About the client
The client is a longstanding family-owned educational publisher based in New York City. Founded in 1832, the company specializes in K–12 educational materials, including print, digital, and online resources. Their offerings include mathematics, English language arts, grammar, reading, and vocabulary. The company also provides catechetical programs for Catholic schools, parishes, and families.
Client challenges
During the initial discovery call, we reviewed the client’s integration landscape spanning NetSuite, Salesforce, LMS, 3PL, HubSpot, and finance systems.
This assessment helped identify key gaps in the following integration services:
- Sales Order synchronization between Salesforce and NetSuite.
- Order and subscription integrations between LMS and NetSuite
- Fulfillment, inventory, pick, pack, and shipment integrations between NetSuite and 3PL.
- Synchronization of customer, sub-customer, partner, contact, and prospect master data.
- Campaign and opportunity synchronization between Salesforce and NetSuite. Lockbox payment processing and financial data integration.
- Case management synchronization between NetSuite and Salesforce.
- Product catalog and pricing synchronization across NetSuite and Salesforce.
Our analysis also revealed several underlying design and execution challenges:
- Incorrect WSDL implementation: The wrong WSDL version caused repeated errors and unpredictable data flow between NetSuite and Salesforce.
- Inefficient integration design: Connector calls were scattered across multiple processes, leading to redundant operations, unnecessary API calls, and degraded performance.
- Lack of reusability: Connector components were recreated across multiple places without caching, leading to repeated data fetches and slower processing times.
- Sequential processing bottlenecks: Transactions were processed one at a time with no parallelization, limiting scalability as order volume increased.
- Inefficient order update logic: Each time an order was modified, all order lines in Salesforce were deleted and recreated, even for minor updates, resulting in data duplication and unnecessary processing.
- Limited error visibility: Integration errors lacked detailed messages or alerts, requiring manual log reviews to identify root causes.
- Missing validation checks: There were no post-processing validations to confirm successful sales order creation, increasing the risk of undetected failures.
Although the environment ran on a single-node Boomi architecture, we recommended targeted optimizations to improve reliability, operational efficiency, and long-term resilience.
Solution
LevelShift redesigned and optimized the foundation of the NetSuite–Salesforce integration, streamlining order management, fulfillment, inventory, payments, support, and product data synchronization. The solution improved integration performance, enhanced component reusability, increased operational visibility, and strengthened error handling and monitoring.
- Optimized connector usage
Introduced Boomi Cache to store frequently accessed data, reducing repetitive API calls. Consolidated connector usage by reusing shared connection profiles and referencing pre-fetched data across components, minimizing redundancy.
- WSDL version alignment
Updated the WSDL to align with the production environment and validated all API operations. This ensured compliance with current Salesforce and NetSuite API specifications and prevented recurring communication errors.
- Connector object reusability
Refactored connector components to enable reuse across multiple processes. This eliminated redundant configurations, simplified maintenance, and improved overall process efficiency.
- Parallel processing
Implemented Flow Control shapes in Boomi to enable parallel transaction processing, significantly improving throughput and reducing execution time for large datasets.
- Sales order validation
Added validation checkpoints to confirm successful Salesforce order creation before proceeding to subsequent steps, ensuring data accuracy and reliability.
- Robust error handling and notifications
Integrated a LevelShift agentic logging and alert framework for automated error capture and email notifications. This enhanced visibility into failures and enabled faster resolution.
- Efficient order line updates
Enhanced logic to identify and update only modified order lines using Salesforce Upsert operations and external IDs. This reduced unnecessary deletions, improved system performance, and maintained data integrity.
Benefits
The following improvements across order management, fulfillment, payments, support, and data synchronization delivered measurable gains in performance and reliability.
- 15–18 additional processes were tested with the client and successfully moved to production, ensuring stability and readiness.
- Reduced unnecessary record operations by 85–90%, improving data accuracy and lowering processing overhead.
- Lowered API calls and processing load by 60–70% through connector reuse, caching, bulk operations, and optimized integration design.
- Parallel processing enabled smooth handling of high-volume transactions.
- Automated error capture and notifications reduced issue resolution time by 90% and improved operational visibility.
- Only modified order lines are updated in Salesforce, avoiding unnecessary deletions and maintaining data integrity.
- Enhancements deliver a consistent, reliable experience for managing orders across NetSuite and Salesforce.