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Major Healthcare Company

Mastering SAP testing complexity at a Fortune 50 Healthcare company for innovation without disruption

Company overview

For this major Fortune 50 Healthcare company, business is the epitome of complexity. They partner with biopharma companies, care providers, pharmacies, manufacturers, governments, and others to deliver the right medicines, medical products, and healthcare services to the patients who need them, when they need them—safely and cost-effectively.

There’s no margin for error, but millions of things could go wrong at any time. In just one of many workstreams, 10,000 life-critical line items are processed every hour. Even a simple hospital order (e.g., for gauze pads and insulin) crosses a web of ~30 custom and packaged apps—including SAP ECC, FI, Hybris, Ariba, Salesforce, Workday, Pega—multiple integration platforms, and multiple distribution/delivery systems.

Now, core systems are being updated and released daily, and the packaged app landscape is undergoing a massive 10-year shift to the cloud—including moving 24 SAP instances to SAP S/4HANA. And among all this change, there’s pressure to catch defects earlier and reduce the overall cost of testing.

Challenges

  • Rapidly evolve systems in response to highly-dynamic policies, regulations, patient demand, partner needs, M & A activity, and health crises
  • Move from bi-weekly or weekly releases to daily releases
  • A single transaction touches customer interfaces, order entry, order delivery, and procure to pay—with supporting processes in distribution, security, operations, finance, record to report, integration, and reporting/analytics
  • End-to-end testing performed manually, limiting speed, repeatability, and accuracy
  • Limited insight into quality metric benchmarks
  • Open source tools don’t scale past “islands of automation”
  • Need advanced automation for everything from legacy SAP and custom applications, to SaaS, APIs, and integration platforms, to fully-cloud-based S/4HANA, Snowflake, serverless, etc.
  • Legacy Microfocus ALM solution lacks agility for managing modern QA processes, integration into Jira, Bamboo, Jenkins, GitHub

Solutions

A major Fortune 50 Healthcare company performed an extensive search for testing solutions that were equipped for their sophisticated IT landscape—both current and future-state. They discovered Tricentis and took up the CEO’s bold challenge: “Give us your most difficult automation challenges, and we’ll prove that we can solve them.” This led to a Proof of Concept where 13 tricky use cases—across both legacy and modern technologies—were successfully completed in three weeks with 5-6 people led by Tricentis Solution Architects. At that point, they were convinced Tricentis was the right partner to provide the technology and guidance needed for fast innovation without business disruption.

The company is currently in the process of implementing the complete Tricentis platform, including:

  • Tricentis LiveCompare: To reduce the time and cost of SAP updates and migrations by identifying exactly what tests are required
  • Tricentis qTest: To streamline agile test management and gain centralized visibility and control across their entire testing toolset (including open source)
  • Tricentis Tosca: To reduce the risk of change with high levels of end-to-end test automation

The Director of Quality Assurance determined that this strategic quality investment will yield a total savings of $750K in the first 5 quarters, then $1.44M annually thereafter.

Goals and solutions

Phase 1 Goals + Projections

  • Build out infrastructure, launch, and onboard core NA Pharma teams
  • Establish digital center of excellence
  • Transition from legacy testing tools
  • Increase E2E test automation rate from 30% to 80%
  • Start tracking risk coverage and reach 90%
  • 35% reduction in testing costs
  • 10X increase in testing speed
  • 25% reduction in production defects

Phase 2 Goals

  • Optimize procedures to expand automation success across teams
  • Extend the project from North America to Europe
  • Add service visualization for more effective E2E testing
  • Add automated data integrity testing to improve data quality
  • Standardize risk-based testing approach
  • Fully retire legacy testing tools
  • Shift remaining manual testing resources to automation