Since the inception of our Managed Services practice a year ago, we’ve been diligently collaborating with clients worldwide to streamline their operations. By handling administrative tasks and driving system projects, we enable organizations to concentrate on their core objectives while we manage the technical backend.
During our recent online collaborative event, we explored three ways Managed Services can help organizations boost their operations, SOS Children’s Villages International shared learnings and outcomes, and together we gained some key takeaways from interactive questions and polls using Menti.com during the webinar:
1. Understanding Managed Services Needs: Organizations attending the event reported needing different levels of Managed Services, ranging from ongoing support to capacity enhancement, team training, and custom development within specific projects.
2. Challenges in Salesforce Management: Reported challenges included technical team management, user adoption, documentation, training, staying up-to-date with releases, and having a better understanding of original design decisions before implementation through technical/functional analysis.
3. Essential System Management Tasks: Organizations felt pressure to deliver reports and user-friendly dashboards, support end users, provide training and documentation, and adapt solutions to evolving contexts as they scale. Meeting these needs presents a challenge for organizations with a lack of resources or in-house capabilities.
Next, we explored three practical ways Managed Services can address these needs:
- Salesforce Support: Our Managed Services provide comprehensive support for clients with established system administrators, including report and dashboard configuration, user training, and troubleshooting.
- System Administration: For clients without administrators, we offer services for day-to-day system administration, including user management and integration with third-party tools.
- Engineering Support: Clients with more in-house technical resources benefit from guidance on custom development, technical design, and eliminating blockers for development teams.
How SOS Children’s Villages International (SOS CVI) leverages Vera’s Managed Services to drive their mission forward
Over the past five years, SOS CVI has partnered with Vera Solutions to build and maintain a program and project management solution from the ground up. Throughout this period, they successfully navigated numerous design and implementation challenges by leveraging various Managed Services options. These challenges were compounded by the complex array of stakeholders spanning 115 federations and 100+ countries.
With their team’s global footprint extending across Latin America, Europe, Africa, Western Africa, and Asia, ensuring comprehensive support and development coverage was paramount. One particularly significant challenge arose in ensuring effective communication and user training, upon the system’s initial launch. Additionally, managing legacy data migration and integrating with third-party systems such as ERP, Finance, and Insurance posed further obstacles, intensified by resource constraints and limited internal development team capacity.
“Our partnership with Vera Solutions has not only strengthened our technical capabilities but also streamlined our processes and improved our ability to meet evolving requirements.”
The collaboration with Vera Solutions has not only enhanced the skill sets of both their development and support teams through tailored training and facilitated updates but also streamlined issue resolution times and bolstered overall development capacity. Leveraging Vera’s technical expertise, SOS CVI optimized its in-house knowledge through shared best practices, encompassing guidance on custom developments, quality assurance, system testing, and troubleshooting.
In the past year, their focus has shifted towards meeting user and stakeholder needs by prioritizing software feature enhancements over immediate support tasks. This strategic pivot enabled them to secure Engineering Support for custom code development and automation, ultimately accelerating our development delivery speed.
Watch the full story here:
Why choose Vera Solutions for Managed Services?
When you choose Vera Solutions for Managed Services, you are partnering with a service provider with a track record of over 14 years of experience working with nonprofits. For over a decade, Vera Solutions has been a leader in developing program management and impact measurement solutions on the Salesforce Platform. Currently, over $12 billion of programs, grants, and projects advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals are managed using Vera’s flagship product, Amp Impact. Our team has extensive knowledge of the nonprofit sector and deep experience in delivering the right solutions for a wide range of clients.
We also offer:
- A large pool of highly skilled and experienced Salesforce Consultants, with over 300+ active Salesforce certifications and counting
- Experience successfully delivering over 1,000 projects in the social sector
- A dedicated team located across 5 continents, covering more than 12 languages
As a long-time Salesforce International Impact Partner, we’ve been dedicated to the Salesforce ecosystem for more than 14 years. With the growth of Amp Impact, Vera Solutions has also been recognized twice as Salesforce.org Product Partner of the Year (2019, 2022) and with a Partner Innovation Award (2021). As such, we are constantly evaluating the Salesforce platform’s latest features and enhancements and how they can be leveraged to support our clients’ missions.
