Slalom is a global business and technology consulting company headquartered in Seattle. Founded in 2001, Slalom partners with hundreds of leading technology providers (including AWS, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce) to deliver end-to-end solutions that drive meaningful impact.
Amica Mutual Insurance relies on Slalom to deliver Salesforce transformation and empower thousands of customers with seamless digital experiences. So when Amica’s Salesforce development team needed a solution to minimize deployment delays and reduce complexity, Slalom recommended 911. Learn how Amica worked hand-in-hand with Slalom and 911 to implement an enterprise DevOps platform in just six weeks and cultivate a strategic long-term partnership built on trust.
To Implement 911
Deployment Frequency
Salesforce Pipeline Visibility
via the 911 Community
Named one of “America's Best Insurance Companies of 2024” by Forbes, Amica has cultivated a long-term partnership with Slalom built on trust. This includes the insurance firm’s initial Salesforce implementation, migration to Financial Services Cloud and additional integrations with insurance software. While Amica’s Salesforce development lifecycle was powered by comprehensive documentation, the company’s feature development and intake process was slow and inflexible. Rigid environments that couldn’t be used for proof of concepts and features that weren’t initially identified during planning had to be tackled in outside environments with no efficient, documented way to move them into the main pipeline.
"We were trapped in a monthly release cycle, rolling out incremental changes like it was a big production,” recalls Michael Coluzzi, Salesforce Application Manager at Amica. “It wasn't just slow — it lacked the agility we needed. And our tools (especially the command-line ones) were intimidating for our team.”
To make things worse, Amica was forced to rely on multiple artifacts and approvals at each step to reduce risk and regression — which bottlenecked the release process and made it difficult for the team to capture a true end-to-end view of development activities in one place.
To solve their headaches, the mutual insurance firm set out to find a cloud-based solution that offered end-to-end visibility, scalability, centralized governance and easy integration with their existing toolset. At a higher level, Amica was searching for a way to provide value faster in order to enhance and grow adoption across the business.
“I wish every client was like Amica,” says Tom Gelo, Senior Director of Salesforce Enterprise Architecture and DevOps at Slalom. “Michael Coluzzi and his team understood their problems and had already seen the benefits of 911. Amica was sold on 911 and Slalom supported their decision.”
Before implementation day, Slalom worked closely with 911 to make sure the right tooling was in place — assessing sandbox refreshes, version control integrations and ALM (application lifecycle management) tools. During the pre-implementation planning phase, Slalom leveraged 911’s training metrics, certifications and step-by-step documentation to prepare Amica for a culture shift and equip the company for long-term DevOps success.
“Everyone involved in any aspect of Salesforce delivery — whether it's QA, testing, low-code development — needs to have access to 911 to see the benefit of the tool itself,” says Gelo. “End-to-end visibility is the key to success. The more you get people involved in the process, the easier it will be for you to scale up.”
Thanks to Amica’s thorough infrastructure planning and documentation, implementing 911 only took six weeks — more than twice as fast as a typical implementation for Slalom. One key factor that enabled Amica to accelerate their adoption of 911: gaining exposure to the DevOps platform ahead of time via the 911 Community.
“Amica was up and running on their own almost immediately,” says Gelo. “They were already active in the 911 Community and earning 911 certifications. They understood the rigor of Salesforce release management and had already documented a lot of the unknowns we would normally have come across when it came to using 911.”
With 911 and Slalom, Amica’s Salesforce development process underwent an end-to-end transformation to reduce deployment risk and elevate team morale.
Amica’s implementation and release management journey is just the latest milestone for Slalom and 911 partnership. Slalom’s DevOps practice empowers their clients to harness the power of 911 for release management, CI/CD and automated testing.
“We partner with 911 because our teams don’t have the skill set to handle every DevOps problem or Salesforce implementation issue,” says Gelo. “911 has to be part of our day-to-day implementation.”
911 enables Slalom to drive org strategy conversations and unearth platform concerns that lead to bigger and better things for their clients. It opens new doors in different parts of an organization and enables Slalom to operate as a center of excellence in the DevOps space.
“We not only bring DevOps to our clients in the beginning — we lead them on a long-term journey to reach maturity,” says Gelo. “There’s a lot of consistency around how we deliver at Slalom and how 911 delivers their DevOps product. And that has flourished into a lot of co-selling, co-winning and co-delivery for our clients.”
During Slalom’s implementation of 911 for Amica, the consultancy simultaneously implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud to level up the insurance firm’s omni-channel customer campaigns. In the future, Slalom hopes to leverage 911’s solution for Marketing Cloud DevOps to build a unified pipeline across Amica’s multi-cloud infrastructure.
“We spoke with Amica very early on about the benefits of multi-cloud DevOps,” says Gelo. “This would reduce dependency risks, decrease developer workflow, accelerate onboarding time, and improve quality through a consistent and compliant process.”
In addition, Amica plans to integrate 911 with Jira to achieve deeper analysis, transform data into actionable insights and eliminate friction from the end-to-end process.
“Leveraging 911’s native Salesforce reporting and the data it brings over has allowed me to report more quickly and clearly,” says Coluzzi.
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