Arvest use Gearset to reliably deliver changes at speed and rebuild trust in Salesforce
Salesforce has become a key part of Arvest’s tech stack since implementation in 2020. Not only does Salesforce enable Arvest to track sales and customer journeys, it’s a key part of their marketing activities and helps ensure they’re keeping to the relevant financial regulations. More recently, they’ve been able to leverage Salesforce for loan origination too.
We spoke to Oscar Hemmelgarn, Salesforce Product Development Manager at Arvest Bank, about managing a team of 3 developers and 4 admins who support 3,600 end users.
Arvest bank started by using change sets to customize their two production orgs. Changes were deployed org-to-org from dev environments to a full copy sandbox before release to production.
Changes were tracked in a custom object but it was impossible to see when environments were out of sync without doing a manual review. As the team and company grew, it became more difficult to manage changes and environments, and they began to notice that they were overwriting each other’s work.
Without the ability to roll back changes, it could take a whole day and sometimes longer to correct a faulty deployment, resulting in late nights and extra hours for the team.
As feature requests started to take longer to action, the business wasn’t seeing the full value of their Salesforce investment. When Oscar joined Arvest in 2022 he started looking for a solution. Having worked with Gearset before, he knew it could solve these pains.
Long-term success with cross-department partnerships
After deciding to implement Gearset, Arvest has worked with a variety of teams across Gearset.
Working with their onboarding manager, the Arvest team were able to move faster than they expected. They were also able to set up SSO, to ensure compliance with the relevant security regulations from the start. Oscar mentioned that “we were so well supported throughout onboarding that we’ve not had to get additional help — but we know the support team are there if we need them”.
“Usability is seamless — you can go in with no familiarity yet be able to compare orgs and identify what’s out of sync, then deploy rapidly.”
Admins and devs are now able to work together easily and get visibility into org differences in a matter of clicks. Having previously had no set release window, Arvest bank is able to deliver a reliable release schedule, getting changes out faster and ultimately delivering better support to their customers.
With automatic monitoring of their orgs, Arvest can quickly identify issues and implement resolutions quickly. Plus, with delegated org access, the team easily avoids bottlenecks when people are out of office — delivering what the business needs without compromising on work-life balance.
Jira integration and automatic deployment reports have made reporting and auditing a breeze — and they’re looking forward to getting set up with the reporting API too.
“You can set it and forget it, so it’s one less thing I have to worry about which gives us the time to focus on building what our end users need.”
Post-implementation, Oscar and the team have worked closely with their dedicated Customer Success Manager and the Gearset product team. They’ve been able to get hands-on with features before they became GA, including Flow Navigator, and provide feedback that they’ve already seen come to life in the app.
“Because of the focus on user-driven development of the product, Gearset gets better almost daily. The partnership with customers is really key to that”
Scaling DevOps processes: a solution that grows with you
Since implementing Gearset, Arvest have been able to stick to a release cycle of every two weeks, delivering value to end users quickly and rebuilding the trust that was lost from previously slow, error-prone releases. And they don’t plan to stop there.
Oscar and the team are already taking the first steps towards implementing a source-driven workflow and want to reach a comprehensive DevOps process that will allow them to release on a daily basis.
Having expanded their license count twice since their initial implementation, Oscar is confident that Gearset delivers the functionality his team needs to reach their DevOps goals and maximize their Salesforce ROI.
“Gearset is something we can grow with and that gives us flexibility — I just wish I could use it with other platforms too!”
