Migrating processes from Salesforce to Bitrix

Client

FM Logistic is an international logistics company headquartered in France. The business has been operating in Russia since 1998. There are 22 warehouses with a total number of 3,000 people. Salesforce was responsible for the business processes of the company's marketing and management departments.

The problem

In 2022, the American platform Salesforce stopped connecting new customers from Russia for political reasons. The prospects for working with already connected customers were in question: the platform could turn them off at any time. Since Salesforce is distributed only via SaaS and all user information is stored on the platform's servers, the Russian division of FML risked losing all its operations in one day.

Therefore, the company decided to transfer all processes to Bitrix, a CRM of Russian origin.

kt.team's task

Migrate processes and databases from Salesforce to Bitrix in the shortest possible time and without loss.

Business intelligence phase

The kt.team project team started by analyzing the current structure of Salesforce processes. We have studied:

• what modules and entities FML used in its work,

• how these modules were interconnected in the logic of the necessary processes,

• how each type of data was processed and how it was taken into account in the processes.

Based on the analysis, we will:

• recorded key entities (contacts, companies, leads, deals) — the composition of fields, their relationships, data types;

• compared the capabilities of Salesforce and Bitrix24

• chose which Bitrix24 modules the client needs

• We worked out how to replace the Salesforce functionality, which is not available in Bitrix24 and which the client used.

Result 1. The client's work did not stop for a day, since the development and testing of processes in Bitrix24 did not affect the existing CRM

FM Logistic's marketing division is constantly adjusting its actions based on data from current deals and leads. Therefore, marketing constantly needs transparent reports, analytics from CRM, and the ability to flexibly change these reports to analyze specific trends and data. All information for decision-making must be centralized.

We transferred the logic of building basic reports from Salesforce to Bitrix24, linking fields and documents to appropriate analytics and visualization tools. In order not to increase development costs and not to increase the implementation time, we used Bitrix24 custom tools to the maximum.

All development was carried out without disabling Salesforce, so before the launch of the tested MVP, all FM Logistic employees continued to work in their usual system.

The first users started working with Bitrix24 only after we were convinced that the basic necessary processes were working.

Result 2. We migrated the data that was stored in Salesforce, preserving its structure and mutual relationships

All FM Logistic divisions work with a single Salesforce product, and CRM stores data for Russia, France, and all other territorial divisions. This imposed restrictions on our work: we could not provide us with access to an API with data, since such an API would give us access to the entire array of information. Therefore, we looked at the logic, process construction, formulas by guest access in the sandbox — on the system's test bench without data, and received the necessary data for testing the transferred processes in Bitrix24 in.xls and .csv formats, entered them into the system and tested the performance of new processes. At the same time, the data storage structure and their relationships were kept in the same form so that users could work comfortably in the new system and did not have to rebuild their logic.

Result 3. The first users started working in the new CRM less than a month after the start of the project

It took about 80 working hours to deploy Bitrix24, transfer data, and build logic in the new system. The first users started working with the MVP system less than a month after the start of the project.

The result of the work

The marketing team of FM Logistic's Russian division works with customer data in the usual way. At the same time, the performance of the CRM system does not depend on the political situation.