Ergon leverage git-first Salesforce development to scale without compromising speed or quality
Ergon uses Salesforce across their 60 companies, to support a variety of functions and business processes. Initially, Ergon’s Salesforce instance was supported by a team of 4, who were moving changes manually through change sets or the developer console.
Our process was very haphazard — if something was broken we’d go into prod to fix it.
Jack Mazza, Salesforce Development Manager
As demand for customization and complexity grew, Ergon began looking for DevOps solutions that could bring more reliability to increasingly complex development processes and reduce deployment overhead. They evaluated Gearset and Flosum, but chose Gearset for its first-class version control integrations and robust CI/CD pipeline capabilities.
From a team of 4 to 30, Ergon use Gearest to deliver value at scale
The team built their release process around Gearset Pipelines, using CI/CD to move changes from development to QA, through user testing, and into production. Pipelines not only saved Ergon the time and frustration of repetitive, manual deployments, they now have a reliable process for fixing any incidents they encounter in production. Frank Ogutu (Lead DevOps Engineer) called out the “efficiency and collaboration” gains that Ergon has seen as a result of implementing Pipelines.
The transition to Pipelines has been truly amazing — we’re catching issues earlier, can follow pre- and post-deployment steps, and fix any issues that might reach production much easier.
Frank Ogutu, Lead DevOps Engineer
As the business and team has scaled, Pipelines provided the flexibility needed to keep a growing team collaborating and working effectively in parallel without clashing. Having started as a development team of 4, Ergon has leveraged Pipelines to effectively support a team of almost 30 contributors making changes to their Salesforce orgs.
Gearset Pipelines has enabled us to scale really well. The whole team can work in parallel easily and we’ve not had an issue on release day in over nine months. Gearset really is the industry leader for git-first Salesforce development.
Jack Mazza, Salesforce Development Manager
Embedded quality gating and testing with Code Reviews
Since embedding Code Reviews into their release pipeline, Ergon have been able to shift left, reduce deployment failures, and resolve issues quicker. With automated reviews as soon as a PR is opened against dev environments, the Ergon team is no longer hitting late-stage issues with changes and know their releases aren’t introducing poor quality, insecure code to production.
When you have almost 30 people pushing changes and only 2 to 3 people reviewing, they need as much help as they can get. Code Reviews has sped up our review process immensely, by flagging issues straight off the bat and helping us fix them.
Jack Mazza, Salesforce Development Manager
With built-in quality gating and recommended fixes, the Ergon team no longer hit a bottleneck at the review stage and can deliver at pace for the business. The team are also continuing to build out their custom rule set, making Code Reviews specifically tailored to their use case, priorities, and specifications.
Code Reviews helps us catch issues earlier and our deployment success rate has improved massively. With Gearset, we know there won’t be issues when deploying to production.
Frank Ogutu, Lead DevOps Engineer
Seamless collaboration with implementation partners
Gearset’s visual Pipelines made it simple for Ergon and Coastal Cloud to align quickly and adopt a shared release process. Despite working across different teams, they were able to collaborate easily through a unified release process that was adopted by everyone.
We’ve been able to establish a process and collaboration across the teams. Everyone’s now following the same process and pushing in the same direction efficiently.
Jack Mazza, Salesforce Development Manager
Proactive and reactive support that makes a difference
Ergon has partnered with Gearset, leveraging both proactive and reactive support to get maximum benefit from the platform long-term.
To get up and running with Gearset quickly and in a way that suited Ergon’s needs, Gearset’s Onboarding Managers and DevOps Architects were on hand to give guidance and thorough training to the team. To ensure long-term success, the Ergon team and their Gearset Customer Success Manager meet regularly to align on goals, tackle any challenges that have arisen, and keep the team up-to-date with platform updates that align with their aims.
The Gearset team listens to us, wants us to succeed, and cheers us on as we grow and scale.
Frank Ogutu, Lead DevOps Engineer
If the Ergon team hits blockers day-to-day, the Customer Success Engineers are on-hand via the in-app chat to make sure every member of the team is back up and running as quickly as possible.
The in-app chat and support documentation is amazing. To talk to a human and not a bot is tremendous, and they respond within 5 minutes.
Frank Ogutu, Lead DevOps Engineer
