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NZTA

Ensuring a smooth road to SAP cloud and S/4HANA migration at NZTA

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automated test scenarios created in the first month

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Company overview

“Within 1 month, NZTA’s Quality Engineering team has been able to make a real impact on maintaining NZTA business productivity levels and support what has proven to be an aggressive timeline for the SAP platform migration. It has been a real eye-opener to see what can be achieved by way of business productivity.”

– Rose Wapp, Manager Quality Engineering, NZTA

 

Challenges

Enable faster, safer SAP platform migration with minimal impact on the NZTA business community

Solution

Tricentis Tosca + TTC

Modernizing testing to drive faster, safer SAP modernization

Background

Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) is dedicated to providing “great journeys to keep New Zealand moving.” They look after the national transport system with some $2.9b of annual expenditure and  $53b of assets under management. Not surprisingly, many complex systems and applications are involved in monitoring, maintaining, and supporting their business. SAP plays a major role: SAP is used to manage the processes around road development and maintenance—including all transactions associated with land/property purchase and disposal, as well as the project and financial management of road projects.

With a required migration to S/4HANA on the horizon, they decided it was time to modernize the underlying platform as well. The New Zealand government has been advocating a transition to on-shore cloud-based data centers for some time. Before shifting to S/4HANA, NZTA committed to first modernize the SAP platform through a migration to cloud-based hosting. However, extensive—and complex—testing was required to minimize disruption to critical systems supporting real-time transactions. Testing routine changes was already burdening the business team. To support the immediate cloud migration and the upcoming S/4HANA migration, they needed a way to test exhaustively without commandeering all available business resources.

Challenges

  • Multi-phase migration to cloud, then later to S/4HANA
  • Zero test automation for the core SAP transactions
  • Manual testing already disrupted the business team’s day-to-day activities
  • Testing a cloud migration and S/4HANA migration promised to exacerbate the existing burden
  • Tests had to be repeated throughout multiple steps and phases of the migration
  • It didn’t seem possible to meet the tight project deadlines with their existing testing approach
  • No room for error; migrated business processes had to work right from the start

“The ability to steer multiple control types such as HTML, .NET and SAP GUI in a seamless test was invaluable to us when completing end to end testing.”

– Andrew Meredith, Quality Engineer, NZTA

Solution

TTC, an experienced Tricentis partner, set NZTA on the path to success—for this immediate project, the upcoming S/4HANA migration, and the continuous optimizations and innovations essential for the organization’s long-term success. A short “proof of concept” led by TTC experts was all it took to demonstrate that Tricentis Tosca tests could be created in one (on-prem) environment, then deployed and successfully run in another (cloud) environment.

Within just a month, NZTA implemented test automation that covered all inbound and outbound interfaces for Fuel Excise and Finance, Real Estate, Property Management, Business Reporting, and Customer Relationship Management. The tests were created in the NZTA SAP on-premise environment, then successfully deployed and re-executed in the SAP cloud environment. This provided fast feedback on whether key SAP transactions were operating properly in the new environment after each change. An automated test suite that executes in 1.25 hours replaces 15 person days of manual test effort. Through the powerful combination of TTC’s know-how and Tricentis’ industry-leading testing platform, NZTA successfully automated SAP transaction testing, enabling SAP platform change with minimal impact on the NZTA business community.

Results

  • The team went from 0 to 31 core automated tests in just one month
  • The initial test set covered all inbound and outbound interfaces of 6 core functions (CRM, reporting, finance, etc.)
  • Automated tests were created in the on-prem environment, then deployed and successfully run in cloud environments
  • 15 days of manual effort was reduced to 1.25 hours
  • Automated tests can run repeatedly, with appropriate data generated on each run
  • Test automation is now easily created and updated by the team’s existing resources