WEKA have made CPQ deployments a breeze
Avoiding manual deployments
WEKA’s Salesforce technical team is based in Israel, with their Sales, Marketing and Customer Success teams based around the world. Though their technical team swiftly handles day-to-day Salesforce development work, in 2022 they began to question whether Change Sets was efficient and accurate enough for their metadata deployments.
At the same time, WEKA began implementing CPQ, which presented a new set of challenges. Katia Gleber, Business Applications Manager at WEKA, explained that they initially implemented CPQ using Salesforce’s native Data Loader. However, WEKA’s development team “really didn’t want to go there for their routine CPQ deployments, as using Data Loader was a manual and slow process that could take up to five working days.
The search for a deployment solution
Katia began to search for a new deployment solution, frustrated by the painful process of Change Sets and other deployment tools that require admins and developers to remember what’s changed and select all of the components and dependencies in a deployment package.
Once Katia began a free trial of Gearset, she realized that it gave far more visibility over the entire process. By showing a side-by-side comparison of all changed, new and deleted items between source and target orgs, Gearset gives WEKA clarity and enables them to build a deployment package in just a couple of clicks.
Katia finds working with highlighted changes and suggested dependencies much quicker, and it gives more accurate deployments too, giving “complete visibility of the differences between two orgs and much more control”.
Katia explained that Gearset’s change monitoring features have given her a new oversight of all the development work across WEKA’s development work:
“Across our teams, work is constantly moving into production. I need to see these changes, and with Gearset’s monitoring features I feel confident that I always know what’s happening.”
Katia’s planning to extend WEKA’s use of Gearset’s monitoring features and integrate with JIRA, so that the Sales and Marketing teams can track current development work. She also wants to introduce sandbox seeding, to more accurately test new implementations and developments.
Gearset killed two birds with one stone!
As WEKA is a rapidly growing startup, the team needed a deployment solution that could grow with them. Katia explained:
“We wanted a tool to support us in the future — as our team grows, our processes grow alongside them. WEKA wanted something scalable that could support us in our future Salesforce development work.”
This is when Katia realized that Gearset could further support their future development work by handling CPQ alongside improving their deployments. Gearset quickly proved its value when Weka’s technical team in Israel began to deliver CPQ test environments quicker, more often and without headaches. Katia recalls the moment she knew that they had chosen the right solution:
“We had to deliver some urgent tasks. It was the first time I’d included CPQ when refreshing from a partial sandbox to production. Thanks to Gearset, I can deploy CPQ data in 5 minutes and focus on more important tasks.”
Whereas a sandbox refresh used to be a manual process, “with Gearset, it’s just the click of a button! I don’t need to export data or establish any connections anymore, so now it just takes me a few minutes”, explained Katia.
WEKA met both their requirements with a single solution
While WEKA initially found Gearset as part of their search for an improved Salesforce deployment tool, they’ve found that Gearset is the comprehensive solution they needed to improve their CPQ release process too.
WEKA have moved from painful, manual CPQ deployments to a quick and reliable process. They’ve successfully continued with their CPQ implementation and development work, and used Gearset to revolutionize the way that they release and monitor their Salesforce releases. Katia concluded,
“We chose Gearset to support us with our deployments, but the full scope of the solution has been the cherry on top!”
