Aethon Consulting: May the Salesforce Be With You, Not With Consultants

Bryan Hutchinson, Owner & President

When highly-experienced and certified Salesforce consultant, Bryan Hutchinson, served as IT manager and Salesforce developer (SFDC) for Architectural Ceramics, he saw from close quarters the excessive reliance enterprises had developed for their Salesforce solution providers. Hutchinson and his coworker at the time noticed that IT teams were forced to revert to their Salesforce consultants for even the slightest administration change to the cloud-based products. At full capacity, Salesforce is meant to take charge of the online presence of an enterprise, and double up as a customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. However, there is a widening gap between what customers seek and how small-sized companies respond to their requests. This gap can cost businesses potential customers, and lead to stifled growth. The day-to-day struggle faced by organizations in their quest to migrate, integrate, and fine-tune Salesforce to meet their respective business needs, proved to be an eye-opener for the two partners. “The consultants created a system wherein admins had to go back to them for every minor change in Salesforce. That’s when it struck us; there’s a business opportunity here, to empower IT managers to an extent that they needn’t consult the solution provider for every minor query or change,” says Hutchinson, who, in 2017, co-founded Aethon Consulting—a certified Salesforce solution provider— with the intent to seamlessly connect business owners with their IT teams so organizations can optimize every last benefit of Force.com—Salesforce’s platform as a service (PaaS) product.

"Since I could see both sides of the argument (business and technical), I had to bridge that communication gap, and figure out how to utilize Salesforce in a way that everyone can relate"

Hutchinson, a major in accounting, was initially a part of the financing team at his previous employer when they failed to migrate to Salesforce on a number of separate occasions. After switching to the role of Salesforce administrator, Hutchinson learned the nuances of the cloud-based platform on the fly, and with the help of his team successfully switch their business processes to Salesforce. During the transition, Hutchinson absorbed the perspective of both the technical and business sides—a realization that would eventually lay the foundation for Aethon. “As a customer of Salesforce, while working with consultants and partners, I realized the disconnect that exists between business-minded and tech-minded people. Since I could see both sides of the argument (business and technical), I had to bridge that communication gap, and figure out how to utilize Salesforce in a way that everyone can relate,” says Hutchinson, owner and President of Aethon.

We deep-dive into actual use cases, utilize custom settings to let customers make changes to various aspects of Salesforce—whether it’s to turn on/off automation or include additional fields in the query

Today, Hutchinson is himself, a certified Sales and Service Cloud Consultant and works as a part of a team to assist clients in designing, building, and utilizing Salesforce without long-term reliance on Aethon’s IT/Salesforce services—which range from system enhancement, implementation, automation, and training. Aethon equips enterprises with the ability to fully utilize the Force.com platform, and further enhance it as per their requirements.

Ideally, Aethon doesn’t need to field any post-deployment service calls.

Empowering IT Admins with New Salesforce Capabilities

For an enterprise to unlock the full potential of Force.com without constantly relying on a service provider is no easy task. Team Aethon makes it possible. Armed with the capability to make full-scope system enhancements and customizations, Aethon creates opportunities for Salesforce administrators and superusers to make changes in their business processes without an ounce of coding. Also, Aethon’s deep-rooted knowledge of the myriad challenges in the Salesforce arena steers its clients past potential pitfalls. For example, Aethon recognizes that most companies underutilize Force.com due to their time-consuming and tedious process of acquiring case-specific information and tracking it via spreadsheets instead of feeding the data directly into the platform. To eliminate the task, Aethon identifies how each business requirement fits next to another in a flowchart and how various departments can efficiently work together or automate the redundant processes. The company’s ability to understand the ‘what, why, and how’ pertaining to business processes makes them stand apart in the Salesforce arena.

In the same vein, Hutchinson has noticed how enterprises struggle to cope with issues emanating from Salesforce’s embedded programming tools such as workflow rules and process builders. “Pre-deployment, the first thing we discuss is the volume of data, because some of Salesforce’s easier programming tools can throw up problems when you run extensive volume through them, and requires coding to fix. We deep-dive into actual use cases, utilize custom settings to let customers make changes to various aspects of Salesforce—whether it’s to turn on/off automation or include additional fields in the query. We enable the customers to make adjustments to Salesforce as their business requires them to, rather than relying on a provider,” explains Hutchinson.

A Game-changer for Warehousing Industry

Recently, Aethon engaged with one of its previous clients who wanted their warehouses to go paperless and embrace barcode solutions. The client in question also required an inventory-tracking solution to attain information about their products’ location and quantity.

By leveraging the Force.com platform and AscentERP, Aethon successfully improved the client’s processes and user interfaces to help them gain unique insights into their products, sales and the types of industries buying them. “Our interactive dashboards, comprehensive data sets and data recipes, and real-time reports helped the client procure those insights for product/purchasing at a click of a button. Over the last quarter or so, this has been the other game-changer for the warehousing industry where you have a tablet or barcode scanner, and mobile belt printer for printing labels that are all communicating with each other inside Salesforce. Nobody else, to our knowledge, has integrated such a solution on the Salesforce platform before we did,” says Hutchinson.

While its foray into the warehousing sector has unlocked new doors, Aethon’s clientele spreads across industries such as retail, healthcare, and manufacturing in Washington DC, North Virginia, New York, and North Carolina. The company’s footprint is clustered on the east coast since an on-site presence is paramount for monitoring their clients’ processes. The majority of its projects are centered on ERP and full-scale implementation of the Force.com platform. Having forged a number of long-term partnerships with reputed ERP providers such as AscentERP, Aethon works collaboratively with its clients and partners to implement barcoding, warehouse inventory management, order fulfillment, and purchasing natively on Force.com.

Owing to Hutchinson’s heavy background in finance, capped off by his Certified Fraud Examiner credential, Aethon is able to implement a comprehensive accounting solution for integrating various accounting systems with Force.com. This level of expertise in finance has helped Aethon forge new partnerships with financial service providers, with plans to unveil newer Salesforce capabilities in the near future. Hutchinson adds, “They’re not just partnerships, we are certified to work on their product and provide enhancements, customizations and/or integrations to other business systems. We are regularly testing and working with our partners to have a more robust product offering.”

Ready to Carve out New Identity

In the coming years, Aethon intends to position itself as an end-to-end solution provider that gets involved in implementation, process enhancement, and every other aspect of a client’s business processes within the Salesforce segment. “With 2018 being our most profitable year in terms of clients and successful projects, our sights are set on enhancing ERP, warehouse management, and financial capabilities on Force.com. We will continue working with small and medium-sized businesses to impact their employees and bottom lines, empowering them with full transparency across their operational processes. We have been steadily building a reputation among our partners in ERP and financial sectors, which positions us to have a significant impact in the Salesforce arena,” concludes Hutchinson.