Bring Value to Your Business with Engineering Operations

It’s not hard to find a Salesforce consulting firm with some in-house engineers available to help with your integration — custom coding options are becoming a fairly standard offering across the industry. That’s awesome, and it can be incredibly helpful. 

What’s not so common, though, is an engineering team leveraging the power of Fractional Operations (AKA consulting done the right way) to bring some serious muscle to your project. There’s more to intelligent business solution engineering than some HTML, JavaScript, or Apex scripting — at Kicksaw, our dedicated Engineering Operations (EOPS) Team is committed to providing cutting-edge, scalable solutions that empower your business to excel in today's dynamic and ever-changing technological environment. 

Why Engineering Operations?

Some businesses only have requirements that can be neatly addressed by Salesforce’s native, out-of-the-box capabilities. If that’s you, great! But…that’s probably not you. 

We live in a wildly complex world, and the inner workings of our businesses reflect this — each company has unique requirements, standards, and problems, and they usually require more than one or two software solutions in order to adequately address these needs. Ideally, all business software would integrate cleanly, data would always be squeaky clean, and separate platforms would support one another rather than hoard their resources, but that’s just not the case. And that’s also why we created our EOPS department. 

The ideal business operations solution for any given company is similar to a delicious plated dinner — there are a variety of ingredients, each bringing its own flavors and sensibilities to the dish. Most are delicious on their own, and most can be prepared and eaten in a few different ways, but it takes an experienced chef to bring out the true potential in the meal. It matters that the ingredients are prepped correctly, seasoned well, seared properly, and served with the right sides. The choice of plate and utensils matters too — presentation (think user interface) is important. 

You get what we’re saying here. Don’t settle for a microwaved dinner or go out of your way to attend culinary school real quick before making dinner if you’re hungry right now. The pros at Kicksaw already have their degree, and your dinner, ready to serve up. It’s all part of our commitment to providing value realization for our clients with each and every implementation.

Delivering Technical Excellence With Kicksaw’s Engineering Operations

With a strong emphasis on Salesforce development, cloud-based infrastructure, and a wide range of technical expertise, our team is prepared to address your most intricate technical hurdles with precision and innovation. Our extensive industry knowledge, combined with our deep platform expertise, has made Kicksaw a partner known for delivering business value, as well as cost-effective approaches to implementing solutions that pay for themselves. EOPS is a key factor in our ongoing success, as our engineers are dedicated to delivering continuous value and strategic partnership throughout the duration of your engagement.

• Engineering Expertise. We utilize deep industry, platform, and SFDC knowledge to effectively build solutions that make an impact for our clients. Anybody can build a script, but we focus on delivering value.
• Platform Specialists. Our team of North American-based developers work to deeply understand your business needs and utilize their extensive expertise across frameworks including SFDC, MuleSoft, custom-built AWS/Azure services, and Python to maximize project value.
• Proven Methodology. We follow a structured development process, including User Acceptance Testing, unit tests, and Infrastructure as Code, ensuring professional and reliable turn-key solutions that your developers can easily augment.
• Commitment to Excellence. We are dedicated to learning and adapting to new technology so that we are able to deliver superior technical results and optimal solutions for every client we work with.

Tim Sabat, Chief Technology Officer at Kicksaw, has this to say about Kicksaw Engineering Operations: 

“Engineering client work in the Salesforce ecosystem is great because we get to solve problems that would otherwise block a client from being efficient.  When I visualize the end user of a system, I picture them in one of two states: either frustrated with their job because they have to toggle between two systems, or satisfied because all their data is in a central location.

“Our team is unique because it has a diverse set of skill sets. Salesforce development can tend to silo developers — the standard developer in Salesforce works only in Apex and LWC and sees Salesforce as the only method for getting things done. However, the developers on our team have a greater range of tools at their disposal. Because we reach outside the platform for tooling in the AWS/GCP or Azure realm, and because we work in other languages like Python, we can create more innovative solutions.  Our developers are language and platform polyglots — it takes a lot of industry experience to become one, which means the people who gain these skills tend to be extraordinary, and therefore more interesting/fun to work with, and creative as well. 

“Part of my job as CTO is to ensure that clients are aware of our team's vast skill set. That's not always easy because the list of what our team is capable of is so long. Data science, DevOps, web development frameworks, Pandas and other ETL tooling for data transformation, various iPaaS solutions like MuleSoft Composer or Anypoint, Workato, Del Boomi, etc. These are all in our wheelhouse, but don't fit the mold of what the traditional SFDC dev offers clients.”

Real-world Success, Tailored For You

What does working with Kicksaw EOPS look like in reality? 

Though the solutions we create will be unique to each customer, we can promise you one thing: it will be a collaborative, flexible experience centered around your business needs, focused on delivering practical, scalable value, chocked full of technical wizardry. 

The first agenda item, once you’ve signed on for the EOPS experience, is for our team to get to know you and your business. Whether that means a thorough knowledge transfer from your Kicksaw Sales/Marketing Ops team or initial discovery sessions with your internal team, our engineers will immerse themselves in all things Your Business to determine how best to solve for the issues holding you back from your potential. 

From there, it’s iteration and collaboration for as many months as needed. Practically, this can take several forms:

• Salesforce Development. Automate complex processes and create rich user experiences with custom LWC, Aura, Apex, and Visualforce development.
• Custom Integrations. Integrate Salesforce with external systems like EHRs, ERPs, and custom APIs using MuleSoft, AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, and more.
• Org Migrations and Data Management. Utilize scripting, queuing, and batch processes to support org migrations and complex, high volume data transformation between systems.
• Custom Web Development. Craft web solutions that deliver business impact using modern frameworks like React, Python, FastAPI, and more.
• Salesforce ISV Product Development. Support Salesforce ISV partners with application development, integration, packaging, and distribution.
• Staff Augmentation. We act as your internal development team, whether it’s within the SFDC ecosystem or beyond. We’ve successfully created custom AWS stacks, portals, and supported backend processes for online businesses.
• Infrastructure as Code. Leverage tools like Serverless Framework, AWS CDK, and Terraform to build cloud infrastructure that’s efficient, scalable, and secure.
• Industry Compliance Achievement & Support. Help achieve and maintain technical compliance standards for SOC 2, HIPAA, and other regulatory requirements.

What does this look like at the end of the day, once everything’s built, tested, optimized, and deployed? The possibilities are pretty much endless, but maybe for you, this looks like: 

• An integration with Netsuite and Salesforce, using MuleSoft tools and custom built solutions, to seamlessly connect these two vital systems
• A custom Lightning Web Component in Salesforce to submit medical reports to the FDA via API
• Data migration using Python and AWS to save your team from needing to manually processes data via spreadsheet
• AWS middleware for data management to establish a secure connection to a 3P solution
• A custom-built Salesforce package to help sell your own solutions to your customers

The examples in the list above are not made up — they are actual solutions our engineers have created for customers. But there’s more to the Kicksaw EOPS experience than product development. Our team is readily available for any and all questions you have about how to best use your solution, and they will train everyone on your team who needs to use it. And if your needs change along the way? No worries — we adapt to your needs as they evolve.

“Kicksaw quickly reviewed our infrastructure and came back with a detailed plan to help us scale and keep up with growing demand. They also were key in helping us improve our security and other technical requirements to successfully attain SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliance. Kicksaw’s experience and technical ability was invaluable during these major company initiatives.” — Ruben Gamez, Founder of Signwell

Exceed Your Expectations Through the Power of Engineering Operations

It all boils down to this: when it comes to your business software tech stack, we don’t want you to settle for good enough. We want you to dream big and to unleash your imagination. And then, we want to help you bring that dream to life. 

Custom engineering operations from a consulting firm dedicated to delivering a solution that prioritizes your needs can spell the difference between success and failure for your growing business. Think outside the virtual box — get in touch with us today to learn how the Kicksaw EOPS team can deliver incredible value to your business.