Delivering ROI with DevOps improvements – summit 2022

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Description

Catch up on this webinar, Delivering ROI with DevOps improvements, from the Gearset DevOps Summit 2022. Frank Short (Enterprise Account Manager, Gearset) is joined by Paul Watkeys (Head of Digital Products, Veolia UK & IRE), where they discuss the dramatic DevOps improvements that helped Veolia UK & IRE to deliver massive Salesforce ROI.

Having used Salesforce for years, Veolia UK & IRE adopted Gearset in 2021 as part of a big shakeup to improve their release process. At that time, there was no visibility across teams so work was often duplicated and their 65 sandboxes across 4 orgs were out of sync. This became increasingly difficult as Veolia UK & IRE used a number of different partners and suppliers. Implementing Gearset removed silos, boosted their release times and enabled scalability. For the first year, Veolia UK & IRE forecast at least 500% ROI.

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Transcript

Paul, do we have you?

Hi, Frank. How are you?

I'm well. Thank you. How are you?

Yeah. Very good. Thank you.

Excellent. Should we start off with some introductions?

I can go first.

So I'm Frank Short. I'm an enterprise accounts executive here at Gerset. So I've been at Gerset since the early days, around about five years ago. At the moment, I look after some of our key accounts, including Veolia. Paul?

Yeah. My name is Paul Watkes. I am the, head of digital products for the UK and Ireland, region of Veolia. I've been with the organization now for just over three years. Prior to that, I've been operating within the digital transformation sector as a management consultant for the last eighteen years.

Excellent. So lots of folks attending here around the globe would have heard of Veolia, I think. But just so we're all on the same page, talk to me about Veolia, and the work that you do.

So, Frank, Veolia are, a French multinational organization. We've got two hundred and thirty thousand employees across the globe. We operate in over fifty countries. We primarily deliver ecological transformation services, so environmental services.

So typically, they would be wastewater energy management services.

We, last year, merged with our second biggest competitor, that's SUEZ, so another brand people will probably be familiar with. Although, in the UK and Ireland, that merger is still subject to the CMA. Certainly, for the rest of the world, that's been approved by nineteen different regulators. So we really consider ourselves to be positioned in the primary place to drive ecological transformation and essentially deliver the sustainability goals that have been set by the UN, and that's our purpose really as an organization.

Excellent. And and how do you use Salesforce? How does it support the business today?

So, we use Salesforce globally, specifically, with a lens if you want over the UK and Ireland. We have a multifaceted use of Salesforce. So all the way through our channels from marketing through to sales in our commercial waste sector.

We utilize Salesforce service cloud for our customer service support, so management of cases, routing of live chats, management of customer queries, the delivery of first time resolution.

But we also, quite exciting that use Salesforce as the first fully cloud based end to end waste management system, within the Veolia business. So all the way through from, initial quotation through to invoice, and that includes service delivery, includes chemical analysis, and that's actually for our hazardous waste part of the business, so the most complex waste types that we can deal with.

And as you can imagine, to develop such a system, took lots and lots of Apex code. It took lots and lots of developments, and it's a project that was started in two thousand seventeen with PwC.

It's a multimillion pound investment. And more recently, we have and we'll go on to speak about that later, internalize the development of that platform because we see it has been a key differentiator for us.

And in fact, the platform has been such a success that we already have, Veolia and Middle East who are looking to take on the platform.

We've got interest from Veolia, Argentina, and also, we had been working with Veolia Singapore.

Excellent. And and I know that digital transformation is a big objective for you right now. Can you talk me through the strategy at Veolia for that?

Sure. So, in Veolia, UK and Ireland, certainly in two thousand and seventeen, we started, as sponsored by our CIO, Stuart Stock, our digital new age. And it was an absolute goal of ours to underpin our business optimization to drive data driven decisions.

And in order for us to deliver the sustainability goals of our customers and therefore our ourselves as an organization, you know, we needed to underpin that with a a fully transparent view of, all aspects of our operations. So in the UK and Ireland alone, we have eighty thousand members of staff. We service seven million households either with municipal waste collection, water treatment services. We service eighty thousand businesses all the way from McDonald's to Asda through to the local, news agent that you might find around the corner. So digital transformation for us isn't a key enabler for growth. It's a key enabler for us to maintain market position, but more importantly, it's a key enabler for us to deliver ecological transformation.

Yeah. And we're gonna talk more later about how Gearset has kind of enabled your digital transformation.

But let let's talk about DevOps. So we we started working together a year or so ago.

What was the trigger point for you to go out to the market and start looking at a a DevOps solution?

So I actually started my current role of as head of products in, I think, it was November two thousand and twenty. And one of the first tasks I had to do was really take a a long hard look at how we were performing in our Salesforce area. We always recognize that Salesforce will be a key platform for us and and certainly make a part of our enterprise estate in a considerable way. So we we actually hired a program architect from Salesforce and invested quite heavily.

We worked with Martin Gale, who is a director program architect for a six to nine month period, and we went through everything from creating target operating models to capability maturity assessments. We, delivered a a full set of stakeholder mapping and strategy analysis. And ultimately through that process, which is when we sort of started our, journey on that development of a COE process, We decided that we needed to start to internalize some of our development. I think, you know, we are and it's I I think it's no secret.

We operate, an augmented staffing system, so we have some partners. We have some contractors. We use some employees offshore, onshore. It's a real eclectic mix of different providers.

But what we did want to do was take ownership of our design, our ownership of our deployments, ownership of our code because that's something that had been missing in the past, particularly when you're operating with large, large platinum partners with Salesforce. So, I I think it was through that journey that Martin Gail himself recommended that we take a look at Gearset because we were, struggling along using YAML code. And at the time, we were using Git. I think we had a sandbox nightmare.

We had sixty eight or seventy sandboxes floating around. Everything was out of sync. It was costing us a fortune in dedicated developers just to keep on top of things. We were overriding work.

It was a real nightmare, so became obvious pretty early that we needed something. And then, the product owner for Salesforce at the time, who was also vehemently aligned to the benefits that GearSec could deliver us, was able to sort of push that relationship.

We may have lost Paul.

Are you can you folks hear Paul? Is anyone able to send me a message on the chat?

Oh, sorry. Hello.

Oh, you're back? Good.

I'm back. Apologies. I'm so sorry. No. Might be on his Xbox. I've told him to unplug it.

We lost about ten seconds.

Sorry. Where did we get up to?

I think you were talking about the product owner at the time of those relationships.

So the product owner at the time was also vehemently aligned to us needing to improve our cadence and rigor around deployments and then started that conversation with you, and it's been quite a success ever since.

Yeah. Because you were already on that DevOps journey when you kinda came came to us.

We were. Yeah. Yeah. We we made a bad job of starting to internalize that DevOps process, and, I think, what Gearset was able to provide us with was not just a tool, but almost a framework. So in the in the same way that, utilizing, we mentioned earlier, Bitbucket, I think someone mentioned or Jira or Confluence, gear set to us forms part of a prod process rigor and cadence and actually gave us some fairly good, operating, if you want, instructions, some rules, some mandates, and responsibilities.

So it's been nice then.

Very good.

So if we jump back to the digital transformation, now how how in your mind, how has Giaset supported that, the transformation so far?

So Gear Sets enabled us to invest money where it matters because, the deployments take care of themselves. We are able to, focus, invest now with confidence. It means that we can build and develop stakeholder trust because we are able to deliver iteratively. We're able to deliver things in that product fashion. So we very much work as a fusion partnership service if you want more partner to the business. So we are ultimately, focusing on outcome delivering, and I think Diasat has enabled us to to do that more effectively. I think, in, you know, trust between IS and T or IT and the business is always important in a digital transformation journey.

And Gear Set, being as transparent as it is to use and as reliable has just enabled us to build that trust really.

And and the digital transformation overall to I suppose to folks in on on the call today that are maybe thinking about going on that journey themselves. Are you able to kinda describe the sort of the overall impact and and benefits that you've seen on going through that journey?

Yes. Yep. So, we've absolutely been able to, demonstrate tangible benefits of digital transformation. So whether that is optimization, for example, of routing of our vehicles and that reduces our carbon overhead. We've been able to reduce our fuel costs considerably.

There are other tangible benefits relevant to our business as well, so improving our customers' ability to sort their waste, for example. So, the the the more accurately and the better customers are, the less the ends of the landfill, the less contamination there is, the more material recyclers are available. And for us, all of that is driven through that customer digital experience. So we have a customer hub, for example, that's connected to Salesforce.

We have eighty thousand active users a month. They engage in elearning with us. They engage in, sharing best practice stories as well. So all of that, again, has been enabled through our digital transformation.

And it's fair to say our digital transformation journey, Frank, extends well beyond Salesforce. So we've implemented, for example, Workday, which is an ERP system, and that's replaced SAP for us.

We've had you know, we've implemented Infall as an asset management system, and we've been able to take a lot of the best practices that we've defined within our Salesforce, if you want, center of excellence or what we like to say is a center of excellence and move that and apply that across other technologies too.

We've got onboard computers in every single truck, so we're weighing weigh actively when we lift it. We did GPS matching for bin locations, so we're able to accurately report to our municipal clients, for example, when residents' bins were left out or when they weren't left out. We've got a whole host of onboard capability in terms of route risk assessment. So if, for example, a truck is driving near a school at the end of a school day, it will alert the driver to stop.

It might be outside a post office on Thursday, and it's a pension day, it will remind the driver to look out. So, you know, whether it's from quality of service, whether it's the safety of the organization and the people in it and our customers and the members of the public or through to financial performance, digital transformation has underpinned all of that. I think more specifically, if we look at the pandemic as well, digital transformation enabled two thousand corporate workers to literally work from home the day after a decision of lockdown was made. We were able to maintain our operations without any significant impact.

We operate as an organization, a SATAWAD policy, so that secure anytime, any device, anywhere policy.

We use Chromebooks. We don't use Windows, so we're highly secure from a cyber essentials and cybersecurity perspective. But, again, all of that, you know, was formed from digital transformation. We've closed all of our data centers and moved everything to the cloud, and all of this has happened in the last four to five years.

Yeah. Makes sense. It's really cool to hear that gear set has played some role in that.

Yeah. Absolutely. It has. Yeah.

Yeah. That's nice. So we pivot to ROI. What return on investment are you expecting from your DevOps implementation specifically?

So it's really interesting if we if we just looking through the lens of how much will I save in developer time, that's a simple equation to me. I think we run it through the case study. I'll look at five hundred percent against the cost of what we've invested in gear set. But I think there's other, returns that are more intangible.

So the ability for us to be flexible, the ability for us to not miss out on lost opportunity within the business. We work in a fast changing business with a fast changing demand from our customer base. So whether it's mobilizing, demobilizing, added services, all of that, requires, product iteration, and we we now have that available to us. So it's really difficult to explain what value it brings. All I can say is that it's at least five hundred percent on what we've invested with license fees, but it's more significant than that because it's kind of become a fundamental part of what our customers expect the Veolia service offering to be, and that is to be dynamic, responsive, trustworthy, transparent.

A lot of that comes from our Yep.

For folks in the audience that may be looking to use ROI to to pitch a solution like Gearset to key stakeholders. Paul, can you hear me?

Sorry. I think I've lost you again.

That's alright. I can hear you now. Can you hear me?

Okay. Yes. I can. Sorry. Yeah. I'm back.

That's alright. We're on.

For folks in the audience that are looking maybe to use ROI to pitch a solution like GIS or other tools, to key stock stakeholders in the biz business. You know, what advice would you give them? How would you go about calculating and forecasting ROI?

I think you need to do a baseline assessment of realistically what it costs now. So from a resource management perspective, how much time are you spending in your deployments? How many times the deployments go wrong? What's your success rate?

How much time do you spend creating YAML code and and, or using change sets, for example, was another example provided earlier. So I think there's there's an easy way to quantify what it currently costs you. I think getting into the gear set package and and doing a pilot is the best thing. We started off with one license and then grew to twenty or thirty or forty.

It can rapidly increase. I'd always start there. I think also it's important to map out, the benefits to your senior stakeholders because you're ultimately selling a solution here when you need to get buy in. So for me, again, the ability for me to offer the the five different chief operating officers within the UK a level of commitment to be able to iterate for their service streams was amazing.

And I think being transparent about what the complexities of, DevOps mean and and some of the, you know, the security, issues that you can encounter as well. Giasa has helped us be transparent to our data protection team, enables us to support our c, so our chief information security officer in understanding how our, code is evaluated, how developments are deployed, and what environments exist in what state. So I think you need to look at it holistically, but the very first starting point would be what does it actually cost you today, to develop in house and to and to deploy. And then as I say, all the intangibles like the lost opportunity you've probably found because you haven't been able to do something quick enough or you haven't been able to obtain the trust or gain the trust needed or you've missed the window of opportunity. All of these things aren't insignificant and shouldn't be overlooked Yeah. In my view.

No. I agree. The POC is a good, is a good thing to call out. The GIS has a free trial where you can there there's no limitations to the trial. You can use GIS as you would do as a paying customer. I seem to remember, Paul, we had a very quite extended proof of concept phase, which is, you know, I I think if you're we will help you at GISA anyway to kinda build up ROI together and collaborate on that.

Yeah. And I think I actually, was a fan of folk at the start, we focused on a couple of features. We were having challenges moving data, if you remember, between our old hazardous waste system into the new one. And then, actually, the use of deploying, configuration code came after. So, and then I think we were looking at data backup solutions, and you've been able to, you know, support us with that proof of concept and trial because we all work in that iterative product way, and it always requires let's get a proof of concept to demo and build off the back. So I don't see why the assessment of a a DevOps tool should be any different to that.

That's right. I remember you the the the initial use case was around moving data as you said, and I think you're actually one of the first customers to move on to our, pipelines pilot as well. So that's how quickly that kind of moved through into the full DevOps and CICD package.

Excellent. So I'd like to finish, if I can, just, around sustainability.

Veolia is kind of big around sustainability.

So the ecological transformation is another initiative at Veolia.

Are you able to explain, you know, what ecological transformation means, and how your digital transformation, which guess has placed a role in, we've spoken about that, has kinda supported that initiative?

Absolutely. So, just to give you an exact and I'm just gonna read off the screen. So our purpose probably best explains this. So Veolia's purpose is to contribute to human progress by firmly committing to the sustainable development goals set by the UN to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.

We've lost you again, I think. Hopefully, Paul will come back in.

Battle climate change. That is our absolute goal.

We do that through education. We do that through a unique combination of technology, unique business processes, but we do it through a mass purpose. Every single Veolia employee partner, I would include Diasat, in this as well, are resources. We are resourcing the world for the future.

We have an obligation not just for our current population, but for future generations and to the world itself to, you know, take back some of the damage that we've, we've we've done as mankind. So, you know, for us, we are all about where can we find efficiencies, where can we, reduce carbon footprints of our customers. We are absolutely a turnkey sustainability partner.

How can we ensure that we recover from waste reusable materials? How can we educate?

And I think digital transformation, is the enabler to that. We wouldn't be able to do it at scale. We wouldn't be able to do it in coordination with other business units across the world. And it's that power of having that presence that ultimately puts us in that, if you want, world champion position.

It's not just about our size, our revenue, our financial performance. It's actually about what we're delivering and how much carbon we reduce and how much waste we recycle and how much water we clean and, all of the other things that we deliver as an organization. So I don't think there is an ultimate solution to everything, but we know we can find a solution with the right minds, the right hearts, and the right endeavors. So digital transformation is the tool that underpins all of that.

It's our collaboration tool. It's our visibility reporting we wanna be, and we are a data driven business. We understand that we need in such a complicated world, with such complicated customers, in such complicated markets, to have visibility to make decision making right, and we need to make quick decision making in order to face what is an impending disaster for the world.

And I think it's interesting because they're they're two very different initiatives in a way, but they kinda tie together really nicely.

And I think it's particularly interesting if you think about this, maybe folks in the audience that are thinking about building up an internal proposal for solutions like Gear Set or other tools. If you can tie back that spend to some of the bigger objectives of the business, I think you've got quite compelling argument.

And especially if you can if you can double that down with ROI and you've calculated and forecasted it.

So just a little thing to take home for some of the folks on the call today. Think about the bigger business objectives and how Salesforce DevOps, which feels like this kind of smaller thing actually transcends and, and moves into some of these bigger business objectives. Does that make sense?

I think it does. And I just, suggest the same thing again. Strategy mapping is an excellent process. It's one that Salesforce, do all the way from, strategy objective down to lead feature delivery, and if you think that, is enabling all of that. So, again, work with your Salesforce customer success teams, define a strategy map to a capability map, and then use that as part of your business, case and your proposal, and I'm sure you'll you'll get great success.

Perfect. Well, thanks, Paul. Thanks for your time. I we lost you at the ecological transformation, Elizabeth. I think your son was on the Xbox again, but we got nearly all of it.

Apologies. And and please feel free to look at our website, and I'm happy to, appreciate the the the terrible connection, but happy to, to to take questions. Or, Frank, if you've got anyone in particular that's got questions at a later point, happy to make some time because I do passionately believe that has, a future certainly, to support lots of businesses as it has done for for me.

Thanks, Paul. Excellent. We'll open up to any questions, and over to you, Melissa.

Thank you so much, Frank and Paul.

That was fascinating to hear about the digital transformation over at Veolia, and it sounds like you're getting some real ROI out of it. So we do have some time to take a couple questions, which I'll go over now.

So what ended up happening to those seventy plus sandboxes? Did you end up reducing the number of Salesforce full copy and partial copy sandboxes once you switched to a DevOps model?

Yep. So, we probably, we have now reduced those fifty five to about twenty. We have, quite a complex DevOps model, and and we're just talking about the hazardous waste development here. We also have a new commercial org build that's happening now that has, I think we've got, seven developer boxes, and then we've got a couple of, promotional environments as well. So, we absolutely have reduced them down now. It took some time, because, obviously, there was some valuable development sitting sparsely across them and to bring it all together was quite difficult, but we're much more rigorous in our, process now.

Great. Thank you. Another question is, if you went through the process again, is there anything you'd do differently?

I would have probably spoke to more customers before because I think there's a lot to learn from shared experience, and I think the community in general, the DevOps community are happy to engage and help. I think sessions like today were useful. We didn't really engage at this level with Gear Set. We've, you know, we found the tool and and and cracked on. Maybe if we'd have had some conversations, we could have got a bit of a head start, but, nevertheless, it's been successful. So, I think there's always things you can do differently, but I think broadly, we've we've done it in the right order. And, yeah, it seems to be working touch wood.

Thank you.

Someone asked that they see it's interesting that after a feature is committed to a QA branch, deploy this deploys changes to all sandboxes to keep it in sync. I understand you can do that with a CI job.

Yep. And that's what we've been, I think we moved pretty quickly, Frank, into that.

Yeah. You you you the earlier you're using pipelines, one of the early adopters of pipelines. So you're describing the back propagation of changes into into sandboxes to keep everything in sync.

Next question. Where do you see your DevOps journey going next?

I would like to, grassroots develop the future generations of DevOps. I absolutely, think that as an organization, we need to possess that capability.

I think that the longer we operate successfully, the more I can move the stack of augmentation model to an in house model.

I think that there are other tools as well now, and platforms that would benefit from DevOps. So for example, we do a lot of work on in for an asset management system, and we do work with Workday. So moving on from Salesforce, I think we'll be able to support different parts of the business and different different platforms. But, yeah, my my main focus now is to start to bring in apprentices, graduates, and start to drain sorry, train that in house because it's a costly market.

I'm sure you all suffer the same thing. The Salesforce ecosystem is white hot. It's expensive. The pay rates of contractors are huge.

Salary expectations are huge. So future proofing to me now is about, utilizing, what are considerable technical skills that our apprentices of today and graduates possess and and start to get them, aligned to to rigorous and and well performing DevOps processes.

Another question is, what are you thinking about Salesforce after ten years, and how will it help you to the next generation?

I see Salesforce as, improving its capability offering. I think, for example, field services is a key piece for us in terms of engineer management. I've been working closely with colleagues at Thames Water who have had massive success We feel services will be looking to deploy the same potentially across Northern Europe as well into our Benelux territory for the management of engineers that work on engines and CHP plants and water sites.

We've invested heavily, recently in marketing cloud as well, so we see that as progress from our use of Pardot.

I just think that the Salesforce business model is excellent. I think that it will be the primary CRM platform and beyond.

We work closely with the foresters and gartners of this world to take strategic guidelines and, guidance and advice, and we can always expect to see in that top right hand corner, Salesforce, and I don't expect anything to change. I think Salesforce, need to do something to help with the cost of, and the rates of pay in the market, but I think, you know, that stand for us as an ecosystem to do as well. So, again, what will keep it viable is bringing in that crash route development capability, in house.

Looks like we have time for one more question.

Do you move all edits including schema changes and basic admin updates from custom labels to flows through Git and source control management? And how does deploying those items differ from Apex and Lightning component code files?

We use Bitbucket now, not Git.

And, again, the capabilities and configurations of Diaset depending on, what the developer's been working on with Devon, what we are promoting through. So, it's kind of a need by need basis that would be defined. By the way, guys, I'm not a developer.

So, maybe that's, something that we can But I think the vast majority, yeah, the vast majority of changes now are are moved into Git via GearSat.

So the historically, I think some changes made by the admin team may have been made org to org.

They are now going through gears, I believe. So that's that's a big one.