Common Sense Media
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Deploying Salesforce Data Pipeline Architecture and Quality with Confidence
Common Sense Media is a global non-profit that provides ratings for media and technology with the goal of providing parental guidance and protections for youth. Kander was brought on to streamline its organizational data pipeline architecture, as well as the technical implementation and integration of Salesforce Cloud solutions.
The Challenge
The Common Sense Media (CSM) engineering team relied on Drupal as a key source of user data for their business, but were unable to properly integrate with their Salesforce solutions, an integral part of their data strategy. CSM needed a Salesforce consultancy that had a breadth of experience with integrations outside of the Salesforce ecosystem. Before their engineering teams partnered with Kander, Drupal instances would trigger data that would completely wipe critical data in Salesforce and refresh with contemporary data. This would cause Salesforce to lose a large amount of audit trails and compromise overall data integrity as well as have inaccurate customer data.
Kander brought on a Salesforce Architect and a Drupal Architect to support the integration and ensure that there was accurate data being sent over from Drupal to Salesforce. The Kander team created a solution to bring only new updates into Salesforce instead of a full refresh every time, while ensuring data integrity was maintained which used Salesforce as the source of primary data, while eliminating loss of data critical for business growth.
Kander remains an ongoing thought partner with the larger engineering teams for new application development as well as overall Salesforce org to support critical business functions.
Our Approach
Leveraging a design-thinking approach to building scalable data pipelines, the Kander team was able to quickly understand their business growth goals, as well as requirements for managing and maintaining customer data integrity. During the design phase, the Kander team helped CSM think through their entire data pipeline integration, while providing hands-on technical expertise to ensure that their solutions would scale with the demands of organizational growth.
With the success of their initial Drupal implementation in 2019, Kander was brought on to help alleviate technical resource gaps within the CSM engineering team roadmap and to properly integrate their data pipelines into Salesforce. “I always internally refer to Kander as our strategic thought partner," shares Gordon Lee, Salesforce Solution Architect Director, who also manages a team wearing multiple hats and evolving duties in an effort to provide continuous quality data pipeline delivery.
Over the years and with changes to internal engineering resources, the Common Sense Media engineering teams have relied on Kander’s technical expertise to quickly fix their Stripe API updates, improve the cycle time in their mobile app deployments, and the support of all aspects of the business including Marketing and Customer Success teams by providing expertise in Marketing, Experience, and Service Cloud solutions.
Today, with Kander’s partnership, Gordon shares that this transformation was not just about technology, but how Kander’s technical experts helped him and the engineering teams find the gaps in their own assumptions, processes, and ultimately changed how their engineering teams work together. “Kander came on and was able to execute our project from six months to three months,” recalls Gordon, and now when senior leadership identifies a gap in internal technical resources to execute a pipeline delivery milestone, the team at Kander is quickly brought up as a consistently reliable external solution.
At Kander, we are committed to ensuring not just digital transformations for our clients, but also providing strategic counsel to help internal teams deliver go-to market solutions for your customers collaboratively and efficiently to scale.
“The nice thing about Kander is that I know that they have been working with clients all throughout every industry…and there's this whole breadth of knowledge that I can tap into.” - Gordon Lee, Salesforce Solution Architect Director
The Results
Kander improved the entire data pipeline infrastructure with a successful integration between Drupal and Salesforce
With Kander-sourced technical resources to close skill set gaps, the engineering teams at Common Sense Media were able to deliver 6 month scoped projects in 50% less time.
Kander’s technical team was able to provide expertise to help ensure cross-functional team alignment, while reducing time to release by 25%-40%.
Over the duration of the thought partnership, Kander’s teams relieved the CSM technical program manager of 30 days of rework and time resources spent.
Work With Us
Kander implements systems and solves problems at every scale from enterprise level, Fortune 500 companies to start-ups and non-profits. If you have a Salesforce need or questions for us, we would love to hear from you.
