For a company with an eight-year Salesforce history, you would think that making the move to Lightning would be long and cumbersome, but BMC did it in just 5 weeks! BMC provides solutions that empower digital transformation, enabling companies to better leverage their cloud assets as well as their legacy IT assets, including drawing on emerging technologies like machine learning and AI. BMC’s business model depends on constant innovation, so it's a must that the company stays up to date with cutting-edge technology. For IT Director Rachel Rogers, moving to Lightning Experience was necessary to stay ahead of the curve.

Migrating 8+ years of customization to a new platform was going to be an endeavor, Rachel thought, but an even greater challenge was going to be convincing the business leaders to make it a priority. Rachel understands that “the scariest thing is change. We had to convince them that it was for the better.”

Before development even began, it took Rachel almost a year of going back and forth with her leaders doing negotiations, roadmap evaluations, and feature parity comparisons between Classic and Lightning. In late summer 2016, Rachel had approval to begin planning the rollout.

“The scariest thing is change. We had to convince them that it was for the better.” -Rachel Rogers, Director of IT

After reviewing over 1 million lines of Apex code during the technical evaluations, Rachel and her team learned that only 2 things could break: a couple of buttons on CPQ. Everything else could be easily migrated. The most effort for rolling out Lightning would be focused on change management.

BMC conducted a blind study to gauge how users would react to the new Salesforce experience. The test group, including some of BMC’s best sales reps, was asked to complete tasks that they were familiar with in Classic, but weren't given any instructions for doing it in Lightning. The team observed how each person completed the tasks, watching for process, training opportunities, and technical bugs.

The reps were extremely receptive to Lightning and all agreed to participate in a pilot. Some of the team's findings from the pilot was that their users could benefit from simplifying the user experience. The BMC IT team decided on one compact layout per object and to get rid of lots of profiles.

“Lightning will be a huge time saver, because the information is right there.” -BMC Sales Rep

Some of the feedback they received from reps was, “This could be a tool that you embrace, rather than a tool you have to use,” and, “This will be a huge time saver, because the information is right there.” These reps and sales managers were so eager that they went to their VPs and demanded it. Rachel and team began the development process and completed the migration in just 4.5 weeks.

“When people ask how we did it in that amount of time, I tell them it was because of all the technical decisions we made,” said Rachel. “We didn’t try to rebuild it. We did only things that were business critical.”

BMC also plans to continue their phased roll out of Lightning to enhance the user experience.

See how Lightning can take your productivity to the next level by checking out the Lightning Overview Demo. Then get acclimated by doing the Lightning Trails on Trailhead.