- Government
Ministry of Defence: Building a Salesforce Centre of Excellence
85%
potential reduction in Salesforce licences
£2.76m
per annum in projected savings
43%
faster to fill out declarations
Synopsis
The Defence Recycling and Disposals Team (DRDT) is an arm of the Ministry of Defence (MoD). It repurposes surplus military equipment and inventory from the British Armed Forces across the UK and overseas locations.
DRDT had an existing Salesforce Enterprise system for listing and processing these items. The system was time-consuming and expensive, and also made DRDT reliant on its then-supplier to make small changes.
Tecknuovo delivered a transformative iteration on this product that ramped up efficiencies, cut costs, and gave DRDT’s in-house teams full control of the solution. Alongside delivery, we built a Salesforce Centre of Excellence (CoE) to bring expertise and leadership around these types of solutions fully in-house.
Our team helped DRDT make the system’s user experience 43% more efficient, identified 23,015 unused Salesforce licences that could save £2,755,008 p.a., and sharply increased the system’s security against outside threats.
The Challenge
The incumbent supplier’s solution was posing challenges for DRDT and its users in three areas:
- The form users needed to fill out about each piece of equipment was time-consuming. They needed to fill out the same extensive list of questions for every item — from boots to war planes.
- The existing solution didn’t meet the necessary security standards, with former users still able to access logs.
- The system relied heavily on suppliers to run and make changes. DRDT had to call in an external software engineer each time it needed a small change.
Solving Today
Mobilising an expert Salesforce team
Combining expertise from our in-house teams and our large associate community, we quickly mobilised a team of Salesforce specialists. In just two weeks, we had formed a team of a Software Engineer, a Salesforce Developer, a Business Analyst, and a Delivery Manager.
Reassessing DRDT’s delivery strategy
We started by analysing the current system and where its challenges stemmed from. The project’s scope and timeframe meant that instead of building a solution from scratch, we would iterate on the existing one to help DRDT solve the challenges it was posing.
Our team advised that a DevOps approach would be key to delivering efficiently within the challenging limitations. We quickly replaced the existing traditional delivery methods by introducing continuous integration and continuous delivery, helping to speed up and improve builds, integration, and testing through automation.
We also ensured the solution would be safe to iterate on within the overarching system by building in regression packs. Salesforce environments are complex and intertwined, meaning that amending one process can unintentionally break something else. Regression packs prevent this by testing not only the process you are working on, but its effect on other processes down the line.
Streamlining user experience and maximising efficiencies
We built a new process that streamlines the declaration process through the system. This is driving efficiencies for 3000+ users.
We re-built the declaration process to be logic tree-driven, giving only relevant questions about the item being repurposed. This finds the right buyer more quickly and has cut down users’ time to answer the questionnaire by 43%.
We also made sure DRDT’s teams would be able to add or change qualifiers to the declaration as needed. The existing solution needed developers to build new metadata to create these functions. We took a low/no-code approach instead, which means that non-technical in-house DRDT team members can easily make changes to the system independently.
Securing the system against outside threats
All MoD projects need to be built according to the Secure by Design (SBD) principles. This was not yet the case with DRDT’s existing solution, meaning contractors could access data that they shouldn’t be able to, threatening its integrity.
To secure it, our teams built a new sharing architecture. This is a system that maps out who has access to which information, and which lets users set conditions that give groups or individuals access to the appropriate information within the system.
The new sharing architecture has made the system fully secure, ensuring access is only granted to authorised people and groups. We also designed it to be easily editable, meaning that internal DRDT team members can change access settings fully independently of external engineering support.
We exceeded the SBD standards by commissioning an additional penetration test, and have implemented four new security improvements since the start of our engagement.
Building Tomorrow
Eliminating unnecessary licencing costs
To help DRDT free up spend, we investigated its use of Salesforce licences. We found that there were 23,015 active licences not in use. Eliminating these costs would save DRDT and the taxpayer an estimated annual cost of £2,755,008.
Upskilling to future-proof DRDT’s Salesforce CoE
Our project’s purpose is to build a Salesforce CoE within DRDT to give it an internal source of expertise and leadership around Salesforce solutions. A fundamental part of that is to transfer all expertise and documentation around implementation work to DRDT’s in-house teams. We used our Zero Dependency® framework to deliver on this.
We built an extensive library of resources for our customer to build the foundations of the CoE and DRDT’s in-house capability. This includes a knowledge repository, repeatable configuration standards and patterns, and documentation on the development rationale.
Crucially, we also thoroughly trained our customer’s teams on how to use these resources, including by creating video training materials around each release. We also upskilled two team members as Product Owners, who will take over fully once we exit the engagement.
This technical capability is strengthened further by the no/low-code environment, which lets even non-technical team members implement changes.
Results
Our Salesforce implementation has helped our customer on four fronts. It has:
- Enabled DRDT to save an estimated £2,755,008 annually on licencing costs.
- Made the solution 43% more efficient for users by streamlining the declaration process, saving an estimated 884 hours per year.
- Added four new security features and improved standards to exceed Secure by Design principles.
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“The team have been fantastic again, I can’t express how much value you all add. I honestly feel as a group it is the best working collaboration I’ve seen in a long time and long may it continue.”
Supplier Manager, Central Gov