We took a trip down memory lane this week with our Founder and CEO, David Brabrook, to revisit our first Field Service Lightning Implementation – which also incidentally was the first of its kind in the small-medium business vertical in North America. Read on below to learn how it all came to be.
It was around March 2016 and App Solve was co-hosting a customer dinner in Boston with some of the area’s most prolific business leaders.
We were co-hosting the dinner with Salesforce.com, led by one of their strongest sales leaders – David Premier.
The concept around the dinner was around the book ‘The One Thing.’ This is a wonderful book and a fantastic way to lead a business gathering. The book is based on prioritization, and what is the one thing that you could do (for your business, your relationship, personally etc.), such that by doing it, would make everything else easier or unnecessary. Since this is a business gathering, the focus on the ‘the one thing’ for our fellow leaders – their business. We went around the table and each person discussed their ‘one thing’ for their business, and it created incredibly in-depth conversation.
One of the leaders at the table was Jennifer Kelmer, Founder and CEO of Level up your Home. Jennifer was just starting Level up your Home as a speciality high-end at home audio and visual installation company. Jennifer spent 15 years at Bose, in the professional services division, and left to start Level up your Home. Jennifer was evaluating software solutions that would be a fit for her business and would also enable her soon to be thriving business’s installers with the right technology to perform their function, as well as provide an exceptional experience for their customers.
Level up your Home was evaluating a number of different platforms but was quite sure about implementing Salesforce.com for their core CRM. At the time, Salesforce had just made available their Field Service management platform, called Field Service Lightning. After the leadership dinner, App Solve and Salesforce began working with Level up your Home to choose the best possible software to begin their business with, in order to set a course for rapid growth.
After an extensive evaluation period, where App Solve assisted Level up your Home with a number of different solutions, including choosing other field service platforms with a plan to integrate to Salesforce CRM, we created a solution that included Salesforce Field Service Lightning. This would allow for all information to be housed within one platform to increase efficiency, productivity and transparency and to deliver fast, intelligent field service by connecting the entire workforce on one platform.
In April 2016, Level up your Home trusted Salesforce and App Solve to build their Field Service management solution; and this is where the fun started!
Field Service Lightning had not yet been implemented within the small-medium business market within all of North America. Everything was brand new, from the Salesforce Account Executive being able to choose the newly created SKU’s within the quoting system, to the ability to deploy the Field Service Lightning org to the customer, and for us to implement a solution that hadn’t been done before.
Like anything new, there wasn’t a clear implementation roadmap, and we obviously hadn’t implemented the system before either. Thankfully, with our extremely talented App Solve technical team, we were able to utilize our experience on hundreds of Salesforce projects and combine that with learning this new platform. Naturally though, questions came up along the way. The platform was so new that we were using documentation that Salesforce was providing to the partner community – within hours of it being released.
In the end, we were able to complete a super successful project, where we implemented Salesforce CRM for core functionality, as well as customizing products, contracts and orders to support field service activities and tracking. We were also able to configure a community portal that could grant partners access to Orders and capture key information like notes. App Solve also built the Field Service Lightning system for field execution and dynamic scheduling, in order to provide Level up your Home with the foundation they needed for supercharged growth.
Since then, App Solve has continued to be at the forefront of the Field Service Lightning platform. We have been deployed by Salesforce themselves, who had had a challenging implementation as ‘rescue projects’, as well as commissioned by Salesforce to assist customers through the various product life cycle stages that Field Service Lighting has grown through.
Proudly, App Solve has now had the most implementations of Field Service Lightning of any Canadian-based Salesforce Implementation Partner. If you’d like to learn more about the platform or find out whether it could be a fit for your business, reach out to us and we would be happy to share our experience and help you evaluate whether the platform could be of value for you.