Description of the challenge
This customer, a multinational in the healthcare sector, has a history of acquiring different companies, each with their own geographical context, culture, organization and processes. A strategic project was launched to align some of the core business processes of these companies in order to increase efficiency and transparency across the EMEA region.
The first and most important goal of the project was to bring some of the key financial processes together into a Financial Shared Service Centre, located in Eastern Europe. Another goal of the project was to transfer stock and processes from decentralized warehouses into a central European distribution organization. A final objective was to bring all sales processes and Invoicing, as well as Business Intelligence data
into 1 single platform. A complex set of ERP & related software (SAP, JDEdwards, Siebel) had to be deployed as well as a European standard platform to support this transformation.
The project was implemented in a phased release schedule per country or sales market. The second release (France) was postponed due to insufficient involvement of the local business and inadequate testing of the ERP processes. At that point in time the project board expressed the following concerns:
- Time: the testing cycle took a lot of time, early testing phases reached only 70% completeness against plan.
- Bad software quality: a lot of issues were detected only in production.
- Low business confidence: business did not want to accept the system; it did not match their expectations.
Quasus was asked to address these issues over the course of the upcoming releases.
Evidence supporting the added value of the solution
Over the course of the project, Quasus consultants were able to reduce the actual testing cycle time by 60 %, from 20 weeks to 12 weeks elapsed time. This reduction was realized by better test preparation and by avoiding repetitive test case creation. Through better planning and organization it was now even possible to double the number of test case executions within a testing cycle.
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Quasus consultants were also able to increase the quality of the ERP software solution. The number of defects (1) found and fixed during the early test phases increased significantly compared to the number of defects detected in production. During the final release, Quasus consultants were able to save up to 1 million € of potential business loss and defect resolution (300 defects, 3750 euros per defect)(2).
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Finally, the business gained confidence. The satisfaction score of the test approach reached up to 90% during business evaluation sessions of the project.
The approach
To eliminate some of the ‘waste’ the project was carrying, Quasus gradually developed a Test Center of Excellence, based upon 3 pillars:
- A management tool, upon which a structured test approach was built;
- Involvement of a pool of Business resources from different countries earlier in the project;
- Training of ERP experts in creating re-usable test cases and data sets.
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The implementation of the management tool increased overall transparency and traceability within the project. A real-time testing dashboard revealed some of the project’s weaknesses. Quasus trained the ERP experts in using established techniques (all pairs, decision tree) to increase the quality of testing and eradicate duplicate testing. An example of the flexible test scenario builder that was implemented can be found below.
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Customer Quote
“Hiring Quasus Consultants to improve the testing process within the project proved to be an excellent choice. Not only did they increase significantly the quality of the implemented ERP solution and gained business confidence within the project, they established a stable foundation for the quality of testing across EMEA IT projects. “
D. O’Connell, Regional Director EMEA Finance.
[1]Defects have been re-calculated to allow comparison between the releases (i.e. the
Italian release included local distribution components whereas France did
not). Excluded are: minor/cosmetic defects, data defects, defects that were not fixed before go live (open/rejected).
[2]According to Gartner, the average cost of a defect detected in production is 5000 €. This includes the cost of IT operations, rework in analysis, development & test + business loss. According to Graff and van Wyk, the cost of detecting and fixing the same defect during testing is 25% of having to resolve the same defect in production.
On Saturday 14 January 2012, Quasus held its annual Kick-Off party. This year’s party was held in the stylish event hall, B19 in Ukkel. The evening was organized in an Asian Lounge atmosphere and all the guests were asked to respect the dress code: stylish black with a touch of fuchsia. Easy for some and a real challenge for others…
