Integrating Salesforce CPQ with NetSuite for Automated Quote-to-Order Conversion
Overview
Challenge: An industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large data centers, campuses, and routing environments sought to automate the conversion of Salesforce quotes into NetSuite sales orders. This automation aimed to save time, boost productivity, and minimize manual entry errors. Additionally, the client’s team worked remotely across different time zones worldwide which presented a unique project management challenge.
Solution: The complexity of the project required strong leadership to ensure collaboration and progress across various activities.
Results: The order management team was able to automate the majority of the new revenue sales order conversions thanks to this integration. As a result, the client could get products to customers faster, gain more insights from the data now provided by automation, and free up resources to handle higher-value tasks.
Challenge
An industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large data center, campus, and routing environments needed to automate a key quote-to-cash process for its order management (OM) team: converting Salesforce quotes into NetSuite sales orders via a Boomi integration.
At the time, the OM team handled the task manually, increasing the likelihood of both delays and human errors. First, the team verified the products from the purchase order against the quote in Salesforce and ensured the quote had the proper Deals Desk approvals for the sales order creation. Next, they manually created a sales order in NetSuite to match the customer purchase order. Automating this process promised efficiency and increased productivity that would help them book orders much faster and deliver products to customers quicker.
Integrating the solution, however, meant that teams had to collaborate across both business functions and systems, which required strong project leadership. The project team also worked across multiple time zones in a fully remote environment, making project coordination even more mission-critical to success.
“Successful project management is built on transparency and alignment. When all stakeholders are aligned, the likelihood of delivering a project on time and within scope increases significantly. As project and program management experts, we go beyond simply managing tasks—we bring energy, a positive attitude, and a collaborative spirit to every project. This approach allows us to quickly build meaningful relationships, which is essential for large-scale transformation projects.
Our role is not just about managing timelines and budgets. It's also about ensuring every team member understands the overarching strategy, project plan, and specific responsibilities. With our extensive experience across a wide range of projects, we seamlessly adapt to our clients' methodologies or introduce our own to ensure a structured and efficient project execution.”
Burton Roark
Managing Partner, G1 Consulting Group
Solution
The client turned to us for our project and program management expertise. Our project leadership approach focused on fostering collaboration, ensuring clear communication, and clearly defining roles and responsibilities. Involvement in previous initiatives with this client gave us critical organizational knowledge, which proved necessary for success with this integration project. We were able to utilize this knowledge to navigate the key stakeholders, get organized quickly, and make sure everyone understood their role in the project’s success.
Because the client recently adopted an Agile methodology approach, we did the same and moved swiftly to define roles and responsibilities, key activities, and timelines. To overcome communication and geographical barriers, we also focused on increasing the frequency of meetings and setting up chat rooms to ensure the right people could collaborate. Project managers are the ‘communication glue’ of the project. This is even more important in a remote environment. We constantly worked behind the scenes to facilitate the flow of communication which fostered a sense of purpose and collaboration across the team.
In a remote environment, it’s also important to create opportunities for people to get to know each other, since there are no chance meetings in the hallway, at the proverbial watercooler, or on the elevator. We regularly invited team members to take a few minutes to introduce themselves and share more about their interests outside of work to foster more chemistry within and across teams.
From a project management perspective, we focused on these 3 critical areas:
Requirements Gathering and Scope Management
Since we utilized an Agile methodology, we needed to create the associated user stories correctly in Jira because understanding the business needs and clearly defining the project scope was fundamental to success. Any misalignment or gaps in requirements could lead to system incompatibility, rework, or missed objectives.
Cross-team Collaboration & Communications
Led daily Scrum Master sprints to confirm progress on user stories and eliminate any roadblocks
Proactively scheduled all meetings
Daily Scrums
Internal & Business demos
Training and change management meetings
PMO and QA syncs
Any additional meetings necessary to proactively address issues that arose
Communicated meeting recaps and weekly status reports
Structured Execution & Risk Management
Created and communicated the master project plan
Communicated the project governance of how the project would be executed:
Set up the shared document repository
Ensured all team members had the necessary access to all systems & tools
Demoed how to progress tickets through Jira according to the Agile methodology
Established a plan to show internal demos after each sprint and brought in the business for every other demo as it was critical to get feedback throughout the development process to keep the teams aligned and mitigate scope creep
Confirmed QA test cases and 100% coverage against Jira user stories
Organized and led all cutover activities
Identified potential risks and addressed them immediately.
Updated underlying business processes so the business would not halt once the integration was enabled.
Created a User Guide with the corresponding error-handling scenarios
Results
Our approach allowed us to manage multiple teams, time zones, and schedules while providing an objective point of view to the client rooted in our extensive expertise. We focused on ensuring we had the latest information across all aspects of the project so everyone else could focus on the tasks at hand, leading to a successful integration.
By eliminating the need for team members to move between separate business applications, searching for and re-entering the same data over and over, the client could now reallocate resources to higher-value tasks and dive deeper into their strategic priorities. Additionally, this B2B integration created the opportunity to gain metadata that the client could use to improve performance moving forward. This information could then be used to optimize processes, identify bottlenecks, and improve future decision-making.
Thanks to the success of this integration, our client continues to engage us for other critical initiatives.