How we helped a Healthcare Leader Archive 80 Million+ Salesforce Records

The global pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation journey for many enterprises and the trio of Cloud, Process, and Data has been playing a supreme role in helping businesses fast-forward their growth & operational excellence. Out of these three pillars, most of the future-ready companies place Data at the top, as an efficient data management strategy is really doing things right for them.

Let’s be honest. Managing data is never an easy job. It becomes more complex when the data volume is massive. And things become inaccessible when the data is residing in a Salesforce system with storage limitations. The trouble often magnifies when organizations witness no sign of any curb on the data growth. 

What would have been your approach when you find multi TB of data scattered across your Salesforce system which is not only taking down your storage space & performance but also increasing the storage costs? Delete some unwanted data? Would your sales or compliance teams agree for this? Are you really willing to delete data when you know data is the new oil? We are left with one more option, Archiving. But is archiving data in Salesforce that easy, considering data integrity, complex object relationships, customizations, etc.? It is not, but it could be seamless if you have the right solution. Let’s talk about a real use case.

A leading healthcare service provider who is also a Fortune 500 was not only dealing with a massive volume of data in their highly integrated Salesforce system but also were unable to find the right approach to control the data growth in order to address the storage management challenges. They were well aware of the fact that archiving a big chunk of old data might help them optimize their Salesforce data storage, but some of the org complexities such as multiple integrations, parallel running jobs, business dependencies, data sensitivity, and identification of the archivable data from some millions of records were the biggest hurdles in the implementation. 

How they generated 80 Million+ Records?

Imagine having millions of records in your Salesforce system & the impact that can put on the storage, performance & cost. And the healthcare leader has 80M+ records in their Salesforce app. Now you must be wondering, how they generated this sheer volume of data! 

The company has multiple production orgs & one of their production orgs was integrated with an external Salesforce application called OneEMX. OneEMX was used to manage all their case objects & these cases were accountable for 80% of their storage usage. Later, they started using ServiceMax as well which resulted in even faster data growth & needed an immediate solution. For accelerated business performance the company wanted to completely shift from OneEMX to ServiceMax, however, they have generated an unbelievable massive 80M+ records by then & archival of the right data out of this gigantic data volume has become nearly impossible.

What were the data growth consequences & archival complexities?

There were three major challenges that the company encountered due to the unmanaged data growth: Cost, Performance & Compliance. Frequent storage upgradation struck the IT budget as Salesforce additional storage space comes at a significantly high price. This was also not a feasible option as they were running out of storage every 4-6 months. Performance degradation was another major challenge as the high data volume made the entire Salesforce app slow & brought the productivity level significantly down. As healthcare is one of the highly regulated industries, they were compelled to adhere to regulatory compliance demands & other data retention policies. Some of the stringent data policies also didn’t allow them to expose their data to an external environment or system.

As the possibility of using an efficient Salesforce data archiver was there, however, a number of archiving-related complexities were also seen. 

• The first challenge was the extensive number of integrations performed in the org along with multiple parallel running jobs. Any achieving activity without a proper roadmap might impact data integrity along with any of the on-going business processes. 
• They wanted the archiving job to run at a particular time to avoid any possible collision with any of their crucial business activity. 
• There were huge architectural changes, so the data was enormous in each of the records. Processing that much data while archiving was one of the biggest concerns.
• They wanted to archive all their last 10 year ‘Case Objects’ & each day they generated around 3000 cases. Also, they wanted an archiving solution that can archive two different types of cases together, one from OneEMX & the other from ServiceMax. The entire hierarchy of about 30-35 child objects was configured under the parent case objects of both OneEMX & ServiceMax.

How DataArchiva come on board

Widely rated as the most efficient & trusted Salesforce data archiving solution in the market, DataArchiva understood the archiving needs and possible complexities. Our Salesforce data management experts thoroughly analyzed the customers’ Salesforce org & prepared an archiving roadmap after discussing with multiple stakeholders & other consulting partners, and considering all the use cases. We also went through extensive technical evaluation in order to offer the best possible solution to make the entire archiving process seamless and automated.

Considering the nature of the business, data complexities, retention needs, compliance demands & cost factors, DataArchiva recommended the customer to use Big Objects as their secondary data storage to keep all the archived records. As Salesforce’s own big data-based storage system, Big Objects could manage a massive volume of data with ease & the data will also never go out of the Salesforce ecosystem. Everything will be at the core.

Unlocked optimized Salesforce storage management through native archiving

DataArchiva’s powerful archiving engine was all set to archive the sheer volume of historical data once the application was installed and configured. All the required customizations were performed by our highly experienced and competent solution engineers. 

All the Case Objects from 2010-11 to date (3000 cases per day) were scheduled to be archived using the auto-scheduler feature from two different locations (OneEMX & ServiceMax) keeping the complex data relationships & integrity intact. The archived data were stored securely at a native-level in the Big Objects with 100% accessibility. All the closed cases were also archived & with a custom logic a particular field was populated specifying the records to be archived. 

To view all the archived data in the live system whenever they want, even non-admin users were provided a custom page (ListView Component). As ServiceMax was the latest tool that the service agents were using to manage recent customer cases, there was a concern over how the service agents will manage the old cases residing in the OneEMX app. With DataArchiva, this problem was addressed and the service agents were able to view the old cases residing in the OneEMX within the ServiceMax without any change in the user experience.  

The healthcare giant was able to unlock the art of efficient Salesforce storage management as they optimized their data usage to better manage their data.

Elevating into the future

As the company efficiently addressed its top three challenges: Cost, Performance & Compliance leveraging the power of DataArchiva, they never got worried about the storage, data growth & data accessibility. The ROI was quick & the TCO was significantly less. They potentially saved over 85% of data storage costs & retained all their data forever. As the app performance was improved, the service agents could now manage more cases in less time which enhanced their overall productivity. 

Are you also dealing with a lot of data in your Salesforce app? Do you have complex archival needs? Let the experts manage your Salesforce data & help you transform your storage needs. Get in touch with us to see how.