When Dutch Railways was looking to make the switch to SAP S/4HANA, they wanted to implement intelligent test automation to make the process as smooth and efficient as possible. They turned to Worksoft, utilizing both testing and business capture tools to gain knowledge and insight before making the transition to S/4HANA. Vincent Immink, Test Automation Architect at Dutch Railways, recently shared insights on why Worksoft was the right choice for their organization. 

Dutch Railways is a transportation company with 1.3 million travelers per day and 4 million travelers abroad each year. With over 21,000+ employees in the Netherlands and ten teams working simultaneously on various elements of their system, their goal was to simplify in switching to S/4HANA.

To meet their needs, Dutch Railways implemented the Worksoft Connective Automation Platform, using Worksoft process capture capabilities to identify their as-is business processes and analytics to understand end-to-end business processes spanning multiple applications. They also engaged Worksoft’s continuous test management capabilities to schedule remotely executed testing and the Certify test automation engine. With these solutions, the company was able to achieve its goals during the transition and provide efficiency and increase quality.

Ensure Quality On Multiple Teams to Shift Left

For Dutch Railways, the highest priority is to deliver safe, comfortable journeys for their travelers. This involves complex systems and multiple teams working on their system. Creating separate teams allows for the company to divide and conquer, but that also invites room for error. To ensure quality, the organization needed to move left and simplify along the way.

“We knew we were starting from behind, so we wanted to make sure to shift left to detect issues at an earlier stage, to provide cost-effectiveness, and have a smooth transition toward production. The tool needed to support that.” 

Utilize Multiple Tools for Increased Efficiency

Using Worksoft’s capabilities for automated testing and process analytics allows Dutch Railways to store captures and provide process documentation to their teams. They’ve automated this entire process so that it sends the process flow data to the Worksoft Certify test automation engine for final scripting. This seamless connectivity has enabled them to perform functional testing for their development and QA teams.

“Worksoft has a complete suite of tools. At this moment, we’re using Certify and Capture to verify functionality on our development and QA systems.” 

Integrate with Non-SAP Applications and Tools

Dutch Railways also chose Worksoft because of the platform’s ability to seamlessly integrate with other applications. The Worksoft platform helped Dutch Railways during their move to SAP S/4HANA, and it also increased efficiency for other programs and systems such as SoapUI, Jenkins, and Jira.

“One of the other parts of Certify is the use and integration with well-known tools. Due to the fact that Worksoft is able to communicate with these tools, we are more capable to make the shift left that we as a team want to make.” 

Company-Wide Ease-of-Use

One of the biggest things that set Worksoft apart is that our intelligent automation is codeless, which carries key benefits for users. Namely, it’s easy to train team members with a variety of skill sets to use the platform, which gave Dutch Railways access to information and testing they hadn’t had in the past. 

“It’s codeless. This enables us to train people really fast. Any user can use the process capture so we can get the knowledge out of their hands and into our system so we can scale it.” 

A Scalable, Connective Automation Platform

In utilizing more than one solution from Worksoft, Dutch Railways is seeing the benefits of the Connective Automation Platform. In connecting discovery and testing, they are able to reduce cost and increase efficiency with less risk. They can also easily add other Worksoft solutions when they’re ready. 

“It’s really easily scalable. Once you set up your automation suite, it’s [easy] to add new services to the environment so you can support multiple projects or more testing on your old projects.” 

Peace-of-Mind with Secure, Robust Orchestration

The Worksoft platform also enabled Dutch Railways to perform orchestrated tests outside the platform, bringing the results back to Worksoft for more seamless reporting. Worksoft enables technical and non-technical users to schedule, report, and oversee the testing process. 

“This is really important as we shift left; you can use Worksoft’s orchestration tool to kick off tests outside of Worksoft and receive it back so you can provide proper reporting.”

Implementation of Test Automation

To successfully implement Worksoft test automation, Dutch Railways focused on several key elements of the platform. They utilized Worksoft’s ability to operate in an agnostic environment to create scripts in one environment and reuse them in others, continuing to shift left as they performed a lights-out execution, reducing error and testing on a daily basis. Because of the codeless platform, Dutch Railways was able to quickly train their teams to support their DevOps teams.

“The biggest point in this is environment agnostic. The tool does not know in which environment the test is being executed, so we were able to create scripts in one environment and run them in every other environment in their program. "

To learn more about how Worksoft automation empowers enterprises to achieve success, visit our Customer Automation Journeys page.