The challenge
As Perch Energy expanded its customer base, the limits of its Salesforce implementation grew increasingly costly. The org had grown organically but inconsistently, leaving behind brittle workflows, unreliable integrations, and reporting that took significant manual effort to produce.
Customer enrollment, account lifecycle management, and case handling all relied heavily on manual intervention, creating delays and increasing the risk of error. Connections between Salesforce and external platforms were prone to failure, with cross-system updates taking hours rather than minutes and limited visibility into transaction errors. Leadership lacked real-time visibility into pipeline performance and service operations — recurring reports were built by hand. And a biweekly release cadence with a high rollback frequency slowed the team's ability to ship improvements and respond to the business.
The work
Embedded through Laminar's Fellows network for a five-month engagement, a Senior Salesforce Developer worked directly with Perch's Head of Salesforce Engineering — designing technical fixes, leading code reviews, and managing deployments through a modernized CI/CD pipeline. The engagement centered on three workstreams.
First, a redesign of the workflows behind customer enrollment, account lifecycle management, and operational case handling. Using Flows, Apex, validation logic, and system integrations, manual touchpoints were systematically eliminated across operations, support, and sales, data quality standards improved, and cross-team handoffs made smoother.
The bigger structural call was rebuilding the integration layer itself — replacing a fragile, reactive set of connections to external platforms with one built for near real-time sync, robust error handling, and active monitoring. That traded the short-term convenience of patching individual failures for the upfront work of an observable system built to hold under growth.
Third, purpose-built executive dashboards and operational reporting gave leadership consistent visibility into pipeline performance, service operations, and customer conversion metrics, with previously manual recurring reporting fully automated and KPIs standardized across the organization.
The impact
Defect density fell 30% through stricter validation rules, improved Apex test coverage, and more robust error handling in integrations. Release frequency doubled, from biweekly to weekly, enabled by modularized components, an improved Git branching strategy, and pre-deployment checks that cut down on hotfixes. Feature delivery time dropped by roughly 40% — from two-to-three weeks down to one-to-one-and-a-half.
API response times improved 20–25% via SOQL query optimization, reduced governor-limit pressure, and selective caching. Cross-system update times fell from hours to near real-time as the integration rebuild took hold. And five to eight hours of manual operational work came out of the team's week, automated away through Apex jobs, Flows, and scheduled integrations.
By the close of the engagement, Perch's Salesforce org needed less manual effort to run, its integrations were stable and observable, and leadership had the real-time visibility to make faster, better-informed decisions — positioned to handle higher customer volumes without a proportional rise in operational overhead. All figures are operator-reported.