Case study
How to improve business processes and make reporting less complicated with Salesforce and Zuora?
When a company develops rapidly, handling business processes becomes more important than ever. New processes are necessary to implement. Thus, there are more and more reports to prepare on a regular basis. Sometimes, this task may be a bit tricky, especially in complex and sophisticated industries like automotive. Recently, one of the automotive companies has asked us for help in improving processes and facilitating reporting.
ABOUT THE CLIENT
International automotive company
The client is an international automotive company that has been processing information about vehicles for over thirty years now. They provide their clients with an intuitive database full of data like the history of cars, dates and types of repairs, etc. To search for the information, you just need to enter the VIN number. This is extremely useful when you e.g. plan to import a car from the US. The company has been operating for more than 30 years and now, they are one of the leaders in the industry. They offer comprehensive reports, collaborate with registration authorities, law enforcement agencies, insurance companies, and inspection stations in several countries. The client also educates their customers. This all has led to rapid development.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The purpose of the project
New services, the increase of the number of customers – those brought the necessity to facilitate some processes, as well as to organize and manage reports, and create a new reporting system.
Implementation
The entire project started with an in-depth analysis of the customer needs. The company had already had numerous systems and existing solutions that had to be integrated with new solutions. We decided that Zuora would be the best option. Briefly speaking, Zuora is an enterprise-class software considered to be a bridge between the CRM system and ERP system. The tool allows you to manage the subscriptions system easily and intuitively.
As our client operates in the subscription model, Zuora has turned out to be a perfect software for recurring billing and managing subscriptions. It speeds up billing operations, makes it easy to segment customers and configure automating schedules, delivers complex calculations, and provides numerous ready-to-use invoice templates. Settlements in Zuora could be easily integrated with Salesforce. It is worth mentioning that we managed to effectively integrate both tools (integrations were implemented in both Salesforce and Zuora).
At the end of the day, we managed to expand the existing community with a reporting feature, which is a very relevant step forward. At every stage of the project, we closely collaborated with the client, immediately responding to their needs when necessary.
CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
Challenges we have faced
Huge amount of data that had to be moved to the Zuora platform
The client works with huge amounts of data every day. This caused many serious synchronization problems. Such an amount of data made it difficult to integrate Salesforce with Zuora. We decided to use batches for data synchronization, and it turned out to be an effective solution. Batches based on API enabled us to integrate large amounts of data with the Zuora platform, as well as made it easier to manage the data later on, during the next phases.
The already existing community that has used multiple integrations
Usually, adjusting to existing solutions is much more difficult than building a new one. In this case, we were forced to stick to an already existing community. It had existed with many integrations so we had to find a solution that would let us avoid adding unwanted duplicate data. We achieved the desired outcome using the deduplication feature. We used some Salesforce built-in mechanisms to get rid of duplicate data and prevent creation of such data in the future.
Zuora itself
Integration issues were not everything. We also found it problematic working with the platform itself. Zuora may cause issues, especially at the beginning. However, we dispelled the doubts and provided the client with comprehensive training on the platform.
Welcome
cooperation
