One moment, two programmes, one decision
This UK insurance and standards body operates at national scale in the new-build housing sector. Its warranty book covers a large portion of new UK homes. The business mix spans warranty, technical inspection, building control, standards-setting, training and industry research. It is both a commercial insurer and a standards authority. The data flows that underpin it are complex, regulated and consequential.
When the legacy CRM approached end-of-life and the integration layer beneath it needed an upgrade, the organisation made a strategic decision: do not sequence the two programmes. Replace the CRM with Salesforce and rebuild the integration estate on MuleSoft in lockstep, as a single coordinated programme. Salesforce as a deliberate platform choice, not a procurement default. The foundation for the next decade of digital initiatives across warranty, inspection, building control, claims and member-facing services.
That meant the integration architecture had to do more than connect today's back-office systems. It had to be future-ready, dependency-light, and built with the decoupling discipline that a regulated UK insurer's data flows demand.
Co-led architecture, from discovery to go-live
Ampleshift joined in February 2024 as integration architecture co-lead, alongside the Salesforce delivery partner. The joint-delivery model that typically creates risk (two vendors, two architectures, a blame-game waiting to happen) worked here because Ampleshift co-led discovery alongside Salesforce from the start.
Integration architecture decisions shaped the Salesforce architecture, and vice versa, in real time, rather than being handed down from one team to the other. One architectural language across both platforms. One coordinated cutover approach. Production go-lives landed together.
The integration estate was built around API-Led Connectivity: System APIs exposing each enterprise system once, Process APIs orchestrating the cross-system business flows, Experience APIs serving Salesforce-side consumers. Between eight and ten enterprise systems connected bidirectionally, including the claims system, a Snowflake data warehouse, the Agresso ERP, Creditsafe and others. Security applied with the UK regulated-insurer context in mind throughout: OAuth 2.0, Secure Properties, audit-aware data handling.
CI/CD pipelines on Jenkins, with integration tests as a pipeline stage, meant deployment time was reduced and developer errors were caught before they reached production. A logging strategy with consistent error typification gave the operations team end-to-end traceability across the estate for the first time.
“One architectural language across both platforms. Integration architecture decisions shaped the Salesforce architecture, and vice versa, in real time.”
What the business gained
Manual back-office reconciliation between the CRM and back-office systems has been eliminated. Data is real-time consistent across the digital ecosystem. Case-handling is faster. The reconciliation time that teams previously spent hand-matching records across disconnected platforms is gone.
MTTR for production incidents has been reduced. When an issue occurs, the logging strategy and error typification mean it is classified and triaged faster than the legacy estate ever allowed.
The platform is dependency-light by design. The next decade of digital initiatives extends the existing API catalogue rather than requiring new point-to-point links. The integration estate is an asset that grows in value as the organisation builds on top of it.
Senior expertise from day one. No billing games.
A small senior team, one architect, one senior developer and one developer, delivered enterprise-scale integration architecture work in two-week sprints across the year. No offshore handoffs. No approval-layer drag. Decisions made and executed by the same team the client met on day one.
Sixteen MuleSoft certifications across the team. Salesforce partnership depth that made Ampleshift credible on both sides of the CRM-replacement table. The two sides of the programme spoke one architectural language because Ampleshift was inside both conversations from the first discovery session.
A partnership that outlasted the contract
By the time Ampleshift offboarded in February 2025, after twelve months of delivery alongside the organisation's own people, the relationship had deepened to an unusual degree. The internal teams regarded Ampleshift as friends, not only a partner. The trust built quietly across a year of CRM-replacement delivery, including through Salesforce-side discovery and a coordinated phased cutover, is what allowed the architectural decisions to land and the platform to be handed over with confidence.
The platform is in the operator's hands, documented and operable. Ampleshift is not retained in an ongoing run capacity. That was by design. Every engagement ends with systems that work, clients that stay, and a reputation we are proud to stand behind.
For UK insurance and standards organisations in the built-environment sector, a CRM replacement is rarely just a CRM project. It is the once-in-a-decade chance to reset the integration estate alongside it, before the next decade of digital initiatives is built on top. This case shows that the two programmes can be run in lockstep, co-led with the Salesforce partner, and delivered by a small senior team in a year, with the integration estate left in a state that compounds in value rather than fragmenting with every new initiative.
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