About the Customer

This Canadian company rents, sells, and leases work trucks and vehicles, and manages vehicle fleets on behalf of business customers. Rental is still the core revenue driver. Fleet management—taking maintenance, licensing, claims, and vehicle tracking off a customer’s plate—is the smallest line of business but the highest margin, and the one they most want to grow.

For years the company has run nearly the entire business on a sprawling set of custom-built applications; one for rentals, one for rate cards, one for leases, one for claims, one for invoicing, and more, all tightly interconnected, with a single system serving as the customer master and Great Plains as the accounting ERP. Moving that onto Salesforce is a major shift. They came to ForeFront to make it happen without breaking what already works.

A Business Run on a Web of Custom Apps

The company had built its own software for nearly every function: rental contracts, negotiated rate cards, lease calculations, an asset database, work orders, telematics, licensing, claims, credit applications, inspections, invoicing, and a CRM for vehicle sales. Every system was wired tightly to the others, and a single customer master held the account data that tied it all together.

Data, the team openly acknowledged, was messy. That web of custom apps kept the business running, but it was brittle, hard to scale, and rigid due to custom code. Nowhere was that more limiting than in the high-margin fleet management line they wanted to expand, where growth depends on clean asset tracking, organized case handling, and a single view of each customer. Standing up modern CRM and service operations on top of that web, without disrupting daily work, was the challenge.

Start Small, Build Trust, Scale Deliberately

ForeFront and the customer agreed to a tightly scoped first phase, roughly a tenth of the eventual end state, designed to get the team comfortable on Salesforce before committing to a full migration. The bulk of the work was a Service Cloud build: inbound case management for the company’s roughly 17-person customer care organization (eight quick-assist groups and a nine-person corporate care team), with Zoom phone CTI, email-to-case with threading, case record types and subtypes, Omni-Channel routing across phone and email, sample SLAs for priority customers, assignment and escalation rules, after-hours call capture via Smith AI, and a Knowledge framework.

On the sales side, ForeFront stood up Sales Cloud for leads, campaigns, prospects, and opportunities across the fleet, rental, and leasing business, with forecast types for fleet management and local and national rentals, and amount-based forecasting that fits how they sell today.

Integration and Data, Done Carefully

ForeFront delivered a MuleSoft integration to bring accounts from the company’s customer master into Salesforce, with a bidirectional sync on critical notes. Rather than migrate and duplicate the company’s data, ForeFront used Data Cloud to surface asset and agreement data already staged in Snowflake directly on the Salesforce account record, delivering visibility without duplication. Reps get the context they need, the moment they need it.

The Roadmap: The Growth Engine

Phase 1 is the on-ramp to a multi-year, enterprise-wide transformation the team calls its Growth Engine. The destination centers on Salesforce Automotive Cloud, which has already been purchased. It makes the vehicle asset the hub of the business: every rented, leased, and fleet-managed vehicle is tracked in one place, complete with maintenance history, telematics, and registration status, while claims and cases are handled in Service Cloud. From there, the roadmap points to several further moves. Revenue Cloud will replace disconnected quoting and bring products and inventory onto the platform. Additional plans include a self-service customer portal, payments, vendor management for third-party repair shops, and a Great Plains ERP integration for accounting. Throughout, the custom app suite will be retired progressively over time.

A Modern Foundation, Built to Earn the Next Phase

Today the customer is live on Sales and Service Cloud, with a connected account master and Snowflake data in context, the first real step off a decade of custom-built software. ForeFront proved it could deliver in a complex environment without disruption, which is what earns the right to the much larger work ahead.

The phased approach is the point. Rather than sell a risky big-bang migration, ForeFront scoped a focused first phase to build the team’s confidence in the platform, then mapped a Growth Engine roadmap—Automotive Cloud, Revenue Cloud, portals, payments, and ERP integration—that grows the high-margin fleet management business as the custom suite is retired over time.

ForeFront met a company with a decade of custom-built software where it was. Rather than selling a risky big-bang migration, we scoped a deliberately small first phase to build trust ahead of a multi-year effort. We delivered live Sales and Service Cloud, connected their account master through MuleSoft, and surfaced Snowflake data through Data Cloud. From there, we mapped a Growth Engine roadmap on Automotive Cloud to grow their highest-margin business.