Our Client:
Our client is an American company that provides a multitude of healthcare resources, including pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, health information technology, and care management tools. We have been providing testing services to them for 20 years.
Challenges:
Our client has more than 400 interfaces and over 40,000 custom database tables within SAP, a massive enterprise software platform on which the client runs their business. This number of databases makes the platform one of the most complex SAP constructs in the world. The client is constantly receiving patches (i.e. upgrades and fixes) from SAP. The client’s subject matter experts (SMEs) understand how the patches are supposed to work, while Prolifics developers must test the patches to make sure they are functioning correctly.
This creates a gap or inefficiency between our developers and the client’s SMEs. In other words, our client’s SMEs know what the upgrades and fixes are supposed to do, but are not familiar with the coding to test those patches. Similarly, while our developers know how to code, they aren’t familiar with what the upgrades and fixes are supposed to do. Consequently, the groups must meet to trade information. This, as expected, takes lots of time.
Action:
Prolifics used functional and regression automation tools that still required extensive coding in collaboration with the SMEs. While we looked at other tools that were supposed to make the process simpler, none of them worked the way we wanted. This changed when we began using Tosca from Tricentis, a newly added Prolifics’ technology partner. Tosca is a low-code tool that supports automation for over 100 technologies. We migrated the client to Tosca. Kiran Bhashyam, Prolifics Solution Director, said, “The other testing tools didn’t work the way they were supposed to, but Tosca did.”
Prolifics engineers trained the client’s SME’s on how to use Tosca to confidently set up the testing for the SAP upgrades. As such, our client’s SMEs can easily understand and use it to run the testing they need.
Results:
Our client’s SMEs can confidently use Tosca to set up the testing process for the SAP upgrades. This created a 30 percent time reduction in automation effort and a 25 percent reduction in maintenance costs. The client is satisfied with the results to the extent that they have expanded our services beyond testing. In fact, they are currently planning to acquire the latest version of SAP (SAP HANA), and have entrusted us with helping them migrate to the new platform.
Technology:
Tricentis describes Tosca as intelligence test automation that optimizes and accelerates end-to-end testing of a company’s entire digital landscape. It requires minimal coding and uses an AI-based approach to expand innovation across a company by taking the bottlenecks out of testing and the risks out of software releases.
