ConnectALL Aids Merchants Fleet to Drive Continuous Client Value
Executive summary
Merchants Fleet, the fleet management and fleet solutions company, has been highly
focused on tech-enablement. With an IT staff of 87 out of the 500+ employees, keeping
their IT functionalities stable is key to their business. The company’s VP Enterprise
Solutions and Architecture is constantly evaluating and determining technology that can
enable Merchants Fleet’s business delivery needs.
At a critical juncture of their business, they found their ticketing service was affecting the
delivery of client requirements as well as new product ideas. The cycle time was high and
there were a lot of redundant and manual processes slowing them down. Specifically,
Client Experience, and the Product Development teams were saddled with inaccurate
data, higher ticket volume, and missing information as they used two disparate systems
— Salesforce and Azure DevOps — that were not synced. This increased costs, delayed
service upgrades and updates, and ultimately affected the quality of their fleet
management services and solutions.
Merchants, being technologically savvy, wanted to design a custom solution. But they
estimated the TCO to be very high with unimaginable maintenance, which would lead to
further problems. They wanted a single solution that would automatically synchronize
information between the two systems.
After evaluating other solutions in the marketplace, Merchants came across ConnectALL
through Orasi Software, a DevSecOps innovator accelerating software application
delivery and adoption through automation, and they seemed to have found a perfect
match. Using ConnectALL’s Value Stream Management Platform, the company has
evolved and accelerated their delivery of client value. It has brought its Development and
Support/Service teams together. Working with ConnectALL has helped this organization
save hours of time per day, which in turn reduces IT costs, improved communication and
collaboration, led to faster ticket resolution, lesser cycle time, improved productivity and
efficiency, and ultimately happier clients — leaving them a lot more time for innovation.
About the client
Merchants Fleet is the
nation’s fastest growing fleet
management company
providing funding and service
options for organizations that
leverage vehicles to run their
operations. Merchants has
decades of experience in the
industry with traditional fleet
management, as well as
rental and short-term leasing
solutions. Their unique
technology platforms
coupled with specialized fleet
teams provide the most
comprehensive FleetTech
solutions to drive proven
results.
$6000 IT cost reduction
every month via
reduced hours
100% accuracy in records,
improving the quality of
ticket resolution
30% increase in
IT teams’ efficiency with
20 hours saved every week
Challenges
Unsynchronized systems and data slowed down client requests and ticket resolution
When ConnectALL started working with Merchants, they were faced with a myriad of issues within their ticketing system and resolution. Their
client experience team used Salesforce while their product team (composed of developers, engineers, and analysts) used Azure DevOps.
Information between the two teams and systems was updated manually, with hours per week being wasted in moving data. This in turn
impacted the time taken from a ticket entry to the actual development work. All this led to misentry of ticket information, loss of information,
and inaccurate data and fields, which impacted the client requests’ resolution time and quality. Sometimes ticket information would not be
entered correctly or the information would be lost. Additionally, due to a sudden spike in ticket volumes, teams would have to shift focus toward
monitoring what was in the queue versus the ones that were in process and needed to be logged correctly.
This struggle between client experience and product development led to:
About ConnectALL
ConnectALL is a value stream management company dedicated to helping customers achieve higher levels of agility, traceability, predictability and velocity. ConnectALL’s services and solutions help organizations to connect people, processes and technology across the software development and delivery value stream, enabling companies to align digital initiatives to business outcomes and improve the speed at which they deliver software.
ConnectALL’s value stream management solutions and services allow companies to see, measure and automate their software delivery value streams. ConnectALL has been recognized as "Best in Show" in the Value Stream Management category of the 2020 and 2021 SD Times 100, is recognized by numerous third-party analyst firms as a key player in value stream management, and is profiled by the Silicon Review as one of the 30 fastest-growing tech companies in 2021.
Solution
Bidirectional flow of data between systems eliminates redundant processes and boosts accurate ticket entry — leading to faster ticket resolution
Merchants connected with ConnectALL’s Value Stream Management Platform through
Orasi Software. Their experience with ConnectALL and Orasi has exceeded their
expectations.
The company quickly established a strong partnership with ConnectALL, as
ConnectALL’s well-established process for implementation of the company’s needs was
effective.
It took 2-3 months for the end-to-end evaluation, understanding, and implementation
of the platform with an established communication plan. ConnectALL’s team worked
alongside the company’s internal team, aiding them at every step in setting up a
non-production server and ultimately migrating into a live production environment.
This allowed the teams to verify that information flowed as they expected. After
implementation, deployment across all the required teams was done within 1-2 weeks.
Merchants soon discovered that ConnectALL's Value Stream Management Platform
was an excellent fit for solving their problem. It’s adapter-based model with a
centralised processing system was exactly what they were looking for. The company
could rely on ConnectALL’s hands-on out-of the-box knowledge about the end points
and leveraged their expertise. With the platforms ability to bi-directionally synchronize
information between specific endpoints, the company has managed to:
- Lower their total cost of ownership
- Cut down the need to manually maintain the systems
- Leverage on expertise
- Avoid non-standard implementation
ConnectALL’s intuitiveness has made life easy at Merchants, with the IT teams able to go hands off and having a lot more time to spare for other work.
Teams using Salesforce and Azure DevOps:
- Have complete visibility into client requests, issues, and priorities
- Communicate seamlessly about updates and statuses
- Have traceability into client requirements through the toolchain
While every organization has its own way of working, Merchants also had some cases
of confusion within teams during the implementation process. However, ConnectALL
very promptly steered them back to focusing on getting them into production and
getting productive. ConnectALL’s implementation team focused on the needs of the
firm and delivered value.
The support team has been quick to respond post-implementation as needed. The firm
had a couple of server issues, but with the help of ConnectALL's support team resolved
it within 24 hours and for their system backup and all data transferred through.
Results
ConnectALL helps increase team efficiency by 30%, ensures 100% record accuracy, and saves approx $6000 every month
One of the major impacts of using ConnectALL’s Value Stream Management Platform has been to save an exorbitant amount of time and
improve communication between teams and with clients. Teams have been able to work efficiently, communicate updates automatically, and
collaborate better than ever before.
Merchants estimates that using the platform has freed at least four to six of their IT team members’ time, saving around 20 hours per week.
These reduced hours have factored in as a significant IT cost reduction, amounting to at least $6000 every month (assuming $75/hour in
wages). ConnectALL has increased team efficiency by 30%, enabling the dev, QA, support, and service teams to focus on innovation and
additional work. ConnectALL moves the data between the two systems without anyone having to intervene, which helps in opening and closing
tickets in seconds.
Additionally, the VSMP has helped the company remove ‘a man in the middle process’. The elimination of missing information, repeated
follow-ups, unfilled fields, and jumbled data in fields has increased the accuracy and quality of service tickets by 20% with no need for future
rework — ultimately boosting their overall record accuracy to 100%.
The company’s time savings have hugely impacted the way the product development and client experience teams communicate and
collaborate. ConnectALL’s power to connect the tools, the people and the technology has helped the IT team to save significant time in
responding to tickets — leading to faster ticket servicing. This has hugely improved client experience, as evidenced by a lack of client complaints
or follow-ups. This has in turn helped reduce the pressure on the QA teams, while the dev team is laser-focused on improving the quality.
Future Roadmap
Merchants Fleet continues strong partnership with ConnectALL to deliver client value
Merchants Fleet's strong partnership with ConnectALL continues year after year, as they focus on delivering client value. The team at Merchants is confident that they can reach out to ConnectALL at any point for tool interoperability. According to the team, the ConnectALL solution makes it simple for anyone who wants to bring their systems together and use the expertise that comes with it. They recommend that businesses evaluate and take a close look at how ConnectALL could help them. Merchants is aware of ConnectALL’s strong hold in value stream management solutions and will evaluate any of the out-of-the-box solutions that would cater to their business needs in the future and improve client experience.
"We had a lot of wasted cycles, inaccurate data, and the time from entry to work was way too long. This affected the
quality and productivity of ticket servicing. We evaluated a lot of solutions — even custom solutions. Nothing seemed to
fit the need. ConnectALL is a single solution that had the bi-directinality and the specific endpoints we wanted to target.
It is adapter-based with centralised processing and that is exactly what we were looking for. With ConnectALL, we are
saving time, improving quality, productivity, enhanced communication, and ultimately delivering value to our clients. We
haven’t received any complaints from our clients in a long time and that is a testament in itself. I appreciate the
implementation team’s willingness to go above and beyond to get the product delivered on time and with quality."
— Ben McIntyre, VP Enterprise Solutions and Architecture
Want to do this yourself?
Get in touch with us and let us know your specific requirements, and our team will work with you to schedule a customized product demo.
Request A Demo
Check out some other case studies
EFI uses integration tool to manage complex software development for multiple customers and versions
Read the Case Study
Ready to get started?
Explore the integrations, check out the features, or get in touch
