Migrating 400-plus international offices onto a single Salesforce platform

At a glance

A global staffing agency with more than 400 locations in 19 countries needed to replace their legacy CRM systems with Salesforce, requiring a migration of millions of candidate records without disrupting business operations.

Customer challenge

To manage their database of millions of job candidates, our client had been using an assortment of CRM platforms, with offices in each country using either different versions or totally different systems. This approach gave rise to a host of productivity and budgetary issues, including:

• Slow performance

• Restricted sharing of information between offices in different countries

• High licensing costs

• Growing infrastructure and maintenance costs

Our client decided to migrate all their offices to a single Salesforce platform — a project that presented a number of challenges:

• To avoid disrupting weekday business operations, our client needed to migrate their U.S. and Canada offices over a weekend, requiring migration speeds of 20 million or more records per hour.

• Since each country had its own legacy system and business model, a single data migration approach was not possible.

• No tool was available in the market to migrate all our client’s data efficiently.

Approach and solution

Each country’s offices were running different systems, so our team had to approach each as a separate migration and documented the requirements for each with country-specific transformations. Because traditional ETL tools would have required more than a month to extract and transform our client’s data — about 1 billion records — we chose a Hadoop architecture, which required only 3 hours to extract and 30 minutes to transform. We also built a custom data loader tool to split the load into multiple files and to launch data loaders in parallel.

Our team followed Salesforce guidelines for data migration and identified opportunities for speeding up the loading process. For example, we identified the objects that would not conflict in data loads and submitted them in parallel by splitting the files into smaller “chunks.” As a result, we achieved migration speeds beyond the traditional Salesforce limit of about 20 million per hour.

Value and benefits – “the wins”

We successfully migrated each of our client’s offices to a single Salesforce platform, enabling information sharing at a global level and reducing candidate search times from hours to minutes. We enabled our client to realize multiple additional benefits, including

• Reduced licensing costs

• Reduced maintenance and support costs

• Improved ability to support the business

• Improved use of data for strategic decision-making

As a result of this project, our client can more efficiently manage their global database of candidates, match them with job opportunities more quickly, and achieve the significant time and cost savings to be found in aligning their global organization on a single CRM platform.