Propel
Customer Story

The enterprise software that Propel provides are specialized, B2B solutions that help businesses manage their product data. They provide product lifecycle management (PLM), product information management (PIM) and quality management solutions (QMS) built on he Salesforce platform.

Their client base is centered on engineering and manufacturing, including medical device companies with complex and demanding end-to-end quality control requirements. They also have a number of retailers with more common product and customer management concerns. All of their solutions are built on the Salesforce platform, and Propel’s business is based on managing the configurations of their customer’s Orgs.

Everything Propel does for their clients — which ultimately enables collaboration within the client’s operations and with partners and the customer base — is intertwined with Salesforce. Using it as efficiently as possible is a crucial bottom-line business reality for Propel. Snapshot’s ability to do a few specific things has quickly become vital to their operations. And surprisingly enough, they don’t even use most of Snapshot’s capabilities.

“I feel like we’re probably using about 30 percent of your functionality. We only move configurations. We needed to go from one Org to a completely different Org with no relationship whatsoever and there aren’t many systems that will do that,” says Higham.

That 30 Percent Is Crucial

The key transition when a client purchases Propel’s service is the configuration, meaning the integration into the client’s Org of the dozens and dozens of custom objects, fields, field sets, page layouts, and reports that Propel develops and deploys. This combining of the client’s Org and the master configuration Org that Propel uses as a starting point is obviously crucial, time-consuming, and tedious.

With Snapshot, that entire process is automated and finished in hours, not days. It frees up the Propel team to dig into more important things.

“What we need is really simple, pretty straight-forward,” according to Higham. “But I’m telling you, it saves us — I mean literally tens of thousands of dollars, because when you add up 2 days here 2 days there it becomes a lot.”

In addition to the preliminary work, Snapshot also allows Propel to quickly deploy solutions between one project and another. Another tedious, time-consuming process that used to be done manually but now happens quickly.

“It would take a couple of days just for the initial — what we call our out-of-the-box configuration — for someone to manually do that initial configuration. And then the customer might say, ‘well I really need an equipment calibration function, can you do that for us?’” explains Higham. “So, we would have to take the new guy and say ‘we did an equipment calibration for this customer over here, can you copy what we did for this customer and put it into this customer’s Org?’There is a lot of ongoing configuration going on so it was very, very tedious.”

This desktop pipeline below is an example of Propel’s. By simply dragging an arrow from their Org, they are able to move custom objects, custom fields, page layouts, field sets, process builders, email templates, etc. very easily into their client’s Org.