significant forward-looking opportunity to improve Merchandizing and Sales Compliance. This proved true to have an additional 112K sales based upon better data access within the first month of launch. Our merchandiser team previously was only achieving 80% compliance in stores that they visited every month. With the additional percentage of sales generated from these placements, and a more trustworthy measurement of our compliance in real-time, the team utilizes this information to have more data-led conversations with our Merchandising Execution Team partners and our merchants. WD-40 Company has had multiple conversation that have resulted in conversion to a display in Garden with a 100% compliance within the 1st quarter of rollout of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud. This translated to 1,000 more units sold every week over the first 3 weeks after launch.

Anything else you would like to add?

We are very proud of what we accomplished especially because the legacy ERP application had no exposed API suite or modern capabilities existing in most software technologies today. We were challenged to think out of the box and I just kept telling the team to try it. It Should work!