Dow Corning

From Antarctica to the moon to your own household, silicon-based technology by Dow Corning helps products perform more effectively. A leader in silicones, the $5.45 billion per year company makes more than 7,000 products for over 25,000 customers worldwide. Dow Corning is distributed across dozens of global locations with 31 different languages. Yet, a single instance of SAP supports about 97 percent of the company. Since Dow Corning implemented the software in 1996, the company has rolled out nearly every available SAP module. Dow Corning keeps SAP current, remaining just one version behind at all times. Each year, that requires four to five system upgrades across its landscape. Upgrades, enhancement packs and support packs make for constant change - at a rate of 400 to 600 transports per month.

Challenge

Since adopting SAP 13 years ago, Dow Corning had performed testing manually. Though the company had a history of quality testing, the demand on high-value business process experts reached an all-time high. Without a formal test group, busy subject matter experts were spending as much as 500 hours combined conducting functional testing for every SAP support pack. When faced with the major upgrade from ECC 5.0 to ECC 6.0, the demands of manual testing, combined with multiple retirements of longtime team members, Dow Corning decided it could not afford to continue testing manually – it was time to automate.

Solution

In anticipation of the upgrade from 5.0 to 6.0, Dow Corning set an ambitious goal of finding and installing an automated testing solution – and then transferring all their critical manual testing procedures to automated processes. All of this had to be done within three months.

"Dow Corning was looking for one tool to help us automate our end-to-end SAP testing to optimize efficiency," said Jeff Duly, Senior Enterprise Architect. "The biggest challenge was that we had a 3-month window to analyze, purchase, install and then automate as many processes as possible. We felt comfortable after talking with Worksoft that they would be able to meet this challenge for us."

Worksoft Certify® stood out for three reasons.

  1. Worksoft Certify embraces an object-oriented approach to testing - encouraging reusability.
  2. The product is specialized for SAP applications – thus embedding SAP knowledge and workflows.
  3. Worksoft Certify caters to the business analysts versus a technical SAP BASIS administrator.

With Worksoft Certify, subject matter experts that understand the business process have a single solution to validate, document and record end-to-end validation tests without writing, generating or maintaining any code.

Results

Phase I - Automating Over 70% in 3 Months

Within a three-month timeframe, Dow Corning was able to convert and automate all of its critical legacy test cases using approximately 150 end-to-end test cases in Worksoft Certify – representing over 70% of the former test cases and test coverage. Using Worksoft, Dow Corning effectively eliminated three legacy manual test cases for every new, automated test in Certify.

Phase II - Upgrading to ECC 6.0

After successfully completing Phase I, it was time to focus on the major SAP upgrade from ECC 5.0 to ECC 6.0. Dow Corning knew that the preparation and work done in Phase I would pay off, but no one really understood how this would translate in the ECC 6.0 environment. As it turned out, the object-oriented approach in Certify allowed Dow Corning to build and reuse specific test cases which were very portable during the upgrade process, saving a tremendous amount of time. In less than one day, the Dow Corning teams converted all the ECC 5.0 Certify tests to run on the new ECC 6.0 version. After doing so, Dow Corning had developed a total of 250 end-to-end business validation tests that were capable of testing all the critical business processes on the ECC platform.

Phase III – Moving from Upgrades to Updates

With the smooth upgrade behind them, Dow Corning began to integrate Certify into its weekly processes for testing SAP transport changes, support packs and enhancement packs. By using Worksoft’s lights-out testing approach, all 250 end-to-end processes now run in six hours. As part of this reduction, Worksoft showed Dow Corning how to make test data part of the automated process instead of having to copy and move production data to support the testing scripts. This enabled the tests be “self-contained” so that they could be run at night and on weekends without any human involvement - essentially running in a lights-out mode.

Now, IT manages the technical aspects of implementing SAP upgrades, service packs and daily change management tasks. Business process experts focus on the optimization of the business processes while an outsourcing vendor creates, maintains and executes end-to-end test cases that are aligned with Dow Corning’s business processes.

“Seeing was believing,” Duly said. “Once we started using the tool, it gained momentum. After the first couple of weeks, we were really seeing a lot of energy around using the tool and moving it forward.”