Partner spotlight series: How Foulk Consulting transforms QA for energy and utilities with Tricentis

Tricentis partner Foulk Consulting has over two decades of experience helping enterprise organizations navigate the complexities of digital transformation so they can modernize, scale, and secure their quality engineering capabilities. Foulk Consulting brings unmatched depth in implementing Tricentis solutions across regulated, complex, and mission-critical environments where the need for auditable, traceable, and resilient processes is critical for quality assurance.

Highly regulated industries such as energy and utilities are navigating a shift driven by sustainability goals, regulatory mandates, and customer expectations. Quality assurance has emerged as the critical enabler of successful transformation. Foulk Consulting helps its clients ensure QA doesn’t become a bottleneck to transformation with an approach that integrates enterprise-grade tooling with expert consulting. With deep domain knowledge and a mature QA framework, this partner has consistently delivered high-impact solutions from automated testing and performance validation to security assurance and compliance audits.

Tricentis automates end-to-end testing for regulated sectors

The energy and utilities sector faces unique QA challenges during digital transformations, such as:

• Conducting change impact analysis across integrated systems
• Maintaining test reliability during frequent infrastructure updates
• Ensuring compliance auditability without slowing delivery
• Monitoring test infrastructure health across environments

These challenges are compounded by a complex application landscape that includes modern and legacy technologies that span across packaged applications, mainframes and custom applications, APIs, microservices, and mobile/cloud-native apps. Organizations need to ensure compliance with mandates such as NERC, FERC, and ISO while maintaining quality and accelerating innovation.

Automation is the key. Regulated sectors can automate validation of compliance scenarios using model-based testing and use dashboards and traceability tools to produce audit-ready logs on demand. With Tricentis’ native support for more than 160 applications and technologies, energy and utilities companies can achieve resilient, end-to-end test automation across any architecture or application stack. Tricentis can even test extremely new or old or specialized technologies as well as remote applications (Citrix, VMware, etc.) accessed in secure and regulated environments.

For instance, Tricentis Tosca’s model-based approach allows for strong traceability from an energy company’s business requirement through test execution and results. Tosca’s test case versioning, execution logs, and requirement mapping provide traceable evidence for system change validation, supporting controls often required in NERC CIP-010 or FERC audits.

How Foulk Consulting helped an energy provider accelerate test automation

Foulk Consulting has been a Tricentis partner since 2018. Partnering with Tricentis has enabled Foulk Consulting to deliver rapid, scalable solutions for clients to modernize their quality engineering capabilities. One of those clients is a Fortune 500 energy provider that was looking to accelerate its adoption of Tosca following a major digital transformation initiative. However, the energy company faced delays in regression testing due to broken legacy Tosca scripts from a previous systems integrator. The result was serious delays from release over release and a misunderstanding around where the company invested its time in testing and overall quality.

Along with a poor health check score and limited internal automation skills, the longtime client approached Foulk Consulting to provide some oversight of the issue and to help create momentum for realizing ROI in the investments it had made in both tooling and unused automation. Within a matter of days, the Foulk Consulting team deployed certified Tosca architects, upgraded a deprecated six-year-old Tosca instance. This approach drastically shortens time-to-value and helps organizations shift from pilot to production in record time.

In just a few short weeks, the Foulk Consulting team conducted the multi-step upgrade path, repaired and replaced old automation, and started to show working results that built trust on some of the perceptions around benefits and realized time savings of proper automation strategies. Zooming out over three months, Foulk Consulting had automated over 150 test cases and provided an oversight and ongoing knowledge transfer to ensure the automation continued to perform the outcomes they were intended for years prior.

At the end of the following quarter, the client’s leadership acknowledged that their testing cycles were cut by more than half and their test coverage estimates had increased by more than 75% percent from previous testing cycles/releases.

Building QA visibility and stability for scalable success

“The Tricentis platform of enterprise grade automation tooling coupled with test data management and insights with LiveCompare give us tremendous advantages in delivering speed and quality driven outcomes for our clients.”
Ryan Foulk, President and CEO, Foulk Consulting

Foulk Consulting advises QA leaders in regulated industries to begin their journeys of transformation by starting with foundational visibility and stability, including:

• Baseline the current QA infrastructure by knowing what scripts exist, what passes, and what’s brittle.
• Prioritize test assets aligned to regulatory coverage, not just functionality.
• Establish test governance early with versioning, approvals, traceability, and environment control.

As systems age out and cloud initiatives expand, robust QA practices have become a strategic differentiator in regulatory compliance and customer reliability. By selecting a platform like Tricentis that enables scalable test automation across technologies and partnering with experts like Foulk Consulting, energy and utilities organizations can optimally modernize and manage their QA landscape.

The Tricentis Partner Spotlight Series highlights how our partners leverage the Tricentis suite of products to excel in the test automation space and help our mutual customers meet their quality engineering goals. If you’re a partner and would like to be considered for the series, please get in touch with your Tricentis partner manager.