About the Customer

Our customer, an authorized Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA) dealer with a growing network of branches across the Northeast, sells, leases, and services commercial trucks, heavy equipment, and construction vehicles. Their product catalog is broad and complex, and quoting has always been a challenge.

Like many dealers in this space, the dealer was running their sales operations on Arcadium — a rigid, industry-specific CRM built for equipment dealers. It worked, but just barely. Flexibility was limited, visibility was limited, and anything outside Arcadium’s narrow workflows required a workaround. Most of those workarounds involved spreadsheets, handwritten forms, and a lot of institutional knowledge that lived in people’s heads.

The company had already made the decision to move to Salesforce. The platform was in place, Sales Cloud was live, and CPQ was in progress. What was missing was an system that actually worked for their business.

Left Half-Built, Then Cut Off

ForeFront led an enterprise architecture strategy for the dealer to establish a clear roadmap and technical blueprint for a successful Salesforce implementation that unified Salesforce Sales Cloud, CPQ, and deep dealer/DMS integrations.

Strategic Objective

The engagement focused on creating a scalable Salesforce foundation that could:

• Replace fragmented, manual sales and quoting processes
• Support complex equipment configuration and pricing through CPQ
• Integrate Salesforce tightly with Tracey Road’s dealer management systems (DMS)
• Enable future expansion across sales, service, parts, and dealer self‑service without re‑architecture

Architecture‑First Approach

ForeFront’s strategy emphasized architecture before configuration, aligning business processes, data, and integration patterns prior to build. Key principles included:

• Salesforce as the system of engagement, with ERP/DMS systems remaining systems of record
• Integration‑led design, using MuleSoft for bi‑directional, near‑real‑time data exchange
• Phased delivery, starting with a core foundation and expanding iteratively to reduce risk and accelerate value

Core Platform Blueprint

The resulting blueprint defined Salesforce as a unified platform spanning:

• Sales Cloud for opportunity, account, territory, and pipeline management
• CPQ for complex equipment quoting, pricing rules, approvals, and margin control
• Order management workflows carrying deals from signed quote through fulfillment
• Service Cloud and Field Service as future phases for asset, service, and depot operations

Dealer Network & DMS Integration Strategy

A central pillar of the architecture was tight integration with the dealer ecosystem:

• Bi‑directional MuleSoft integrations connecting Salesforce to the DMS (e.g., Karmak / Procede)
• Live synchronization of accounts, inventory, equipment, parts, and work order status
• Real‑time inventory visibility embedded directly in Salesforce quotes
• Elimination of duplicate data entry and manual handoffs between systems

Rescue, Rebuild, Reconnect

ForeFront took ownership of the CPQ environment and finished what the prior partner couldn’t. That meant reworking pricing logic for a catalog spanning new equipment, used equipment, and attachments — all with variable costs, discounts, and margin calculations that needed to work consistently across the organization.

Key work included:

• Price rules and cost/margin calculations: Stackable discounts, cost-plus pricing, and gross profit visibility inside the Quote Line Editor
• Bundle configuration: Trucks with options, attachments, and non-inventoried add-ons all handled in CPQ, with correct pricing behavior for inventoried vs. non-inventoried components
• Quote templates: Delivery Reports and Quote Order documents that auto-populate 90% of required fields from the quote record, replacing handwritten forms
• Quick Quote: A fast-path quoting flow for pre-sales estimates and prospect conversations
• Warranty handling: Warranty display and pricing on quotes, with correct rollup logic
• Approval workflows: Consistent discount and deal approval processes across the sales team

With MuleSoft in place, ForeFront designed and built a new integration architecture connecting Salesforce and Procede Excede. The integration went in both directions.

Into Salesforce from Excede:

• Daily inventory sync — all equipment and attachments, including pricing, specs, and status — pulled from Excede into Salesforce’s Inventory object, keeping records current across every location
• Equipment details, conditions, and availability visible directly on quotes at the time of configuration

Out of Salesforce to Excede:

• When a deal closes, a Sales Order created in Salesforce automatically integrates into Excede, carrying all quote line data, inventory assignments, and rep information.
• Inventory must meet Excede status requirements before an order can be submitted, reducing downstream errors.

The result was a complete, reliable connection between the quoting process in Salesforce and the DMS that runs the dealer’s operations.

One Platform, Front to Back

The dealer’s full front-end sales process now runs in Salesforce. Reps prospect and manage pipeline in Sales Cloud, view live inventory across all branches, configure quotes against real equipment records in CPQ, and submit orders directly into Excede — without leaving the platform or touching a spreadsheet.

Quote accuracy has also improved. Approval workflows run consistently. Pipeline visibility — once essentially zero — is now clear. The manual re-entry that used to sit between a closed deal and an Excede sales order is gone.

Here’s a quick recap of everything we accomplished:

• Full front-end sales process in Salesforce. Reps prospect, quote, and close without leaving the platform or touching a spreadsheet.
• Live inventory at point of quote. Daily sync from Excede keeps equipment availability current across every branch, so reps are always quoting against real stock.
• Automated order submission. Closed deals flow directly from Salesforce into Excede — no manual re-entry between quote and sales order.
• Consistent approval workflows. Discount and deal approvals run the same way across the entire sales organization.

For ForeFront, this engagement established something beyond a single project win. The MuleSoft integration architecture and CPQ configuration built here is a repeatable playbook — one already being applied across ForeFront’s growing portfolio of truck and heavy equipment dealers, particularly authorized DTNA dealers running Excede. It’s the kind of pattern that only develops when you’ve done the work enough times to know where it breaks.