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LeasePlan

Accelerating the move to digital: How LeasePlan is using Tricentis Tosca to drive business growth

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coverage of the critical operational business processes in LeasePlan Insurance

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end-to-end test scenarios

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hours per month saved for business users

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Company overview

LeasePlan is a global market leader in car-as-a-service, with approximately 1.8 million vehicles under its management in 29 countries. LeasePlan purchases, funds, and manages new vehicles for its customers, providing a complete end-to-end service for a typical contract duration of three to four years. LeasePlan has been in business for almost 60 years and sets itself the mission of providing customers with what’s next in sustainable mobility, so that its customers can focus on what’s next for them.

LeasePlan focuses heavily on innovation and its ambition is to connect all 29 countries it operates in, to one digital platform. Entitled ‛Next Gen Digital Architecture’ (NGDA), the project aims to build a global, end-to-end digital platform that encompasses all processes of the leasing company: purchasing vehicles, maintaining them, and selling returned vehicles.

“We want to provide the best possible customer experience with all the latest technology in the market and following the best practices,” says Michael Liu Zhao, Head of Quality for NGDA. “Digitizing these processes also drives down costs for LeasePlan, so that the customer can operate the digital service at the digital level of cost.”

Realizing the Next Gen Digital Architecture constitutes a clear competitive advantage for LeasePlan.

  • Arrow Icon
    Industry: Automotive
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    Organization size: 5,000+ employees
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    Location: Amsterdam
  • Arrow IconProducts:

Delivering end-to-end quality in a complex application landscape

The digital ecosystem that NGDA forms consists of a wide range of applications, with SAP, Salesforce, and Pega as the three main SaaS platforms, driving many of the business processes, together with numerous other applications, both packaged software and in-house development. To get consistent software quality across this ecosystem, LeasePlan Digital began its search for an end-to-end quality assurance solution in 2021.

“We needed a solution that could cover a lot of technologies and could be used for multiple SaaS solutions,” Liu Zhao explained. “We also wanted to have a tooling that specializes in end-to-end testing with a good maintainability and reusability of design.” LeasePlan also found it important that one tool could fit all tests for API, GUI, and end-to-end functionality.

It was SAP that brought Tricentis to the attention of LeasePlan, and Tricentis Tosca was evaluated against different solutions from multiple vendors.

“As an automation expert, I’m quite sceptical about test automation solutions that promise easy-to-use tooling plus complete coverage of end-to-end business processes. Working in a complex domain with mixed technologies such as SAP, Pega, Salesforce and custom-built software, we were facing a tough challenge,” says Liu Zhao. “Our DevOps teams run a variety of tooling that best serves them within the isolation of their product and that is closest to their technology. But we had the desire to run end-to-end regression tests that cover all our most critical business processes.”

  • Arrow IconLeasePlan needed an end-to-end quality assurance solution for its new digital platform
  • Arrow IconLeasePlan wanted the solution to offer good maintainability and reusability
  • Arrow IconComplex application landscape based on different technologies

Close collaboration between SAP and Tricentis

After the evaluation, Tricentis Tosca came out as the winner.

“Tosca can cover more applications than any other solution,” said Liu Zhao. “Tosca even supports PDF or Excel scanning, and mainframes, which a lot of other tools cannot do.”

The close partnership between SAP and Tricentis was very important to LeasePlan, as well as the fact that Tricentis consistently comes out as a leader in the reports of market research agencies such as Gartner, IDC, and Forrester.

“Tricentis’s reputation is very good in the market. We checked different scoring systems, and Tosca is always ranked as a top scorer,” says Liu Zhao. “We also attach a great deal of importance to the support that vendors offer post-sales. In that sense, the close collaboration between SAP and Tricentis proved really valuable.” Other advantages of Tosca included the model-based testing view it provides, the reporting capabilities, and the integration with CI/CD pipelines.

Tosca offers LeasePlan’s quality engineers a completely different way of working, compared to the Java, coding-based tools that many engineers use. Liu Zhao says, “Tosca is a scriptless tool and brings a different way of automating things. We still use our Java-based testing as a baseline, but on top of it we now provide Tosca as an additional quality gate for end-to-end coverage.” Tosca is mainly used for the UI-testing of the customer-facing applications.

Liu Zhao’s team managed to realize the Tosca implementation in a very short period and with high quality. They were able to do that as LeasePlan had already started building the test scenarios while they were still setting up the infrastructure in AWS.

“Once the infrastructure was up, we basically just migrated our own stuff into the cloud infrastructure, and we had everything working quickly. We are now in the luxurious position that we have an automated regression suite in Tosca, that covers around 90% of the critical operational business processes, for our global digital platform in the NGDA Insurance solution,” says Liu Zhao.

The Tosca integration with different proprietary software platforms allows for easy adoption in LeasePlan’s ever-changing landscape and helps it keep up the pace of innovation.

“Our regression set provides the teams with the confidence that they can deploy products without breaking vital processes and, at the same time, making sure that their integration remains end-to-end protected,” says Liu Zhao.

LeasePlan car park garage full of cars

Saving business users’ time

The aspect that Liu Zhao is most proud of is how the collaboration with the business improved.

“Our previous tools did not give a clear view of what had been automated from a business perspective. Our business partners were amazed at how well Tosca was performing. They are also saving a lot of time, compared to the previous manual and time-consuming user acceptance test. The easy-to-read reporting gives them immediate insight into the execution status and provides details of the individual test cases. This allows our business to make good judgment of the coverage and helps them to contribute to new test cases.”

Compared to the manual testing that went on before, the business users easily save 20 hours of testing per month.

The NGDA platform was rolled out in the Netherlands at the end of 2022 and will gradually be rolled out to other countries and applications, further amplifying the benefits Tosca brings.

“I see Tricentis as a vendor, but also as a partner,” Liu Zhao concluded. “Tricentis really has a good post-sales support and we worked with a highly dedicated customer success manager. Tricentis has really become a star inside LeasePlan. Without Tosca we would be struggling with the current complexity, running at scale.”

  • Arrow Icon90% coverage of the critical operational business processes in LeasePlan Insurance
  • Arrow Icon22 end-to-end test scenarios
  • Arrow IconEasy-to-read reporting
  • Arrow IconBusiness users save 20 hours per month, compared to manual testing