2021 Business Impact Award Nomination: Carfax: Optimize customer experiences with Salesforce and NetSuite integration

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Describe your business and technical use case(s) and the challenges the business had:

The business use case is: The finance team needed to merge customer information, invoices and subscriptions between Salesforce and NetSuite so that they have the most up to date information to process the invoices.

Business Challenge: Sales reps needed up-to-date information on Salesforce whenever they met with a dealer in real-time. However, the information on Salesforce wasn’t updated with Netsuite information, such as any outstanding balance or the type of subscription the dealer had, which made it difficult for sales reps to have comprehensive discussions with dealers. This resulted in more meetings with the dealers and the inability to enhance engagements with the customer.

Technical Challenge: The batch jobs Carfax had in place were cumbersome to maintain and they did not give sales reps the information they needed when they needed it. Though the main challenge was a lot of people owned many systems and did not have the knowledge to do ETL work. As a result, they needed a platform to help sync the information between NetSuite and Salesforce with little to no ETL background.

Describe your strategy and execution to solve the business challenge. Include details on how SnapLogic played a role in the strategy and execution, including Snaps and other SnapLogic products/features:

The two ETL architects used SnapLogic to build out this particular NetSuite and Salesforce integration. The architects primarily used the Salesforce, NetSuite, MySQL, PostGres Snap Packs along with a few Core Snaps (Binary, Transform Snaps). After reading through documentation and working with the customer success manager, the ETL architects were confident in building out this integration.

Snaps used for this integration and others: SFDC, NetSuite, Core Snaps (Binary, Transform Snap Pack), MySQL, PostGres, Script Snap (exotic use cases).

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

SnapLogic was first deployed by 2 FTEs (ETL architects)

What were the business results after executing the strategy?

The initial goal is to have NetSuite and Salesforce data synchronized 1-2 times per day. Once integration was completed, the data synchronized every 15 minutes, providing the sales team with near real-time information.

With this near real-time capability, the sales team is also able to detect ‘early warning’ where the customer no longer has access to information from Carfax Within 15 minutes, the sales team can fix it, leading to increased customer and dealer confidence and satisfaction.

Having information quickly makes an impact for sales and Carfax’s bottom line.

What was the ROI you gained from executing the strategy? Include any additional, measurable metrics (ie. productivity improvement, speed improvement, %reduced manual inefficiencies, etc.)

The planned Salesforce and NetSuite integration was projected to take about 1.5-2 years to complete. NetSuite, at the time, was new in the organization, so that added risks to the integration project. Though SnapLogic was projected to be ~5% of the overall solution, it turned out to be 25% of the solution, meaning that SnapLogic helped mitigate risks from the project (The team at the time was limited in ETL knowledge). With SnapLogic, the integration was completed in a few weeks.

Once the NetSuite and Salesforce integration was complete, the Finance and Sales team can retrieve subscription information and update it on Salesforce (Expired subscriptions) via triggered tasks, and gain accurate account data and demographic information every 15 minutes. Millions of records are generated in NetSuite and they get sent out to customers at the end of each month as monthly invoices. Additionally, any information from their legacy Oracle database can be moved to NetSuite in 5 minutes.

Another example with a high ROI is when Xactly retrieves commission information from Salesforce as an SFTP file. This process can take up to 3 weeks. With an integration via SnapLogic, the process of allocating a certain amount of commissions over to Xactly only takes within 24 hours, speeding up the process of paying the right commissions for sales people.

Anything else you would like to add?

Once this integration was complete, the Finance team was more confident and asked the two ETL architects to do more. For example, the Finance team would dedicate 4-5 days chasing and combining SOX reports for audits each month, including screenshots and data from various systems. The ETL architects were able to build an automated process where the Finance team can obtain the SOX report within 15-20 minutes each month, and no humans need to be involved in querying all the data for the reports.

Another use case that the team worked for the Finance team is to upload files with large volumes of data from Salesforce Wave (Data Analytics tool) into Box. Previously, the Finance team would take about 1.5 days to manually complete the process before they can identify anomalies in invoices and send the updated invoices to customers. With an integration pipeline, the manual process is eliminated where the Finance team can automatically find the files uploaded on Box.