There are several considerations that should be considered for a Salesforce to Oracle integration.  The project I am currently working on requires customer service agents to be on both Oracle and Salesforce concurrently.   This requires the use of a real-time approach to ensure that all information is immediately available to all agents throughout the organization.

This is a fairly straight forward process with the right amount of planning and a good integration team.  Below is a high level summary of the problem and related solution that can be used as a starting point for your integration.  Below is a project that I am working on where I have outlined some of the key areas for your consideration. We hope this is helpful!

The Problem: The existing Oracle customer service application is no longer meeting the requirements of our growing support organization.  The organization is looking for a 360 degree view of their customers and support agents need real-time interaction with customer order history and other internal service agents.

Goals:  Reduce the call handle time for our agents, reduce the number of incoming calls, increase first call resolution, learn more from our incoming calls and get a 360 degree view of our customers to make better decisions.

Solution: Full Integration of Oracle customer master data, customer service cases and transactional data such as orders, returns, price adjustments, current payment status, credit status and case history with Salesforce. This also included the roll-out a CTI integration so that incoming calls automatically pop the customer based on specified criteria.

Oracle to Salesforce Flow

This article will group the activities into two categories.  One time conversion and Real-Time integration considerations.

One Time Conversion Activities:

  1. Initial conversion for Customers (accounts/contacts)
    1. Bring over customers who have had transactions in the past 3 years
    2. Easy button to search and find customers from Oracle < 3 years
  2. Initial conversion for Orders and Line items with full history
    1. Migrate the past six months of Orders and Line Items to SFDC.  It was determined that the past six month of order data will answer 90% of the customer inquiries.
    2. Implementation of a weekly purge process that moves the orders & lines older than six months to the data warehouse.
    3. Creation of Easy button for both orders and lines to show records older than six months.
  3. Initial conversion of Oracle Notes to Salesforce Cases
    1. Conversion for all related “call wrap-up” and Oracle notes to be create as new cases in Salesforce.

i.      Need to create mapping of call reason codes from Oracle to SFDC

ii.      Mapping of Oracle notes to Salesforce case description

 Additional Notes* Prior to this conversion there should be a Data Governance plan outline any of the data clean-up and deduplication activities.  There should also be a detailed functional specification to be created with the specific business requirements based on real customer interactions with the system.  Part of this technical specification will be detailed mapping between for field values with any data conversion that is needed.

 Real-Time Integration Considerations

New Customer Creation Process: Create in Web Point of Sale >> (via Tibco) >> SFDC
New Order Creation Process from POS: Create in Web Point of Sale >> (via Tibco) >> Oracle>>SFDC
New Order Creation Process from Oracle: Create in Oracle UI >> (via Tibco) >> Oracle>>SFDC

 Customer Search within Salesforce

  1. We are building a search interface to find customers in Real-time

 Customer History Salesforce

  1. Creating a new view for all customer order/return information in Real-time
  2. Creating the ability to drill down into specific order information in Real-time
  3. Providing the ability to drill down into specific return information in Real-time

 Order Information

  1. Providing the ability to view a single order summary which includes orders, returns and adjustments from Salesforce in Real-time
  2. Providing the ability to cancel entire order or specific lines from Salesforce in Real-time
  3. Providing the ability to access order detail notes from Salesforce in Real-time

 Line Item Details

  1. Providing access to view all lines of a specific order detail in Real-time
  2. Providing the ability to cancel order line in Real-time
  3. Providing the ability to access line detail notes on Real-time
  4. Providing the ability to view a summary payment schedule in Real-time
  5. Providing the ability to view tracking from the carrier specific website in Real-time
  6. Providing the ability to view item attributes in Real-time
  7. Providing the ability to cancel or return Protection Plan in Real-time

 Order/Line Price Adjustment

  1. Providing the ability to view a previous adjustment for an order
  2. Providing the ability to give a customer a price adjustment

 Return Details

  1. Providing the ability to view a single order return summary  in Real-time
  2. Providing the ability to view multiple returned lines of the original order in Real-time
  3. Providing the ability to view item attributes in Real-time
  4. Providing the ability to view the remaining lines of an order that has not been returned in Real-time

Refund Details

  1. Providing the ability to view details Refund activity of customer’s account – Real-time

 Price History

  1. Providing the ability to view the price history for a specific product in Real-time

 Pending Orders

  1. Providing the ability to view any customer orders that are in the import tables that have not been completely processed

 Notes Integration from Oracle

  1. Ability to view all Notes created for that customer account in Real-time
  2. Ability to access Service Request Form related to notes in Real-time

 Credit Card Maintenance Integration

  1. Ability to view transactions against a customer’s credit card in Real-time
  2. Ability to view updates to a customer’s credit cards in Real-time

I would like to point out that to promote better performance it is important to always look at the existing data in SFDC when possible.  This will greatly enhance the performance of the system by not requiring excessive real-time transactions.  For this reason we are keeping the past 6 months of Order data in SFDC.   There are also many coding best practices that we implemented reduce load times such as SFDC Visualforce page optimization, reduction to the number of calls and batch size limits for each call.

 There is also a key data aspect to these types of integration that I should mention.  Prior any conversion there should be a Data Integration plan for ongoing data feeds (new, update, deletion).  There should also be a detailed functional specification to be created for each of the real-time interfaces.  Part of this technical specification will be detailed mapping between for field values with any data conversion that is needed.

For more information contact your Minneapolis Based Salesforce consulting partner at info@cirriussolutions.com.

We have consultants across the US to assit with your integration needs. Chicago Illinois, Austin, Houston, Dallas & Fort Worth Texas, Philadelphia PA, Phoenix AR, New York NY, Portland OR,  Milwaukee WI, Las Vegas NV, Atlanta GA, Raleigh NE, Omaha Nebraska, Cleveland Ohio, San Jose, San Francisco,San Diego & Los Angeles CA