2021 Application Innovation Award Nomination: ITV: Accelerating sales processes with automation

[dmiller]

What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need of application integrations? Describe the business and technical challenges the company was facing and how application integrations can help.

ITV’s goal is to be more than TV by creating meaningful and creative content that connects millions of people around the world every day. To successfully execute on this strategy, the company began to pursue a company-wide digital transformation. The transformation would help streamline employees’ business processes and access to the right data at the right time. The Global Distribution Sales team, in particular, is the core department responsible for selling and distributing ITV shows and content to the world.

The company initially implemented an integration tool (Boomi) to connect SQL Server data into Salesforce so that Sales and Finance teams had a single view of their data in a single platform. For five years, however, ITV was able to only take advantage of two integrations. The application service team sought to scale out their Salesforce usage and give more employees the access to even more Salesforce information.

Additionally, the application service team that supports Salesforce only consisted of 3 people who are primarily Salesforce Administrators, not technical developers who can build integrations. As a result, the application service team would hire and rely on consultants to build integrations.

Describe your application innovation strategy and how you executed the strategy. Include details on how SnapLogic played a role in the strategy and execution, including Snaps and other SnapLogic products/features.

The application service team replaced their integration tool with SnapLogic and rebuild the existing Salesforce integrations within 3 days. Salesforce, SQLServer, Oracle, and REST Snaps were used.

Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? (Please include the # of FTEs, any partners or SnapLogic professional services who were involved on the implementation)

Total of 3 internal FTEs were involved

What were the business results after implementing these application integrations? Describe how your company, departments, and/or employees/customers benefit from the application integrations. Include any measurable metrics.

The application service team has increased their confidence in building integrations without support, hence increased their ability to deliver more integrations for the business.

The integrations that were rebuilt would automatically upload and/or update catalog data each day from their License & Rights management system to a SQL Server database and into Salesforce. As a result, sales people can see which licenses or rights are sold in near real-time. The team also connected data from their campaign management system and SQL Server to Salesforce for sales teams to view information on what advertisements are being sold for each channel and digital hub, enabling them to better manage and forecast sales and revenue.

Another example includes ITV’s core catalog, an archive of all their content, was connected to Salesforce in 6 weeks. The editorial metadata of shows within the core catalog is automatically updated in Salesforce, which enriches the existing information hosted in Salesforce. Sales can also obtain catalog data they need within seconds by simply typing in the production number, enabling them to speed up operations and deliver content to clients more quickly. This integration took longer as it was more complex, requiring more complex parameters, exceptions, and logic into the pipelines to help the sales team get the data they needed.

Finally the custom fulfillment management tool was connected to Salesforce so that the application service team wouldn’t need to manually upload spreadsheets that included content files into Salesforce in order to fulfill the sales. This manual process delayed the fulfillment process. The Salesforce Admins then used SnapLogic to link the fulfillment management tool with Salesforce to automate the fulfillment process, sending the content in the right format into Salesforce once the sale was completed.

● Empower 90+ Sales team to gain access to real-time data
● Deliver integration in 3 days