APTLY
The Perfect Growth Partner

Navigating the path of corporate consolidation and merger is no easy feat, and it can be particularly challenging to the Chief Information Officer’s office, which is often tasked with bringing systems together, quickly, seamlessly, and with limited resources. This was true in 2018 when a group of packaging and plastics companies joined forces to consolidate their market presence across the European, Asian, North American and South American markets.

The aim was to build a bellwether ready to conquer global markets. But two of the largest constituents in the group had their own complex Salesforce instances with unique definitions, configurations, and sales processes that were standing in the way of the type of collaboration that was critical to making the sales teams effective. Consolidating these two Salesforce instances into a solution that supported the business goals of the new entity was seminal to achieving a unified view of crosscompany performance and cross-functional collaboration.

To achieve this win, the task was bigger than mapping one system to the other and architecting the migration. While the project was going to have significant technological complexity, the biggest challenge the new organization faced was rationalizing the business processes that the two Salesforce systems supported and then re-translating that into a bigger, better, and more efficient Salesforce. This was also coupled with the fact that there were additional non-cloud legacy systems that would also be a part of the final solution design.

This meant that the field of expertise needed to make this project work was going to have to be threefold: business and change management, Salesforce expertise, and system integration. This is where innovative technology-aided strategy and process consulting partner APTLY proved its mettle. With its extensive knowledge of the Salesforce platform and the ability to migrate legacy systems into a cloud environment to drive customercentric processes, APTLY reversed the tide for this new business entity.

With a focus on efficiency in sales, APTLY partnered with the new plastics giant to create something better than had existed in either of the pre-existing organizations. This required the restructuring of joint sales processes, as well as significant data standardization across the global team. This, coupled with the added layer of complexity of the fact that one Salesforce instance was in the Salesforce Lightning interface while one was in the legacy classic interface, meant the change management for adoption success needed to start on day one.

Ultimately after nine months of focused and efficient business consulting and technology architecture, the consolidation went live and the focus on change management paid off with strong adoption across the sales teams. User satisfaction was guaranteed through a centralized access to global reports and dashboards to track sales, grouped by strategic business units.

“The common denominator between Salesforce and APTLY is the zeal to challenge clients to adopt digital technologies deeper into their business processes while ensuring user satisfaction and performance,” says Lukas Schröder, Founder & Managing Director of APTLY. “I believe 2021 will be the year of the CIO. Looking beyond the IT department, smart CIOs will become a trusted advisor and partner to the employee experience.” APTLY’s goal is to simplify the orchestration of IT systems and business processes, enabling employees to focus on adding value to their customers. “Employee experience is one of our key priorities,” says Schröder.

As one of the first Salesforce partners on the German market, APTLY has been delivering complex solutions in the manufacturing space for over a decade and is growing steadily. According to Schröder, “We act as the force multiplier that allows businesses across industries to design and implement more than just CRM databases. They can create tools that their employees need to drive real business results.” This passion for driving success is a hallmark of team APTLY, and just the kind of dedication German and other global companies need to keep pushing ahead with innovative solutions in the 21st century marketplace.