There are various reasons why your business may use multiple Salesforce orgs. The most common reasons for multiple orgs are for those businesses which experience rapid growth due to mergers or acquisitions and companies which sell multiple products and sell with different teams. It is a common practice for the organizations to adopt multiple Salesforce orgs for different business units and your business operating in different countries.

However, managing multiple orgs for enterprises is not an easy task in hand. This often results in an incomplete and inconsistent view of customer interactions. This can be hassle some for you as the challenge results in duplication while selling or servicing the same customer and missing out on cross-selling or upselling opportunities. This kind of customer interactions that originate from the various parts of the enterprise may lead to the issue of too-frequent contacts which poses problems for your marketing or legal department as well.

Ther enterprises implement multiple Salesforce orgs and the need for consolidation of these orgs arise due to either standardization of business processes or a users requirement to work in an integrated environment. Each and every Salesforce org consolidation requires a master org to start with.

Consolidation of multiple Salesforce orgs but is quite challenging to configure and maintain. However, there are many challenges for consolidating multiple Salesforce org.

What are the Challenges for Consolidation multiple Salesforce Orgs?

The challenges for consolidation of multiple Salesforce orgs are:

• Managing multiple orgs is a complex process due to requirements for various workforce such as Salesforce Admins and developers, etc.
• Collaborating across the entire organization suffers quite a lot.
• Hard to get a global definition of data and processes.
• Difficult to get a 360 degree view of customer data with the data residing on the various orgs.
• Customization required to generate unified reports.
• Increasing third-party license costs for various solutions.
• Increasing cost to hire resources.
• Increasing complexity of Single Sign-on (SSO).
• Increasing Integration Costs Incurred with the data and process integration across several orgs.

Consolidation of multiple orgs is a tough task as implementation is done in siloes and hence mutually exclusive of each other. Therefore, there is a need to adopt best practices for the Consolidation. What are these?

Best Practices for Consolidation of Multiple Salesforce orgs

The best practices are:

• Understand the org’s Data Model
• Study Object Limits
• Restructure Record Types
• Add Value for Users
• Create a Comprehension Integration Strategy
• Select the Master Org
• Carry out Regression Testing
• Integrate Code

Understand the org’s Data Model

It is extremely important to understand the data model of the org. You can identify the conflicts and gaps of data models by comparing the source and target Salesforce orgs. It is time consuming to design the data models because of the complex nature of the activity. The various custom objects from the multiple orgs must be consolidated into a single entity. Moreover, It is also important to carry out the object and record level mapping. Finally, analysis of lookup and master details must be carried out.

Study Object Limits

Object limits are relevant when data models for different objects are merged into the same object for the target org. And this is where the object limits play an important role. There are a number of factors that decide these limits such as number of validations, fields, validation rules, lookups, lookup filters, number of master data relationships and rollup summary fields.

Restructure Record Types

When the consolidation is for the data of the same object then it is necessary to consolidate and map the record types between the target and source org. Say for example it is possible to store a standard object like accounts and then stored in different record types inside the orgs. Also, there is a need to map these with the record types of the target org.

Add Value for Users

One must be ready with certain things to carry out with the consolidation and gather insights on interlinkages between different processes, unwanted processes and list of the user’s demands. This in turn adds value to the users and leads to increase in ROI and higher user adoptions.

Create a Comprehension Integration Strategy

The consolidation effort requires a comprehensive planning which comprises data, process and continuous integration. Moreover, there is also a need to analyze the orchestration of middleware systems.

Select the Master Org

The selection of the master org is dependable on various factors such as organizational dynamics in a situation of a business acquisition. It is usually a best practice to make the most complex one as the master org. This can save a considerable amount of time as it avoids the rebuilding of functionalities in subsequent steps.

Carry out Regression Testing

A successful consolidation requires a regression testing by a QA in your organization. The consolidated instance validates the  data, functionality of the more complex features and the visibility of records across various departments. If issues crop up after the testing, your team must be ready to iterate and solve the issues. Then only the org may go live.

Integrate Code

There is a high possibility of refactoring code and metadata with evolving coding patterns that changes continuously. Multiple workflows may consolidate into a process builder or a single workflow.

Conclusion

There are multiple reasons to use multiple Salesforce orgs.  The most common reason is rapid growth due to mergers or acquisitions and companies which sell multiple products and sell with different teams. It is also a best practice for the organizations to adopt multiple Salesforce orgs for different business units and businesses that operate different countries.

Moreover, consolidation of multiple orgs is a complex activity and often requires a lot of manual effort. And consolidation varies from one project to another.

AnavClouds Software Solutions, one of the top certified Salesforce partners can help you out with our experienced Salesforce Experts to consolidate orgs with the above best practices. If you have any query, please feel free to reach out to our Salesforce Experts.