PepsiCo Engages Test Automation and Process Discovery During S/4HANA Transformation to Reduce Risk and Accelerate ROI

According to a recent ASUG Whitepaper, 39% of SAP S/4HANA customers underestimated the complexity of their migration. Many organizations utilize automation at some point during their S/4HANA journey, but engaging automation before, during, and after migration can reduce risk and manual effort. Worksoft automation spans planning and preparation, process validation, and managing ongoing change post-migration. 

“Anything you can do to help minimize the pull on employees and the pull on project teams that may take them away from focusing on the core work they have to do on making this migration as seamless as possible is going to be beneficial to the whole organization,” says Mike Veach, Head of CX Operations at Worksoft. 

Sachin Chhabra, Director of IT Development and Delivery at PepsiCo, a joint Worksoft and IBM customer, PepsiCo recently shared how automation supported Pepsico's S/4HANA journey at ASUG Forward 2021. 

PepsiCo is a leading international food, snack, and beverage corporation with over 290,000 employees worldwide with numerous SAP deployments. When the enterprise was preparing for the shift to S/4HANA, they needed to gain a full understanding of their cross-application business processes that span SAP and non-SAP systems. To accelerate deployment and reduce risk, they chose the Worksoft Connective Automation Platform to engage process discovery and test automation. Following are the key benefits of automation they experienced on their implementation journey. 

Understand E2E Processes for SAP and non-SAP Implementation

As an organization already familiar with SAP, with SAP ECC implemented across the globe, PepsiCo began planning their switch to S/4HANA with good best practices and processes built in SAP. Over the course of a few years, they built a global template by capturing, documenting, and automating testing in end-to-end applications, including both SAP and those that would interact with SAP S/4HANA. 

“End-to-end automation has allowed us to gain efficiency and uncover defects we wouldn’t have normally seen manually. We use automation to validate data defects early, and we’ve automated close to 100% of our regression testing to build a foundation for the future,” says Chhabra. 

Utilize Process Capture to Accelerate Documentation

Before their transition to S/4HANA, PepsiCo was already utilizing Worksoft test automation and had a test automation team to drive efficiency and value for the company. As they moved toward migration, they needed to connect their IT, business, and test automation teams as efficiently as possible. While their teams were very engaged, they were not very connected. 

The company decided to implement Worksoft process capture to gain an increased understanding of processes and better align their teams. With so many processes on different teams, they realized the best way to get through this journey was to make sure knowledge was captured, especially for new functionalities, by having teams work on functions and record them with Worksoft’s process capture capabilities. They found that it saved them roughly 50% of effort on testing components. 

“We actually have a way that we can both leverage the documentation output of that to accelerate the automation build of our automation components or import that into Worksoft Certify itself to get a good shell of automation, then our test automation team picks that up and completes the play if you will," says Chhabra

Define Testing Objects Before Migration to Reduce Risk

By engaging process capture and gaining an understanding of end-to-end processes both SAP and otherwise, PepsiCo was able to avoid costly rework once their implementation began. This meant that once their S/4HANA migration was underway, they weren’t having to go back and fix errors that were missed beforehand. 

“One of the keys for us in making sure we have good test automation is that we have an end-to-end framework in which we’re building these components and dropping them in and stringing them together which helps us not only to build faster but to execute faster," says Chhabra. 

Accelerate Timelines with Creative Automation

Test automation went beyond PepsiCo’s S/4HANA migration, as once their transformation was complete, they were able to continue using test scripts that were built during migration for other purposes. Using Worksoft process documentation, they were able to speed up test case creation as well as process and data capture. 

“We actually can use this automation to run what we call a depth of testing or data variation. So where we might be constrained in a number of weeks for manual testers to test every data variant we have, we can actually run the additional data variants of a particular process using the automation," says Chhabra. 

To learn more about how Worksoft automation helps customers navigate their S/4HANA migrations, visit our customer success page.