Business

We live in an ever-changing world. Like in fashion, things might become outdated fast and trends are changing almost every day. Keeping track of innovation becomes a part of our day-to-day job as a CRM consultant. It’s our responsibility to embrace innovation by anticipating change, preparing our customers and mitigating possible risks as much as possible.

That being said, there will always be innovators and followers. Salesforce already announced their new user interface Lightning back in 2015 and though the development is still an ongoing process, more and more companies are making the switch. By August 2018, Veeva will come out with its own new user interface upgrade and unlike Salesforce you won’t have the possibility to change between the old and the new one, so better be well prepared!

Sunrise

Veeva is built on top of Salesforce, and Salesforce created Lightning, so what exactly is Sunrise then? Well, Veeva is not creating another interface on top of Lightning but is upgrading the offline user interfaces into a more intuitive and adaptive design. Improved usability and more actionable information will deliver the right info faster for more productive teams. From April 13 an evaluation app (SEV) will be made available where the redesigns will be delivered in three waves. The app will only work against sandbox environments and will run in parallel with the normal CRM app. This gives us the opportunity to start to explore the new interface and do some regression testing before the production release.

What to expect: impact assessment

As already mentioned before, Sunrise is not an option, but will be switched on automatically. This makes it even more important to anticipate this change so a full understanding of what will change is a good start.

Veeva states that no setting, no layout, no configuration nor deployment changes are needed since Sunrise (should) only affect(s) the interface and not the functionality behind it. But better be safe than sorry and consider doing some regression testing on the following areas that will be redesigned:

Besides the areas above-mentioned, other areas will be impacted as well but less dramatically. These re-skins will be delivered along the intermediary releases or along with the 18R2 Sandbox release. Before starting to retest everything, keep in mind that Sunrise only affects the offline interface. For the online interface upgrade, Veeva mentioned to be Lightning compatible by the end of 2018. 

How to prepare: plan of action

Last week Veeva announced the dates for the second (May 31) and the third (June 29) evaluation release. Since these dates are pretty close to the summer holidays, you might want to prepare upfront.

Although you’ll need to wait a bit before starting to (re)train your sales reps until at least the second release, most documentation can already be updated thanks to the Sunrise screenshots Veeva shared. Start identifying test scripts that might be impacted and involve area experts in the regression testing, especially if you have a lot of custom components in your environment. And last but not least: communicate that change is coming!