Six Steps to Ensuring a Successful Salesforce integration Setting up your Salesforce, Financial Force and Force.com ecommerce integration correctly Salesforce, FinancialForce and Force.com are all highly robust systems that can greatly benefit your business’s customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning, as well as help your employees do their jobs better. To further enhance the benefits that one or all of these systems bring to your business, you can integrate them with your ecommerce systems. The key to getting the most out of the integration is setting it up right. Below are six steps to follow to help ensure that your Salesforce or FinancialForce integration works the way that you want and need it to. Use a Workflow Diagram One of the first steps to take when integrating your ecommerce with your CRM or ERP software is to create a workflow diagram. Programs such as Visio and Gliffy can help you easily create and edit extensive workflow diagrams that help you and others visualize workflows and processes. Creating a workflow diagram first helps you map out how you want the integration to work and what and who it will affect. As you get further into the project discovery phase, we recommend creating a high-level diagram and then detailed-level workflows that enable you to add more detail into the important areas of the high level workflow diagram. Review Internally Next you should review the integration internally with leaders and teams from within your organization, for example customer service and sales teams. Meet with them to discuss the impact that the integration will have on their groups and workload as well as the possible benefits and negatives. Talk about what their expectations of the integration are and make sure that they are within reason and have a clear understanding of how long the integration will take and how it will have an effect on them and their positions. Create Test Data Sets The next and perhaps the most tedious step of your Salesforce ecommerce or FinancialForce integration is to create test data sets and cases to ensure that your integration and systems run the way that you expect them to. You will need to create test data and cases that represent your standard cases as well as “edge” or unusual cases. While it does take a significant amount of time to create and run these data sets and cases, they are imperative to ensuring that your integration is running correctly. Clearly establishing and building out your test data helps ensure that your integration can handle certain scenarios consistently. You can then easily add to and adjust your test data easily after it has been established. Field Level Mappings and Logic Specification Another step to help ensure an integration that works correctly is creating detailed field level mappings and granular logic specification. Mapping and documenting specifications can help serve as references for your integration team to work against when implementing the integration. It will help them understand how you want your systems integrated as well as the logic or reasons behind it. integration Execution The next step is to execute your Salesforce or FinancialForce integration correctly. Clarity recommends using the REST API, Clarity Connect, and SSL to help ensure integration data transmissions are secure and properly sent and received. Setting up the integration to automate data transfers and automatically update information in your ecommerce system after it has been updated in your Salesforce systems and vice versa helps ensure that your business gets the most out of your integration. Generate and Validate Test Data Lastly, you need to generate your test data and validate it against your test data and workflow diagrams. This step ensures that your system is working correctly and is mapped how you wanted it to be. You can then do full system testing to ensure everything is running smoothly. Clarity Can Help At Clarity, we pride ourselves in our ability to create and implement custom integrations. We have even created our own middlware platform, Clarity Connect, to help our clients integrate virtually any system with another. Our team of experts at Clarity has done numerous Salesforce and FinancialForce integrations for our clients. To find out more about what a custom Salesforce integration can do for your business, visit the Salesforce ecommerce integration Resource Center.