ERP migrations are highly complex and require significant testing to ensure business process continuity, satisfy audit requirements, and deliver peace of mind for these significant digital transformations. According to International Data Corporation (IDC) analysts, Worksoft automation accelerates business process testing by 76%, empowering organizations to complete testing in mere hours that once took weeks.

Deutsche Telekom, the largest telecommunications provider in Europe, leveraged the value of intelligent automation with Worksoft for their One ERP Transformation program. Dirk Keweloh, senior vice president of Digitization and Transformation for Deutsche Telekom’s Services Europe AG, recently shared the organization’s experience with Worksoft automation at the Gartner CIO and IT Executive Summit in Munich. Watch the video

Driving Digital Transformation

Deutsche Telekom recently migrated to a single ERP solution to standardize data models, business processes and IT across their complex global enterprise. The ambitious move was designed to give them one truth, one master data and one logic across the services group, which serves more than 175,000 customers with 10 locations and 4 countries.

The organization’s SAP implementation included the migration of complex business processes for purchase to pay, order to case, supply chain, network logistics, and more. With more than 6,000 test cases to be completed in a period of four months or less, company leaders knew they lacked the bandwidth and volume of technical resources to complete the necessary testing with a traditional manual approach.

“We needed some way of reducing the manual effort in rollouts and that’s why I was looking for a new methodology in terms of how I could get rid of these test cases,” said Keweloh.

Automation for Business Processes

During his presentation, Keweloh noted the clear distinction between traditional test automation that’s been available for decades and the flexibility and ease of use offered by the Worksoft platform. Worksoft’s codeless automation streamlines the testing process for business users and their associated processes by enabling flexible scope definition and test execution from the user’s desk.

“What we have here is test automation you can use on the business side. We call it ‘build your own test bot.’ This software from Worksoft is so easy to use. You can train business users so that they’re able to set up their test cases and play with them.”

Keweloh said if the teams suspect there may be specific issues or defects in a certain area of the process, they can easily set up a variety of test cases to run overnight, work to resolve the issue, then run those same established tests again to determine if the resolution was accurate. He said having established tests cases has boosted efficiency and quality as they cycle through rollouts.

“We have ramped up thousands of test bots and can cover 80% of the rollout scope,” Keweloh said. “We are now reducing the effort versus manual test execution and as a result, quality is increasing in our ERP rollouts.”

Documentation Made Easy

Compliance documentation is another added benefit of Worksoft automation, according to Keweloh, who said the platform automatically generates the test documentation necessary to meet audit requirements, which must be satisfied before an ERP rollout can go live.

“We talked to the auditors and they accepted the documentation that is done by Worksoft test automation,” said Keweloh. “Nothing has to be done by the business user anymore. The detailed script is all there in terms of user master data; and it can be uploaded to Solution Manager, or Jira or whatever kind of tracking tool you use.”

He added that Worksoft also automates documentation for the small percentage of testing where manual testing is still used. “You can use the tool and just recode what the business user is doing and let that documentation run in behind it. Now the documentation is gone. It can be fully automated by the tool.”

Methodology: Maximizing Flexibility & Reusability

Worksoft automation allows Deutsche Telekom to automate testing across complex, end-to-end business processes. Keweloh said the Worksoft platform is highly customizable and there’s “no programming necessary.” He pointed out aligning the test automation infrastructure with your business methodology is key to maximizing reusability, allowing organizations to further boost efficiency by sharing the automation across teams within the organization.

“Consider how you set up the test scripts. If you want to go for reusability and flexibility, then you need to think about variables in the scripts. You have to train the business user a little bit. It’s not about the tool or technique, it’s a methodology,” said Keweloh.

CoE: Setting the Standard

Deutsche Telekom has reached a level of maturity with their test automation that has allowed them to set up a Center of Excellence for Test Automation.

“We have established test automation as a Center of Excellence from which we drive and automate transformation programs.”

He added that the CoE for Test Automation is “now the basis for providing services and training to others in the organization. Everybody is able to use the methodology and the tools that are in place.”

Beyond ERP: Automating Non-SAP Testing

Deutsche Telekom is now expanding its use of Worksoft automation beyond SAP.

“This is not only about the ERP. Worksoft is very strong on the SAP environment, but you can also use it for non-SAP environments,” Keweloh said. “We are rolling out this technology to other projects as well, including our 35 innovation projects that we run each year. We also want to use it in the web-based area.”

S/4HANA Migration Planning

Deutsche Telekom is currently working with experts from Worksoft and SAP to determine the best approach to use test automation to streamline their S/4HANA migration.

“Having this huge infrastructure in terms of the one ERP, we now need to go for the next step, which is the S/4HANA migration,” Keweloh said. “So, we are in discussions about what is the right methodology for dealing with test automation on the S/4HANA platform.”

Keweloh said he is looking to automation to make Deutsche Telekom’s migration to S/4HANA “cheap, automated, and standardized” by avoiding manual testing and trial and error. Watch the full presentation here.

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