Plan International USA is a nonprofit organization that is fighting for girls’ rights. Together with their partners, they tear down the gender inequality barriers to empower girls and secure their lives for a bright future ahead. Along with this noble cause, Plan International USA has also pledged to put a full stop to the cycle of poverty in more than 50 developing countries.
Background
Plan International USA houses databases of numerous social benefiting campaigns and this data was managed through their Salesforce CRM. They use Luminate Online to manage their fundraising and marketing campaigns. Informatica was used as a middleware to handle the business logic between Salesforce and Luminate Online and enable communication between these two systems.
Challenges
- Informatica Expertise: Plan International USA was looking for a set of professionals who could carry out a discovery session to comprehend the codes present in Informatica and replicate them in Salesforce without having to use any integration tools.
- Hard Cut-off Date: There was a hard cut-off date for Go Live as Informatica licenses were about to expire and the client did not want to use Informatica anymore.
- Documentation: There were no clear documents to understand the existing functionality of Informatica guides and processes.
Solution
- DemandBlue’s advisory team worked closely with the client’s stakeholders to understand the processes and client’s expectations. Since client did not want a middleware in the setup, the team decided to directly integrate Salesforce with Luminate Online. After accomplishing a direct integration, all the workflows that the client identified as challenging were automated.
- DemandBlue team leveraged the expertise of their internal Informatica team to reverse-engineer the Informatica logic and prepare the technical design document.
- Most of the functionalities previously achieved using Informatica were built directly in Salesforce by leveraging out-of-the-box features wherever possible.
- DemandBlue team also implemented a few solutions and automations to solve client’s business pain points identified during the discovery sessions.
- Client’s end users were trained properly to leverage the maximum out of Salesforce, its automations, and integrations.
Result
- Eliminated client’s dependency on a middleware by directly integrating Luminate Online with Salesforce.
- The new integration was accomplished seamlessly without any downtime.
- By retaining existing UI and functionalities and providing adequate training, team ensured there was good adoption of the system by the end users.
- The new functionalities developed by DemandBlue allowed for personalization in the client’s marketing campaign.
- Solution implemented did not require much user training (as existing look and feel was retained wherever possible).
- Cost on the purchase and renewal of middleware license was eliminated.
- Resource downsizing was possible since an additional team to maintain the middleware was not needed.
