Case study
Annual software cost eliminated by solving the real problem, not the stated one
Staff would manually move those files into it. Then manually move them back out when they needed to do something with them. Six seconds per file. Hundreds of files. Every day.
Nobody questioned it. It was just how things worked.
I was brought in to solve a different problem entirely — they wanted to store a specific type of document inside Salesforce. Simple enough request. But when I looked at what they were actually doing, the request changed.
They already had the files stored in S3. Retrieving them inside Salesforce didn’t require moving them anywhere. A small Lightning Web Component could show the file right there, in context, next to the workflow built around it.
I built a working demo in an afternoon.
Then I built the workflow around it: a clean case-based process that let staff review, action, and approve records without jumping between systems. One place. One process. No manual file transfers.
The demo went to the team that owned the problem. Then to Salesforce’s own product team. Both loved it.
The $140K product is now being decommissioned.
The stated problem is rarely the real problem. Someone asks you to store a file. You ask why they're storing it. You ask what happens next. You follow the thread. That's where the money is.
The most expensive Salesforce problems are usually not the technical ones. They're the ones everyone has accepted as normal.
No pitch. No pressure. 30 minutes.