MB&A
Avant Garde Approach to Salesforce Adoption

“Everything in Salesforce is moving towards mobile and things are becoming more componentized,” begins Josh Millsapps, Senior Partner of MB&A. “Our offering is doing the same.” The firm is developing more components for helping customers within specific areas such as surveys, inspections and automated compliance. The Arlington, VA based Millsapps, Ballinger & Associates (MB&A) creates smaller pieces of stand-alone technology that functions in both—product ecosystem and within Salesforce’s environment. “Measurement. Everyone is looking to do a better job of measuring and they are trying to do it in every aspect of their business. This has carried into how they look at their Salesforce solutions,” says Millsapps. “ExAM’s Assess Anything technology helps organizations measure everything in their Salesforce environment.”

The noted capabilities of the firm in the Salesforce arena include the firms’ Extensible Assessment Manager (ExAM) tool; MB&A rapidly gathers various kinds of information with a scoring system tied to drive interactions in Salesforce for doing complex surveys and inspections.

In a quest to resolve the challenges in the Salesforce realm, MB&A’s team works hard to capture the voice of the Salesforce customer market. ExAM (ExAM4Enterprise.com) offers everything right from quick hitting surveys to complex data collections. As an ISV partner, the firm helps clients to solve specific issues that they have around gathering customer feedback or performing audit or automated compliance with ExAM4Enterprise.com. “The sheer experience of building our products has enabled us to develop unique capabilities around app development,” asserts Millsapps. To its credit, the Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) firm uses ExAM4Enterprise.com to deliver large-scale inspection programs at Los Angeles County Public Schools, the District of Columbia’s General Services, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

HUD’s new inspection program—UCPS-V is built on ExAM4Inspections.com, and enables very complex inspection programs to be implemented in weeks.

The sheer experience of building our products has enabled us to develop unique capabilities around app development

“Our ExAM Mobile App then takes this capability offline in order to support areas without internet or cellular connections,” says Millsapps. “HUD is taking advantage of the significant advances we have made in advancing our inspection capabilities and within our growing inspections customer base.” The firm has also supported more than one million surveys in the last year for the Department of Veteran Affairs as well as a Grants program, and a Voice of the Customer program.

As a testimony of such expertise, MB&A assisted VA Center of Innovation (VACI) as they wanted to find an alternate for managing their innovation projects. Initially, their process spanned multiple stakeholders, across multiple spreadsheets, and managed via, email and phone. This process was paperwork intensive, as it required every innovation project be compliant with VA policies regarding personnel involved on projects, as well as overall corporate compliance. “We used our “Cloud Success” methodology for helping organizations get started with Salesforce and establish a minimal viable product (MVP),” says Millsapps. The solution automated data flows to move data through core business processes organization, establish work flows, notifications, and approvals.

“The big focus for us now is making the complexity we make possible to manage using our ExAM4Enterprise.com product lines and creating wizards and step by step interfaces that make all this capability easier and easier to use,” cites Millsapps. Beyond ExAM, Twilio (SMS), Google (Maps) and Mulesoft products are the three major outside services that the firm helps people with. MB&A continues to make their products more accessible to business users andalso plans to stretch their services beyond the U.S. to markets in Europe and Canada.