Transforming Salesforce Deployment Efficiency at a Global Aircraft Leasing Company

When the world's largest aircraft leasing company was struggling with Salesforce deployment bottlenecks that impacted their ability to respond to market opportunities, Bluewave delivered a tailored DevOps transformation that reduced deployment times by 87.5% and unlocked significant business agility. Read about how Bluewave successfully completed this project below.

About the Customer

Our customer is the world’s largest owner of commercial aircraft and the industry leader across all areas of aviation leasing. The organisation provides airlines with long-term access to the most in-demand passenger and cargo aircraft, engines, and helicopters. The business boasts a highly attractive portfolio, a diversified customer base, and an order book of the most in-demand new technology assets in the world. The aircraft lessor has offices across three continents and over 300 customers, supplying almost every airline on the globe. This scale, combined with an unmatched team, enables the organisation to provide comprehensive and tailor-made fleet solutions that are unrivalled in the leasing business.

The organisation is a long-standing Bluewave customer with over 600 Salesforce users across the business working across multiple time zones and jurisdictions, as well as a dedicated team of 10+ Salesforce developers. The organisation relies heavily on its Salesforce platform to support mission-critical operations and fast-paced deal execution.

The Challenge

The client was experiencing significant bottlenecks in their Salesforce development lifecycle:

Technical Challenges:

• Deployments routinely took 3 – 4 hours to complete, with 30% failing due to API timeouts
• A senior developer needed to actively monitor each deployment to troubleshoot issues
• All components and tests were executed regardless of what changed

Business Impact:

• Development sprints consistently delivered fewer features than planned due to unpredictable deployment schedules
• Senior developers spent approximately 15 hours weekly monitoring deployments instead of building value-added features

These challenges were impacting the company’s ability to quickly respond to business needs and implement new features requested by their global leasing teams.

“The release management role is critical in our organisation to ensure we have continued delivery and safe deployments from a business point of view. It is the final quality toll-gate before features go live and it also comes with the associated environment management, ensuring all environments are aligned as needed based on our requirements.” – Customer Business Operations Director

Analysis

Our team at Bluewave conducted a comprehensive analysis of the client’s existing Salesforce development practices, identifying several key areas for improvement:

• Inefficient Deployment Pipeline: The existing Bitbucket pipeline was deploying all components regardless of changes, causing significant bottlenecks
• Full Testing Execution: All tests were being run for every deployment, even when only minor changes were made

Implementation Strategy

Based on our assessment, we designed and implemented a robust Salesforce DevOps pipeline with the following components:

Optimised Bitbucket CI/CD Pipeline

• Transformed the existing Bitbucket pipeline from full deployments to efficient delta deployments
• Implemented advanced git diff analysis to identify and deploy only changed components
• Enhanced pipeline configuration with intelligent dependency tracking
• Added pre-deployment validation gates to prevent quality issues

Selective Testing Framework

• Implemented intelligent selective testing to only run tests for changed components
• Developed comprehensive Apex test classes to achieve >85% code coverage
• Prioritized critical path testing to optimize test execution time

The Results

Our DevOps transformation delivered significant, measurable benefits to the client:

Quantitative Improvements

• Deployment Time Reduction: From 3 hours to just 24 minutes (87.5% improvement)
• Developer Productivity: Reclaimed approximately 7 hours per developer per week

Qualitative Benefits

• Developer Satisfaction: Teams reported higher satisfaction with streamlined processes
• Eliminated Manual Monitoring: Freed up senior developers from babysitting deployments
• Predictable Deployments: Consistent deployment times enabled better planning
• Business Agility: Faster implementation of business-critical features

Testimonial

“So far, the results are very positive. We now have an 87% reduction in deployment times, but more importantly, this project has given us the ability to turn around items very quickly. Despite a very busy workload, we have successfully launched product A 2.0 as well as several releases of product B+. All credit to the Bluewave team – we could not have achieved this without your hard work and expertise.” – Customer Business Operations Director