Effective use of automated testing, as demonstrated by CMBC’s SAP upgrade project, can save costs, minimize downtime and establish a robust regression testing practice for future updates.
Managing a complex ERP environment like SAP is no walk in the park. Especially when it comes to updates, it is crucial to consider a variety of factors, such as data migration, compatibility, change management and downtime, before implementing and integrating new versions.
One of the ways to ensure all these factors are considered is software testing, which can help identify the faults or missing requirements in an update. However, with organizations consistently growing their ERP landscape, traditional and manual methods of testing are often becoming a time-consuming process that can significantly disrupt end-users’ experience, ultimately affecting the efficiency and stability of the business.
This was the case for The Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company (CMBC), facing a tricky upgrade of SAP which was already encompassing multiple modules, including finance, sales, production planning and warehouse management. The company’s test manager Judy Doust realized that the traditional way of manually creating test scripts, which would require analysts to take screenshots and type up descriptions in Word, would prove to be a very expensive, time-consuming and disruptive process for users. It was time to look for an alternative solution.
Discovering automated testing and best practices
After considering multiple options, Doust shared that the primary issue for CMBC was that most of the testing systems required specialist programmers to be deployed – which is not something that the company could afford within its budget and time constraints. So, continuing the search, Doust discovered Original Software, the provider of automatic software testing products and services.
According to experts, the key difference between manual and automated testing is that the latter provides efficiency and scalability by allowing one to run tests without human intervention, making it well-suited to repetitive and complex testing tasks. Therefore, it is important to use a combination of both approaches and draw from the strengths of each in specific scenarios.
Thus, after consulting with Original Software, CMBC tested out the vendor’s test management software on its telesales system, and it turned out to be a quick and easy process that helped to map project methodologies into the system, with all documents held in a single area. Then, it was time to work on the SAP Upgrade project.
Capturing SAP business processes
With the help of the software provider’s consultants, Doust’s team deployed the platform to automatically record transactions and processes from their SAP system.
Consequently, CMBC hired Capita, a business process outsourcing and professional services company, to provide and execute a regression pack to test the impending SAP ECC6 upgrade. To be able to do that, the CMBC needed to provide Capita with the details of transactions to be tested. Thus, after choosing 100 users to help her capture all the day-to-day, period-end and year-end processes that CMBC used, Doust installed Original Software on each user’s PC overnight. The recordings by users were then automatically logged into the platform, where CMBC and Capita were able to see all the screens, inputs and sequences.
This allowed CMBC to save costs and reduce disruption, keeping core applications stable and up-to-date. In the future, the company expects to run a regression pack every month to ensure the integrity of CMBC’s SAP systems and lower the risk of disruption.
So, when it comes to upgrades, it is crucial to have testing measures in place to ensure that there is no downtime, unpredicted costs or data corruption. But wouldn’t it be nice to make the process easy and straightforward? With automated testing, as CMBC’s example has shown, organizations can achieve just that – and establish a healthy regression testing practice for the future.
