Case Study
Two companies merged onto one Salesforce platform in under six months, with zero downtime and a $50,000 a year integration removed
Pharmaceutical
Advisory
A North American pharmaceutical manufacturer
integration cost removed from the design
downtime at go-live
from planning to live, ahead of a hard licence deadline
The situation
An acquisition had left two companies running two separate Salesforce environments across two geographies. Neither team could see the other’s accounts, so the cross-selling the acquisition was meant to unlock was not happening. The consultancy engaged to merge them realised it was more complex than anyone had envisioned, and brought us in as the fractional lead architect to shape the plan and guide their delivery team. The clock was real: one set of licences was up for renewal, and going live late meant paying for a platform they were trying to retire.
What we found
Some of what the client had been sold did not fit what they were trying to do. The most expensive example was a connector, costing around $50,000 a year, bought to link a third environment with only three or four users. It would have duplicated the standard objects with external ones and could not sync files at all. Beyond that, the hard questions had no answers yet: which processes to keep, how to map the data and dependencies, how to move files, and how to protect regulated customer data.
What we did
We took the connector out of the design and gave the small third team temporary access instead, removing $50,000 a year in cost and a permanently awkward architecture. We led the merge itself: bringing the retiring environment’s metadata into a sandbox with Gearset, walking the business through every component to keep only what was needed, and testing processes and data migration before anything touched production. Files, which had stalled everyone, we moved with a scripted approach that remapped every file to its new parent record. Sensitive customer data was identified and encrypted with Shield. Go-live ran over a weekend with no downtime, ahead of the licence deadline.
The result
Two teams, one platform, and full visibility of each other’s customers for the first time. The cross-selling and deal collaboration the acquisition was meant to enable became possible the day the merged environment went live, and the client avoided both the connector cost and a licence renewal on a platform they no longer needed.
Where it led
Delivered on time, under a hard deadline, and handed over clean. That was the engagement, done properly.
Salesforce products
Sales Cloud · Service Cloud · Shield
Most of these started with a platform review.
If any of it sounds familiar, that is usually where we start too.