The Silverline Blog
Industry insights, Salesforce news, and more
Healthcare
How to get the most out of Dreamforce for Healthcare
Reading time: < 1 minute
If you are an active member of the Salesforce community, or even passive in this case, you know about Dreamforce. The annual event in San Francisco in which more than 100,000 people come together to discuss, hack, share, present, develop all things Salesforce. There might also be that big concert that attracts a few people as well.
Communities
4 Things “I Wish I Knew Earlier” for a Branded Salesforce Community
Reading time: 4 minutes
Salesforce has given its customers a great deal of functionality with their Communities offerings. It brings external customers and partners into business process with some easy-to-use out of the box functionality. While out of box functionality is always nice to have, it’s also comforting to have the ability to build a fully custom, branded Community using Visualforce. I’d like to share four things I wish I knew before my first implementation of a Salesforce Customer Community. They deal with funky email patterns, how licensing can impact design, and some best practices for the technical team implementing the Community.
Financial Services
Use Case for Apex Managed Sharing: Wealth Management
Reading time: 3 minutes
Sharing and record access can be a tricky concept in Salesforce, and with Apex Managed Sharing as an option, it becomes even more complex and options are nearly limitless. So when and why would a system admin or developer leverage this functionality? There are cases where the flexibility of the platform’s declarative options are simply not flexible enough to meet business requirements, and this occurs in a variety of ways:
Logic needs to look across multiple objects for “criteria-based” sharing
Logic needs to look at record owner, and then use a complex approach to sharing the record
Business leverages ad hoc teams, and these drive record access on custom objects
Entitlements are managed externally to Salesforce, and Salesforce must inherit these changes
Healthcare
Turning Intranets Social for Healthcare
Reading time: 2 minutes
One of the many complexities of Healthcare is balancing priorities to achieve business goals. How to treat patients as patients, not customers? How to meet technical, business, and clinical needs all at the same time? How to achieve provider and patient engagement? How to deliver a higher quality of care at a lower cost? The list goes on.
Client News
DealerTrack Success Story
Reading time: 2 minutes
Re-engineering business processes through automation.
Established in 2001, Dealertrack and its web-based software solutions and services enhance efficiency and profitability for all major segments of the automotive retail industry, including dealers, lenders, OEMs, third-party retailers, agents, and aftermarket providers.
Dealertrack operates the largest online credit application network in North America. In addition, Dealertrack’s award-winning solution set for dealers is the industry’s most comprehensive including a Dealer Management System (DMS); Inventory, Sales/F&I, and Digital Marketing; a web-based network for arranging vehicle transportation and shipping; electronic motor vehicle registration and titling applications; paper title storage; and digital document services.
Challenges
Dealertrack originally implemented salesforce.com over 10 years ago, and has grown substantially over the years through multiple acquisitions. Integrating the employees, products, services, operations, systems, and processes of acquired companies resulted in disjointed data and complex processes. In addition, employees submitted requests to admins who made changes without a clear vision across the organization.
Dealertrack’s agents were using up-to four separate systems to perform a single phone call, and their knowledge base and wiki were not integrated into Salesforce. Customer Service reps also had limited ability to see customer specific alerts and it took excessive clicks in order to find information necessary to work a case.
Dealertrack needed a standardized process to easily acquire and integrate new companies, product lines, and sales people into salesforce.com while tightly integrating with their SAP, Production environment, and IVR systems.
Healthcare
VCs are investing heavily in Healthcare
Reading time: 2 minutes
$6.4 billion. That’s the amount of funding that VCs pumped into Healthcare in 2013 according to CB insights. Granted, 67% of that funding went to Medical Devices, Drug Development, and Biotech. Still, that leaves a lot of money for the other segments.
Investing in Healthcare is becoming extremely lucrative; so lucrative in fact, organizations that historically focused on delivering clinical care have developed their own VC arms. This is a unique business model shift - so what is the value of such investments?