Corus Entertainment

About Corus Entertainment

Engaging audiences since 1999, Corus Entertainment is Canada’s leading pure play media and content company, developing and delivering high-quality content and brands across platforms for audiences around the world. The company’s portfolio of multimedia offerings encompasses 35 specialty television services, 39 radio stations, 15 conventional television stations, a suite of digital assets, animation software, technology and media services.

Challenge

Corus Entertainment had already made a considerable investment in Salesforce and had been leveraging Sales Cloud to track and manage the progression of customer multi-media campaigns. Their backend system, Arvato AdSales, was used for actual order fulfillment and was not integrated with Salesforce. As a result, Sales users were forced to enter data into both systems manually, which proved to be both a time consuming, and error prone process.

Solution

Recognizing that the lack of communication between the two systems was impeding operational efficiency, Corus engaged AppCentrica to design and build out an optimal integration strategy.

The integration itself proved challenging for a few reasons. First, Arvato AdSales does not possess any APIs, and so AppCentrica had to integrate Salesforce with Arvato AdStore instead – a complementary product which would serve as an intermediary and push data into AdSales, the desired destination.

Second, because Arvato was a purely on-premise solution, AppCentrica had to expose it to the internet in order to establish the integration with Salesforce. This proved to be a difficult procedure as it required intensive security considerations.

Finally, ongoing changes and updates to Arvato’s product suite had implications for the integration project which required AppCentrica to work very closely with both Corus’ and Arvato’s development teams.

Outcomes

The completed integration between Sales Cloud and Arvato AdSales has greatly improved Corus’ operational efficiency. Sales users now live exclusively within Salesforce, the need for double data entry has been eliminated and user input errors are far less frequent.

Overall, the project proved incredibly successful. AppCentrica continues to work with Corus on a series of additional Salesforce improvements and optimizations.

“Through a project we called Enhanced Salesforce-AdStore initiative (ESA) we sought to improve our national sales workflow by automating the flow of opportunities and orders information from Salesforce to our AdSales and AdStore backend systems, provided by Arvato. AppCentrica’s team worked closely with Arvato and our own internal development team here at CORUS to architect and jointly deliver this integration which takes significant manual entry out of the sales and order process. The AppCentrica team were a pleasure to work with and brought deep technical expertise to bear on the project. We are thrilled with the result and continue to work with AppCentrica as our go-to Salesforce partner.”

Eva Marlow, Director, Client Services, Corus Entertainment

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