Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us to today's webinar. Today, we are going to hear how Legend drove real-time customer experiences with Salesforce and MuleSoft. My name is Simon Goddard. I work on our product marketing team here at Salesforce on our MuleSoft product. Now before we get into today's session, I just want to give you some tips and tricks on how to use our webinar platform. So firstly, this webinar is going to be available on demand after the session, and you can use exactly the same link that you're currently using to reaccess it. Please also note the slides are going to automatically advance throughout the presentation. You can enlarge the slides and also the media player tool by clicking the square button located in the top right-hand corner of the widget. If you do require any technical assistance during today's session, simply click on that help widget located at the bottom of your console. And to provide some helpful content after this session, we've got some related resources. So if you click on the resources window, you can find some extra content to further your learning. And finally, for those of you who are joining us live, thank you so much. We actually have time for questions at the end. So we'd love to get your questions and we'll try and answer as many as possible live. So to submit your question anytime throughout this presentation, simply click the join the conversation widget on the right-hand side. And like I say, we'll try and answer as many possible during the session. So before I get into the session itself, I must remind you that Salesforce is a publicly traded company and customers should base any purchasing decisions based on products and services that are currently available. And today, we're joining you from New South Wales here in Australia, so we would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, and we recognize their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. And as I mentioned, my name is Simon Goddard. I'm going to be your host today. I've been on the MuleSoft team for over 8 years, and we're really the leader in integration, API and automation. And today, we're going to share that point of view with you. But more importantly, the star of today's show, we're really excited to be joined by one of our customers, one of our trailblazers, Alison Murphy from Legend Corporation. And she's going to be sharing her tips and tricks and best practices in a Q&A with my colleague, Adam Ward. Now if you've not heard of Legend Corporation before, they are Australian group of companies founded way back in 1962. They operate within the electrical and industrial products sector. And what I love about Legend is it's a highly complex business. They have more than 40,000 product lines, both manufacturing and distributing a whole heap of products from power plugs to specialist tools in the utility sector. And what Alison is going to share with you is how they digitized their whole transformation. And what's amazing is up until very recently, all of their orders were manually processed by their customer service team. So Alison will share with you how she's working with MuleSoft and Salesforce to digitize that process and some of the lessons learned along the way. And actually, today, I do want to thank you for joining us. See, here at Salesforce, part of our value is the ecosystem and the community, and actually, this was a session that took place at World Tour Sydney a few weeks back, and it received really great feedback. So we're really excited to be able to share it with you here on-demand. But also, if you have further questions, please visit mulesoft.com, engage with the community, and we'd love to help you on your journey further. Now let's get into the content. And the crux of today's conversation is very much creating connected experiences, and a real emphasis on that connected part. Now before I hand over to Alison and Adam, I do want to ground us in the point of view. Why are we even talking about integration in this context? So I'll spend a couple of minutes here before I hand over. And firstly, let's take a step back. See, we are at yet another inflection point. Everyone's talking about generative AI, and we all see the benefits of the evolutionary technology that is GenAI. In fact, 86% of IT leaders expect generative AI to play a significant role. But this is just one of many recent inflection points. Over the past decade, we've talked about the migration to cloud. We've talked about big data. We talked about automation. And who knows what we're going to be talking about in 12 months' time? These are all opportunities to create connected experiences. However, let's just take GenAI. Only 2% of those same IT leaders see no significant barriers, which means the overwhelming majority of IT leaders see barriers to adopting these technologies successfully. So why is that? Well, every year, we conduct a research report called the Connectivity Benchmark Report, and this is our latest report. And it shared with us that 91% of decision-makers agree integration is the reason for slowing down their digital transformation initiatives and being able to adopt these transformative technologies. And this is no surprise to us. MuleSoft has been a leader in this space for decades, and consistently, this is where we're helping customers to transform. So let's dive deeper. Why is this such an issue? Well, this is probably not news to you, but the reality is that right now, organizations are having to manage a complex web of siloed systems and data. In fact, the average enterprise has over 990 systems, and less than 1/3 of them are actually integrated. And what we find is when these systems are integrated, they're often integrated using a variety of different tools, different patterns, which often leads to these complex, expensive integration environments. And then you have this sprawling set of data, different types of access points, and managing and securing that at scale is even more difficult. In fact, we asked our participants specifically around how many of their APIs are governed, and more than 1/4 go ungoverned, which is a huge risk for enterprises out there. So it's no surprise that 62% of leaders are having trouble keeping up with these demands, not just these day-to-day demands, but then also how do we continue to evolve and change our businesses. So here at MuleSoft, we advocate for thinking about this differently. For us to be able to keep up with this pace of change, we've got to think about the strategic conversation of integration in a different way. So let's take a look, first, at well, how are we currently approaching integration? And the reality is that most companies have something that looks a little like this, an integration mess. So you've got some systems at the bottom that you're trying to connect to experiences at the top, and most folks traditionally would connect these point-to-point. But then what you get is the following. You have custom coding or unobservable coding. You're not really sure what's going on. And so then when companies want to change, this is where it starts to slow them down. So say you want to change one of these systems on the bottom here, you then have to unpick and find all of the various ways that it's connected into your business to be able to change it, and that's often very risky and expensive to do. And this is why, again, 8 out of 10 leaders say integration is slowing them down. So how about if we thought about this differently? Rather than having this web of integration and complex spaghetti code, how about we think about business as a composable enterprise? See, what modern composability would advocate is breaking down these complex integrations into smaller composable elements, providing a framework to then orchestrate and organize them to combine them into these custom business capabilities that could meet any requirement. That's what Anypoint Platform, MuleSoft's product, helps you do. It combines traditional technologies and standards like EDI or REST with newer, more modern technologies like RPA, robotic process automation, or IDP, intelligent document processing. By unifying these technologies onto a single platform, organizations are empowered to design, modify and optimize their integration workflows, providing greater agility. So when you need to change out or sunset one of these systems on the back end, you've just got a few components that you can easily access and find to swap out versus having to unpick everything. And what's so transformative about this approach? We talked about IT leaders struggling to keep up with the pace of demand. Well, by taking this approach and breaking down your business, you start to see the value amplify over time. See, in project 1, you may build out a few of these access points and APIs. And then when it comes to project 2, you then don't have to rebuild them. In fact, because on a unified platform, you're able to access them much easier and reuse them, you can then spend your time innovating on top of that. So you can build out some new connection points. And then when project 3 comes along, you can do the same again. And this is why customers, on average, reduce their integration costs by 30% using Anypoint Platform. This reusability is the heart of what we advocate. So that's a little bit about MuleSoft. And what it's really helping to do is bring together all of these converging technologies, unlocking all of your data using integration, securing it at scale using API management, allowing your businesses to automate their business processes using low code tooling, and of course, the wave of generative AI and AI, including AI within the platform, to help your developers code using natural language. And this is why, on average, not only do customers decrease costs by 30%, they increase productivity by 57%, all on a single platform. So that's MuleSoft. And now what I'd actually love to do is hand over to the real talent today, which is, of course, Alison from Legend Corporation. And what you're going to hear here is a fascinating tale about how do you modernize a long-standing business. And on the screen here, you're just seeing a sampling of some of the systems and applications that Alison and her amazing team have been able to connect at scale to create a connected experience. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming to the webinar Alison Murphy and Adam Ward from MuleSoft.

Thank you so much, Simon. It's so great to be joined with you today. And then Alison, it's so good to see you, too.

Good morning.

Nice to see you. Well, Alison, we are so, so, so grateful, not only that you would present this at World Tour Sydney, but you're also here with us today, and I know you're going to stick around for some questions. So as you're watching this, all of you, please think of those questions. Alison is -- I know you give direct and good feedback, so I'm super excited to hear some of the Q&A today. In terms of just opening this up, I know Simon just gave an overview of what Legend does, but I was wondering, in your own terms, if you could just say, what does Legend do?

Yes. So Legend, as Simon mentioned, we play in the electrical and industrial products sector. We have around 40,000 products, which we manufacture some of and distribute others. We're mainly -- our biggest business unit -- we have multiple business units, which is why it's such a complex business, and they all play in their own space with their own products. So the major -- our major business unit primarily sells to wholesale electrical outlets, and another major part of that is utilities as well. So very much in the electrical space and with a large, large number of product lines, a very complex kind of structure of our business.

So I'm hearing complex structures, all these different things, which tees up the next question, which is what were some of the challenges that you are experiencing?

So when I started with the business in May 2020, the primary remit that I had was to -- we had a legacy system, a proprietary system built in-house, 18 years old. We had a single resource who knew and understand that platform. So the biggest challenge to the business at that point was really mitigating the risk around that business system. So I came in with the remit of moving our technology to a newer sort of [ resourceable ] stack and also to improve our e-commerce capability. So really, it was -- the majority of it was around that business risk and removing that from the business. So as we moved into the process of our digital transformation over the next sort of 2 years from that mid-2020 point, we had lots of challenges along the way. But what we came to was a system where we wanted to put in a couple of Tier 1 platforms and then supported by other Tier 2 platforms because we don't have endless budget. So challenge -- budget was definitely one of the challenges that we -- we also had the ability to peel this old system back. We needed to peel that back step by step because one of the major -- our major KPIs was really around don't crash out the business, right, because this legacy platform was the cornerstone of our business. So what we did was we implemented Salesforce to start with, Service and Sales Cloud and along with MuleSoft, then we relaunched a new PIM. So we moved all of our product information out from the legacy system onto a new PIM. And then we launched 8 new e-commerce websites and then we launched CPQ. So again, moving all of those functions from that legacy system to the new platform.

Well, that's amazing, Alison. So you've been like particularly busy with a lot of things to do. Can you explain a little bit more about -- you just teed it up a little bit at the end, but why did you partner with MuleSoft on this? And what were some of the learnings you had along the way?

So one of the key things that I wanted to do was give the sales team, particularly in our business, one place where they could go and get all of the information. So we had -- we have SAP as our back end, which we didn't want to change. We didn't have an appetite to change that. We just needed to move over the front end. But I didn't want to have people needing to log in to multiple systems or go to multiple places to get the information that they needed. So we decided that Salesforce could do that for us, but then we've got the choice of how do we get all of the data to all of the places. So we actually looked at quite a few different integration options, and we landed with MuleSoft for a couple of reasons. Number one, that composability that Simon talked about. We wanted to be able to reuse things along the way, and that was a really strong piece of MuleSoft's capability. We had a really strong relationship with our MuleSoft -- with our Salesforce partners, and then that transferred over to the MuleSoft partners. So we already had a strong trust -- trusting relationship laid down, and we really wanted to be able to have those 2 pieces of technology talk very closely and work very closely. And obviously, the Salesforce/MuleSoft environment does exactly that for us. We -- what were the learnings along the way? We had lots of learnings. We had lots of challenges. We -- early in the game, we had big issues with our initial implementation partner. And we -- that was probably the most stressful time for me in the entire program. And what came out of that was the best thing that ever happened to us, and that was Apisero as our new implementation partner who we took on, first of all, from MuleSoft, but then second of all, 6 months later, we opened that up to Salesforce as well. So they became our partner for both MuleSoft and Salesforce. Again, that's another advantage of having the MuleSoft piece when we already had Salesforce because we're able to sort of consolidate our support and make sure that we have great relationships with the people that we're working with. And the other -- probably the other thing that we really learned as we were putting in MuleSoft is the fact that it can -- it does give you that capability to move data from one place to the other, as any integration platform should, and it does that really well, and we're able to reuse the code and all those sorts of things. But actually, what we learned was that it's really a problem-solving platform. There were so many meetings that we sat in and at the end of it, we were all brain fried and we're just saying how the heck do we solve this problem? And one of us would go away, and I do my best thinking in the shower, but have a shower and then go, you know what, I reckon we can do that in MuleSoft, and it turns out we could. So, so many issues of data transformation and even logic sitting in there that MuleSoft was able to help us solve. And I think that's one of the key learnings is just think about -- think outside the box on what you can do with the platforms that you have. And MuleSoft's one of those ones that sort of is able to deliver a bit of magic every time you need it.

That's awesome. Alison, I love your answer because you talk about like the other systems, the benefit with the Salesforce, like it's kind of altogether. I would love -- and I love that you talk about like best ideas in the shower, and you talked at World Tour Sydney about one of the ideas that you had and then you were able to implement it within the week. I wonder if you could share with the audience today that tip as well because that was super cool.

That was definitely a shower moment. We had -- just sitting in the middle of COVID, everyone had the same problems, right? Where's my order, just supply delays and all kinds of things that are outside of our control. And sitting in one of our business review meetings, we're saying, here's all the challenges that our customers are having and customer service is struggling to keep up and all of these things. And we had already implemented MuleSoft. We had already implemented the capability, our CPQ, which is our order and quote management, which is sending information to and from SAP, sending information to and from the website, giving product information to and from Salesforce and all of those places. And I'm sitting in the meeting going, we have all this information, all of those integrations are built. So how do we get that to the customer and take some load off of our customer service people? So what we did was think about where our data is and how we move it around. And what we did was have the customer e-mail us -- if the customer can e-mail us from an e-mail address that's in Salesforce that is attached to an account, what we do is go -- MuleSoft then goes to Salesforce, gets the account details, then comes back and goes to SAP and gets all of their open orders and their estimated delivery times, puts that -- meshes that together and puts it in a spreadsheet and then returns it to the customer through that e-mail address that they sent in, in the first place within 30 seconds. So what they're getting is they're sending in, where's my order, and we're returning to them, here's all your open lines and here are all the delivery dates that we expect to be able to dispatch those products, within 30 seconds. So now those people, all they have to do is e-mail us at [email protected] and then have that returned immediately instead of calling customer service. Half the time, during that time, we were losing 700 calls a day, so they were dropping out. So now they don't have to sit on the line. Customer service don't have to answer the question and go through every line by line, by line, by line. They've got it there in a spreadsheet straightaway in their e-mail inbox. So that was one of those things -- I thought about that in the shower, had the idea, went to Apisero, our implementation partner and said, what do you reckon? Do you reckon, we can do that? And within 3 days, it was live. So -- and just Simon's talking about reduction in cost of reusability and all that sort of stuff, that actually cost us nothing but time. So time from my team, time from the implementation partner, but no extra capability needed, no extra purchases of licenses or bandwidth or anything like that. It was nothing that time, and it was only 3 days. So -- and the advantage of the customer was massive. So that was -- that is, to me, like just a fantastic example of thinking outside the box on what MuleSoft can do for you and then having a great partner that can actually help you deliver that as well.

That is amazing. Like from 700 calls to 30 seconds, that is amazing. Congratulations. That is phenomenal, and I'm sure that's a huge benefit to all your customers as well. So that is amazing. And Alison, so this is some of the amazing success that you've had, and I think it leads me to some of -- my final question, which is like what are your future plans going forward?

Yes. So we -- obviously, we are definitely at that inflection point that Simon talked about. And we're now in a really great where all of our data is moving from one system to the other. And I mean you can implement 1,000 systems, awesome, do a great job of implementation, but unless they're talking to each other, they're really useless. So we're at that point where we're now stabilizing our data and getting that all into a usable format. And obviously, moving forward, we want to get that customer experience even better. We think Einstein AI can help us predict, using next best action and all of those things, what that customer is going to want from us. So we have -- operating in the electrical industry, we're really quite risk-averse. So my kind of subliminal activity is to get Salesforce's expertise and development to help us show our business what it can do for us without having to overtly say we're going to implement an AI solution here and scaring everybody. We're kind of -- we're going to use Salesforce's expertise to really deliver that in the background to show exceptional customer service and exceptional customer experience. So it's really about predicting, making those conversations more relevant and being able to answer those questions more rapidly for the customer.

I love that. Well, thank you so much, Alison. Really appreciate your time answering these questions now. And I know you'll be back later to answer some of the live questions. So everyone, think of your questions, and we'll have Alison answer some of those later. But before we get to Q&A, we're going to wrap up. So I'm going to hand it back to Simon.

Thanks, guys.

Alison, Adam, thank you so much. I hope you appreciate it takes a lot to come on here and show the good stuff, but also share the stuff that we could do better next time. So Alison, huge appreciation for you and the whole team at Legend. I know this takes a village. So as Adam mentioned, we are going to open up to your questions soon. So please click on that join the conversation widget to submit your questions. And if you're on-demand, again, you can visit mulesoft.com to submit questions elsewhere. Before I do that, just a recap. What have we shared today? Well, we've shared how Legend is working with MuleSoft and Salesforce to connect data across any system, whether it's on-premise or in the cloud. That makes sure data discoverable and consumable wherever it's needed. It's not just about unlocking that data then. What are we going to do with it? With MuleSoft, we can take action on your data using no code or low code to automate tasks and actions across any system. And finally, we need to make sure that's secure. So with out-of-the-box API governance, you can ensure all of your data in transit is secure and monitored. And that's why customers on average are able to go to market 78% faster with MuleSoft and reduce their maintenance costs. Now for those of you who would like to continue this journey, here are a couple of resources that you could be using. Throughout this presentation, I've referred to some stats from our Connectivity Benchmark Report. So you can click the QR code here or scan the QR code to download that. And if you want to hear more about Alison and Legend's journey, they are a Salesforce customer, and we have many more resources you can access. So please, again, scan the QR code there to learn more. But without further ado, let's open up to your questions. So if you have any questions, please click that join the conversation widget, and let's get into them.

Great questions coming in here. Please keep them coming. Why don't we start with some of these that are already here? So Alison, there's a question here, which is what other Salesforce products are you using?

Yes. So we've got, obviously, MuleSoft and Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and CPQ at the moment.

Makes a lot of sense. There's a question here, which -- I love this question, so thank you, which starts to talk about ROI. So the specific question is, how would you articulate the value obtained by adopting MuleSoft? And what does your ROI look like? Obviously, what are you allowed to share, Alison? How would you answer this one?

Yes. So the way I will answer that is around what we've just been talking about really is the customer experience. So we have lots of metrics around the way that MuleSoft specifically has impacted -- we did -- the whole transformation program was huge for us and so has had lots of metrics along the way. But some of the metrics that specifically relate to MuleSoft and the customer that -- the status@legend e-mail that we just spoke about, which has moved 60% of our price and availability and where's my order queries coming from phone calls on to automated processes. And then the other part that we've done that is directly related to MuleSoft is for our EDI. So when a customer places an order in their ERP and it comes directly to us, MuleSoft does a wash of corrections and data mapping and looking for customer part numbers to match to our part numbers, looking for pricing matching, looking for unit of measure mismatches. It does all that logic in the background before it hits Salesforce and CPQ, so that when it hits Salesforce and CPQ, the errors are already removed and it goes touch-free through to the keeper and is dispatched. And we've now got from 0% touch-free, before implementation of MuleSoft, we had to touch every single order. Now with the MuleSoft logic and the ability to pass it through, we're at 60% to 70% every month is touch-free. So the reduction in customer service costs, hours of work and also the increased customer experience, I think those 2 things -- apart from all the reusability and the ability to deliver APIs really quickly and all that stuff that's in your documentation, these 2 things are things specifically related to customer experience and have only been possible because of MuleSoft. Not because of any of the other stuff we did, but only because of MuleSoft.

That's great color. Thank you, Alison. And actually, I'm going to hop to another question because it's sort of related to goals. Someone's asked here specifically around sustainability. So did the adoption of MuleSoft and Salesforce more broadly contribute towards any sustainability goals? I mean this isn't something we've explicitly drawn out here, so you let us know if it's a topic of expertise for you, but would you have any comment on that?

Yes, I think it's -- I mean, it's a great question. We've not actually looked at it in that perspective. I guess what it does give us is the ability to move in a quick way, so be agile in terms of -- if we're talking about ESG-type targets and that kind of sustainability, what we will be able to do is move data really quickly. When we come to the point that we have to start reporting on things that we've never reported on before, we'll be able to move data very, very quickly into the places that we need to have it to be able to report on it. I really have -- it's a great question, and I have to think more on it, but we haven't -- it didn't really come into our thinking, to be honest.

Yes. No, that makes sense. Well -- and if you're interested, for the audience out there, Salesforce has a product called Net Zero Cloud, which is all about how do you track and measure and engage around your sustainability goals. And MuleSoft has an accelerator to help bring more data sources into Net Zero Cloud faster because as is a common theme here, all of the information and data you need isn't just in one place. So how do you bring it together? I would definitely take a look at Net Zero Cloud and MuleSoft, if that is your area of interest. Some great questions coming in, so let's see what we have time for. One, Alison, I'd love to bring out is the realities of this, which is, can you also speak about some of the practical challenges you're still facing? Maybe here, you can redraw out what's maybe the biggest obstacle you came up against, and how did you overcome it? Or you're still trying to overcome it?

What was our biggest obstacle? I guess in the whole transformation program and in MuleSoft specifically, we had really big issues with our implementation partner at the beginning of the program. So we really struggled. We just made the wrong choice. And we had used that company for a different platform previously and been very, very happy with them, and so we decided to give them a chance on the MuleSoft platform. Unfortunately, they didn't have the resources or the experience that we needed. That was probably sort of a heartbreak moment for me pretty early on in the process, and it was a very, very difficult time for us. What did happen out of that was that MuleSoft then, our great relationship with our MuleSoft partner -- our MuleSoft account manager had recommended another partner who hadn't been in Australia before but had this great program of helping customers and wanted to get into Australia and offered us a partnership for 6 months just to test and learn with them. And that was with Apisero, who is now NTT DATA, but that was the biggest turning point in our program, having them come on board. But I have never, probably never, been so stressed in my life as the time when our partner just fell apart. And we -- everything -- nothing was going the way it was supposed to, and we had to move off negotiating, canceling of contracts and renew contracts and all those things mid massive transformation program. So that was probably the biggest challenge that we've had. Thankfully, with NTT DATA or Apisero, we've had a really great relationship with them from that moment right until now. So one of the things that I would encourage people who are starting out is to really make sure that you're comfortable with your partner. That's one of the biggest success factors that you'll have in an implementation or even in a BAU position, is right now, we have one internal MuleSoft resource, but we have a super strong relationship with NTT DATA that if we have an issue or she goes on holidays or she's sick or she can't do what needs to be done, they're on it straightaway. So that is the biggest blocker and the biggest enabler of this whole process is a really great implementation and support partner.

Well, that's actually -- pretty much answers, I think, another question here, which was, did you use a partner, and I think you've called out Apisero here, obviously, NTT DATA. Is there anything else you want to add there, Alison, or do you feel like we covered it?

Yes. The only other thing that I know it was like -- what are some of the things you should be aware of. Some of the things that we didn't consider fully was the vehicles and the bandwidth and the capability that we needed. So just make sure that you've got clear understanding of how many APIs you think you're going to need to build and what vehicles you're going to need to have to support that, both in production and in a sandbox environment. And make sure that you've sort of planned that out with your account manager, so there's no sort of surprises along the way.

Yes. I think 2 themes, I'd echo there, Alison, which is obviously working with your MuleSoft account team to find the right partner to work with, if you're going to use a partner, so definitely reecho that. And then when it comes to scoping and sizing and making sure that we -- you're priced in for the right consumption that you need, again, work so closely with your MuleSoft account team to make sure that, that is going to be fit for purpose. So great answers. A couple more questions here. And again, feel free to submit yours if you have a question. One question here around, have you made MuleSoft your sole integration platform? Or do you use MuleSoft in conjunction with other platforms such as Azure or Kafka? Any comments here, Alison?

Yes. No, MuleSoft is our only integration platform.

Very good. Very easy. And I guess what I would say to that is sometimes -- it's very binary, that one. That was easy. But what I would say is if you do have other integration tools within your business, often MuleSoft does complement, some customers have a joint strategy, and many customers do what Alison is doing, which is just have MuleSoft. So -- great. Question here, did your journey support your data strategy or data governance approach?

Definitely. Our data strategy and governance was a massive part of the transformation program. So one of the issues that I see so regularly in my previous businesses and even people that I talk to today is not being able to get the data where they need it. So I was just speaking to someone the other day, and they were talking about updating a price list. And they said that one person in their team got in big trouble because they'd updated the pricing in one system and they'd not put it on the prices for the web and then it wasn't on the customer portal pricing either, and so everything was all mismatched. Well, with MuleSoft, we have a pricing team who enter a price and immediately, it is on the web, it is in Salesforce, in the order management system. It is everywhere that it needs to be. So it's really important that you look at your data strategy and work out how you're going to master it somewhere, but then deliver it everywhere else that it needs to be. Because if you don't do that, you end up in a position where you've got no clear understanding of where you're mastering your data and then also no clear understanding of which version of your data is sitting in all of your other systems. So integration is absolutely critical to data governance and your overall data strategy approach. And I think that is one of the key design authority points that we had was we must be clear on where we are mastering and how we are moving that data around and what it looks like in terms of security and all of the other things that go along with that, and make sure that, that fits with what we're doing and that we don't end up putting in amazing systems. Salesforce is amazing standing on its own, but actually, it's not really that helpful unless you can get the data in and out of it and put it in the places where people are going to want to consume it. So it was absolutely fundamental in the way that we designed the program, in the implementation of MuleSoft, and MuleSoft has enabled us to make sure that, that data strategy and the governance of our data is very clear and very automated.

If I could, Alison, one question to add on to that. For those in the audience who maybe are trying to approach a data strategy, a data governance strategy, as you've articulated, it's incredibly complex, right? Even for simpler businesses, there's still just a lot to manage. So how did you approach that? And where in the business was that led from, just to give folks a sense of how to start?

It's a good question. It's definitely, definitely led from my team, from the digital team. What we struggled with and we continue to struggle with, actually, is educating the business on the importance of accurate and clean data. So, so many -- and our systems -- our SAP instance, which is what does our distribution and our finance module, it's been in the business for 25 years. So when I came in 3 years ago, we had 25 years of data that people didn't really kind of take ownership of. Nobody really worried about putting a meaningless value into a field that is for something completely independent. So it was a really challenging process, but the part of -- our massive transformation was taking out one massive system and putting in a few others to do that same work. And that gave us the opportunity to clean some of that data, to manipulate some of the data structure within reason because -- and will all have to be working with, in some way, your legacy systems. But it enabled us to open that can of worms, I guess, to see what's under the hood and understand where we've got a mess and where we need to clean it up. So coming back to how did we get started and where was it driven from, a lot of it started with education of the business on if you do this or if this says this, this is what's going to happen. And bringing that back to customer experience and making sure that they understand that every piece of data in our systems and everything that you add in terms of the master data on a product or pricing or any of those things impacts the customer down the line. So it's really about educating -- they don't need to understand data structure or how a database works or tables or anything, but they need to understand how that impacts the business and its operations and then its customers. So that's really where we started is around education of the business, and it's absolutely being driven by my team because it's easy for everybody else to kind of ignore it, but I've got a little OCD, if you hadn't guessed already, and so yes, that's how it started, and that's where it's been driven from, if that kind of answers the question in a roundabout way.

It really -- well, firstly, I love your drive here and your passion for it. And what I heard -- there was a few things I heard, customer focused, right? Let's be outside in here. What's this driving towards? I heard structure and discipline, education, and ultimately, alignment, right, across the org and also ownership, right? You're accountable for it and driving it. And so it's amazing to see. It's amazing to be part of that journey. So kudos to you and the team, Alison. And we are coming up to time. We're at the 45-minute mark. Maybe then if we could leave with a top tip, Alison. You obviously shared so many great insights here, but if you had to leave one top tip for the audience, someone who's maybe looking to approach a similar journey to what you've been on, what would your one top tip be?

I think just don't try and go alone. So from your MuleSoft account manager to implementation partner to your business, don't underestimate how much the business, being involved in the process, even if it feels like a technical implementation, will help you in the long run. So just making sure that you've got clear understanding of what the business is doing and what is happening, what are the pain points and feeding those through to your implementation partner and your account manager. And -- just collaboration, I think, is the number one key. Every time I hear about a failed implementation or a cost overrun, it's because we had so many external advisers come in and poke down at the business and not talk to them and not listen to them, and so we ended up not getting what we thought we were going to get and et cetera, et cetera. So embed the team in the business and collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.

I love that. Wise words from a very wise leader. So Alison, thank you. And if I can add on to that, what often I hear from customers is don't boil the ocean, which is kind of a little bit of what you're talking to as well, which is really like zone in on the problem statement. Start small. Start somewhere, first and foremost, but don't try and do it all at once because that's when you end up drowning and you have too many cooks in the kitchen. Alison, that's all we have time for. A huge thank you to you and Legend and the team. Congratulations on your journey so far. I know there's many more places you want to take it. So good luck. And thank you to you, the audience. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. If you have any questions, please follow up via mulesoft.com, salesforce.com, and we look forward to welcoming you to a future webinar. Thank you, and have a good day.