Unlocking Continuous Delivery + Daily Deployments for Linde

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The Challenge

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In 2015, Linde rolled out Salesforce to more than 10,000 internal users. After a fast-paced implementation, the team responsible for the platform’s operations soon encountered challenges.

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With just one program architect and external developer partners located around the world, they struggled to successfully deploy releases and were limited to a slow release cycle. Release engineers had to merge changes from up to 10 projects in parallel to create one package file, and they had to manually merge XML files in order to complete deployments, which was a time-consuming and error-prone process.

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Navigating The Challenges Around Manual Releases and Limited Resources

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Due to the manual process, changes to the same component would get lost or result in conflicting data. This process was exacerbated by Linde’s numerous custom apps, which strained developer resources and amplified the complexity of the release process.

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This often resulted in loss of productivity for Linde. Developers spent their time fixing code conflicts and overwrites rather than innovating — and infrequent releases deprived them of making the most of continuous delivery. Given the scale of the enterprise that the platform served, Linde knew they had to find a solution to drive efficiency.

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Key Challenges

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The Solution

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After implementing Copado in 2016, Linde started seeing an immediate impact — speeding releases from quarterly to monthly. Linde moved from predetermined releases to automated continuous delivery, with changes going live daily.

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Copado has helped Linde smoothly merge code from independent developer partners working in parallel. Today, all stakeholders have a full and real-time view of developments and share a single source of truth. Copado streamlined Linde’s DevOps strategy by facilitating a collaborative and transparent release orchestration process.

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The Future

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Copado has freed up countless hours for Linde’s developers, who now spend more time building and innovating rather than manually implementing releases and repairing errors. Deployments are not only more speedy but also higher quality. 

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Linde’s Salesforce users are now able to get their customization requests filled more efficiently. Linde is now able to tap into the ultimate level of release sophistication and seamlessly provide continuous innovation and deployment. Linde is now leading the pack and ready to take on the world of tomorrow.

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“Copado was our game changer,” Schmitt says.

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