Description
Discover the latest data on DevOps adoption and performance for Salesforce teams in the manufacturing industry. Rob Cowell, DevOps Advocate at Gearset, walks you through findings from the State of Salesforce DevOps report.
Find out:
- Why Salesforce teams are needing to handle greater complexity
- How well DevOps aligns with company cultures in manufacturing
- The ROI of Salesforce DevOps for manufacturing companies
Learn more:
Transcript
Make a start on the state of Salesforce DevOps for the manufacturing industry.
So we designed the state of Salesforce DevOps survey to gain as much knowledge as we can about how real teams are adopting and experiencing DevOps.
This year, over twelve hundred Salesforce professionals took part in the survey and helped us to identify some of those key trends in the ecosystem, as well as pinpointing particular pain points or blockers that teams are facing.
In today's webinar, we're going to delve into the data from Salesforce professionals, specifically for the manufacturing industry.
So for those that don't know me yet, I am Rob Cowell. I'm one of the DevOps advocates here at Gearset, and I have a mission to bring some guidance and insight to folks in the Salesforce community and hopefully to spread the joy of DevOps to all of you. So with that said, let's dive straight into some of the key findings of this year's State of Salesforce DevOps report and see those key elements that relate to the manufacturing sector.
So when we think about the current state of play within the ecosystem, the continued growth of Salesforce's importance to business stands front and center.
An enormous ninety nine percent of manufacturing companies consider Salesforce to be key to achieving at least some of their business goals, and fifty five percent to all business objectives.
Like other industries, however, demand on their Salesforce teams has grown. For manufacturers, this is due to having more apps, packages, and certainly more complex business needs.
DevOps combines people, process, and tooling to manage that complexity, which only continues to grow.
This ever expanding complexity coupled with a deficit in training in some key areas is definitely an area that we want to be addressing across the board. Although, as we'll see in a moment, manufacturing does have a better commitment to training than most industries.
In manufacturing, you can streamline workflows by fostering collaboration and cross functional cooperation.
You can implement the right tools to enhance efficiency and reliability.
You can use automation and tools at each stage of that DevOps lifecycle.
And by employing version control, continuous integration, automated testing, and deployment tools for a smooth and consistent process.
Ensuring data data security and compliance by leveraging sandboxes to isolate environments and repositories for version control.
Establish proper governance to facilitate transparency, traceability, and teamwork.
And it's this last point, teamwork, that truly is the cornerstone of robust DevOps culture.
Now teams that train regularly will outperform those who don't, and the manufacturing industry is prioritizing training more than other industries, with thirty three percent receiving training about Salesforce processes once a month and forty six percent once a quarter.
Resources such as Trailhead and our very own DevOps Launchpad have helped boost that training with on demand and free learning.
Areas that we've seen particularly of interest in people's learning all seem to adopt a theme of moving towards automation, which aligns to technical goals within the business.
Thirty seven percent of respondents have implemented CICD and forty nine percent plan to.
With automated testing, forty four percent have implemented it and forty two percent plan to.
And even getting started with source control, forty three percent have implemented it with forty eight percent planning to.
Now all of these key factors are key elements of a mature DevOps process, and it's very encouraging to see active engagement with leveling up processes and continuous improvement.
To excel in the manufacturing industry, it's crucial to emphasize individual excellence within your team. So encourage your team members to continuously develop their skills and expertise by staying up to date with Salesforce best practice and pursuing relevant certifications.
They can make significant contributions to the DevOps process.
Empower your team members to explore resources like Trailhead modules and engage in peer to peer learning sessions.
This continuous learning mindset will enhance their knowledge and abilities, enabling them to deliver high quality solutions.
But at the next level up, effective team coordination is also vital in this industry, where complex processes and multiple stakeholders are common.
Foster a collaborative environment that encourages open communication, idea sharing, and seamless coordination amongst team members.
Encourage regular stand ups, retrospectives, and cross functional collaboration to ensure alignment and foster a sense of shared responsibility.
By working together towards these common goals, your team can streamline Salesforce DevOps efforts and achieve better outcomes.
Moving up the kind of pyramid of responsibility there, it's important to obtain business sponsorship and support is crucial for Salesforce Salesforce DevOps.
So engage those key stakeholders, including executives, business analysts, and product owners, and work to connect the dots between those business goals and the DevOps practices.
Great work alone without getting that executive sponsorship is a difficult road, and it's hard to sustain.
So it seemed critical to involve those business stakeholders throughout the process, providing regular updates on progress and demonstrating the value and the impact of your work.
Creating a culture of collaboration and shared ownership will enhance the success of your DevOps initiatives.
Now in the manufacturing industry, where reliability and scalability are vital, it's important to strike a balance between relying on those individual heroics and implementing official efficient tools and processes.
Tools and processes are enablers, not the sole drivers of success.
But by promoting the systematic use of tools such as version control, automated testing, and continuous integration and deployment, you can achieve greater success.
By implementing best practices and minimizing human error, these tools ensure consistency, repeatability, and reduce the dependence on specific individuals.
This approach fosters efficiency, stability, and allows team members to focus on those higher value activities or deliverables.
Establishing a basic governance process involving the development teams, testers, business sponsors, and other stakeholders is also essential for driving a consistent DevOps rhythm.
This can start with setting the ground rules and expectations and implementing measures to align them.
In some of the largest manufacturing companies that have multiple lines of business, multiple systems, and potentially multiple Salesforce orgs, creating a structure around all of this becomes even more critical.
With more clouds than you can count and an increasing number of end users, it's more crucial than ever that Salesforce is able to work for teams of all sizes.
The increased demand has made the release process for some teams more difficult.
Fifty six percent of respondents in this industry have attributed this to the team lacking experience and forty one percent to limited buy in from the team.
But it's interesting to note that this is higher than in other industries. The overall survey results showed that forty one percent of companies felt the team lacked experience, and twenty eight percent had limited buy in from teams. So there's definitely some areas to focus on within this industry.
Moving on to financial matters, here we can see the breakdown of exactly how much money teams say they're saving.
Sixty seven percent estimated that their monthly ROI from Salesforce DevOps was over ten thousand dollars, Definitely an above average rate compared to the other industries at fifty nine percent.
Now you'll see here that twenty seven percent don't actually know the dollar amount that they're saving. This can be for a few reasons. For instance, the complexity of working in a large enterprise. It can mean that it's really challenging to nail down a figure or that the primary value for those teams is accelerating digital transformation, and it's harder to attribute a dollar value to the part that DevOps plays in that.
But the main thing, however, is that even those teams that aren't sure on the dollar return amount are definitely still seeing an ROI from their processes even if they can't pin a figure onto it.
Now these figures should go a long way to try and to convince decision makers on the value of DevOps, not only making them sit up and listen, but hopefully inspiring action to take the next or maybe even the first step on iterating on those processes, methodologies, or tooling.
In the manufacturing industry, IT departments have traditionally been viewed as cost centers.
However, with Salesforce DevOps, you have the opportunity to shift that perception and position IT as a strategic driver of value.
DevOps enables faster delivery of high quality solutions, improves customer experiences, and drives business outcomes unique to the manufacturing industry.
So by showcasing the value that your DevOps practices bring, you can change the perception of IT and position it as a valuable asset that drives success.
Across each of the business focus areas we show here, Salesforce DevOps can have a part to play.
It accelerates digital transformations through continuous integration and continuous delivery.
It enhances collaboration, creating a unified development pipeline, which promotes systems and process consolidation.
Continuous delivery in DevOps allows businesses to adapt swiftly to changing requirements, which improves the flexibility for both internal and external needs.
DevOps optimizes workloads by automating tasks and reducing rework, which may potentially reduce the need for additional hiring.
Salesforce DevOps also reduces the total cost of ownership by improving collaboration, reducing that rework, and automating those tasks.
It can enhance security by integrating it into the full software development life cycle and enabling quicker identification and fixing of any vulnerabilities.
And finally, by minimizing waste in development processes and aligning with Salesforce's own commitment to sustainability, DevOps can contribute to business sustainability.
Now again, in the manufacturing industry, the systems and processes that support operations are often mission critical.
This means that any downtime or issues can have significant consequences.
DevOps plays a crucial role in ensuring that reliability, availability, and performance of these mission critical systems.
DevOps practices promote resilience by implement implementing robust processes and technologies that can withstand disruptions.
By adopting practices like automated monitoring, fault tolerance, and rapid recovery, you can minimize the impact of system failures or outages, enduring continuity of operations in the face of unexpected events.
Migrating to new systems or platforms can be complex or risky in this industry.
DevOps provides a structured approach to manage those migrations effectively By leveraging automated deployment processes, version control, and thorough testing, you can mitigate the risks and ensure a smooth transition to new systems while maintaining the integrity of your critical data.
In these mission critical manufacturing systems, thorough testing is vital to ensure accuracy, reliability, and possibly regulatory compliance in some sectors.
DevOps emphasizes continuous testing through that throughout the development life cycle, enabling comprehensive quality assurance.
By adopting automated testing tools, you can minimize manual errors, ensure consistent test coverage, and improve the overall quality of your solutions.
Systems that require robust disaster recovery mechanisms to protect critical data can ensure business continuity by regular and rigorous practice runs.
These DevOps practices can help establish reliable and efficient disaster recovery processes.
By automating backup and recovery procedures, implementing redundant systems, and regularly testing the disaster recovery plan, you can minimize downtime and recover quickly in the case of a disaster.
Manual steps in critical processes pose a risk of errors and delays. DevOps promotes the automation of these repetitive and error prone tasks.
By utilizing tools and technologies for continuous integration, deployment automation, and infrastructure as code, you can reduce that manual effort, improve accuracy, and enhance the efficiency of your operations.
And if we think back to the earlier figures on Teams plans to adopt and train in this automation, CRICD and more, we can definitely see that there's an alignment between these mission critical needs and active plans to address those gaps.
DevOps, of course, is is more important than ever to enable the business goals to be met.
Manufacturing companies implementing DevOps are seeing those huge benefits, saving time, increasing productivity, improving release quality, and releasing more frequently.
As you can see from the stats here, improvement across the board, but still lots of room for growth.
But achieving maturity in DevOps practices is an ongoing process that evolves with the unique challenges of the manufacturing industry. It involves a gradual adoption of best practices, automation, and cultural changes.
Getting started with DevOps in the manufacturing industry can be daunting due to complex processes and regulatory requirements.
Teams should start with a specific project or area that can benefit from these DevOps practices, such as order management or goods inward tracking, and gradually expanded out to other areas.
It's important to focus on manufacturing specific challenges, such as a commitment to quality delivery and timeliness when designing your DevOps approach.
Engage with key stakeholders, include the appropriate teams across the whole business, and ensure alignment and address any concerns that they may have.
By demonstrating the value and mitigating risks, you can gain support and momentum for broader DevOps adoption.
Take time to be deliberate.
Capturing and sharing impact and laying out the next three to six steps to improve will go a long way. And when you look back in a year or two, the distance that you'll have traveled will be worth that investment.
Not to mention, hopefully, the reduced stress on the teams.
So I hope that real world practical advice like that will resonate with some of the folks here on the call today, and that it reinforces some of the figures and findings that we've discussed from the report.
Of course, there's plenty more insight like that to uncover from the full state of Salesforce DevOps report. And you can download that for free using the QR code on the screen now.
And don't worry if you're not able to catch that code right now. You you it's going to depend where you're watching and how you're watching. But links to the report will be available in our catch up email where you'll find a recording of today's session as well.
So with that done, we do have some time to pick up some of the q and a that folks may have had from the session. I know Holly's been monitoring the chat for me while I've been presenting, but we'll see what we've got, that's outstanding that I can hopefully help with.
Let's have a quick look.
Okay. We have a question on how to measure some of that DevOps performance beyond the release frequency. And that's a good question. I think there's a couple of aspects that come into play there. I think first of all, is take stock of where you are today. It's, you know, you you can't measure improvement unless you know where you started.
So I think, you know, there's there's certainly some key benchmarks to look at there. You know, release frequency as as per the question is is a good place to start, but I think, you know, there is a, an element of quality over quantity, which is particularly resonant with the, the manufacturing industry that has its own QA processes for core business. I think, you know, as well as looking at how often, you know, how frequent your releases are, look at how many of those releases potentially succeed first time, how many of them for, for each release, you know, do you have to kind of do some rework?
And that rework can be for a couple of reasons. It could be that the business is saying, that's not quite right in terms of what we want to achieve. It's functional and, you know, there's no errors, but actually we've, we've thought about it a bit more or it could actually be those errors. You know, we're not infallible.
I'm I'm an ex developer myself. I will put my hand up. Mistakes happen. But again, you know, DevOps practice and measuring that that quality of releases is just as important as the the quantity of releases.
And I think over time, one feeds into the other because the more successful you are with getting releases in first time, the more frequent you can actually get releases in. So I hope that that answers some of that question.
So another question that's come in is, where to find some training resources for the whole team, not just developers.
I, I am somewhat guilty of this as a, as I say, I am an ex developer. It's very easy to get caught up in the in the technical aspect, but I think DevOps is for Salesforce as a practice is is something that the entire team needs to buy into. I think if everyone's kind of working in the same way, whether that's declarative changes, flows, field updates, etcetera, or whether it is that that heavy duty code lifting. Everyone needs to be kind of aligned to that same process.
So to help with that, as I mentioned earlier, there's, there's a couple of great resources. Trailhead from Salesforce, of course, has some great vendor agnostic advice.
Our own DevOps launchpad, while it comes from us here at Gearset, we do try to make that also somewhat vendor agnostic.
And we, you know, we make sure that we're teaching principles rather than just how to use a product.
Of course, if you want to deep dive into that, there are some gear set specific modules in there as well. But we're certainly not pushing that hard. What we want to do is make sure that folks are educated on the concepts, best practice, and how to approach things. And it's as much the culture and the business process as much as it is the, the tools there. So dev ops launchpad dot com, is is where that lives. I I have my launchpad t shirt today, entirely coincidental.
But, yeah, that's a that's a great place to start. And, of course, you know, we we have lots of webinars and sessions, that contribute to that as well. So do look out for me and my colleague, Jack, my fellow advocate. We, we are on quite a few webinars. We do quite a few events, and we're also happy to reach any questions. So do feel free to find us online as well.
So just having a look at the questions. I am not seeing any more. We have a few more minutes left. So now's the chance folks if there's any of those burning questions at the last minute to, to drop into the chat or into the q and a box now. I shall give it another minute to take us up to twenty five past the hour.
And otherwise, I think we are looking pretty good.
Okay, nothing coming in at the moment.
Alrighty. Well, we had a good couple of questions at the end there, some nice sort of broad topics, but I think useful ones as well.
So all that remains for me here at, GearSat HQ in Cambridge, UK is to thank you for joining our call today. Wish you all well with the next steps on your Salesforce DevOps journey, and hope we'll see you again on future webinars.
Thank you so much.
Bye, everyone.
