About the client

The client is a field services company in the USA primarily catering to customers in ready-to-serve restaurants, hotels, and other service establishments. The business USP was to source equipment, installations, repairs, spare parts management, and other field services through engineers/technicians.

The Challenge

The client’s product plan, going through a dry run, showed a high churn rate and lacked focus on QA testing and a proper execution strategy for test assets and follow-ups. The program needed to be streamlined to ensure process definitions, defect management, and training. The challenge involved gaining control over releases for deployment with effective QA support, from defining a strategy to getting all the tests executed for the Go-Live planned in phases.

Multiple testing formats were required, including

• End-to-end testing
• Business cycle testing
• Cut over-testing
• Security testing
• Functional testing
• Regression testing

While JIRA, the project management toolset, had all the requirements for Agile, it had not been implemented using testing best practices. Additionally, slacked workforce and the lack of adequate skillsets in ERP functions were dragging the entire project timeline.

Our Solution

CoreFlex conducted a deep-dive assessment to drill down to the specific features and practices dragging the client down. The objective was to approach the problem holistically to transform and standardize their services and solution categories.

Collaborating with the client, CoreFlex aligned the company objectives and made two crucial decisions based on historic data and transformation trajectories.

• Implement new ERP (IFS) with focused decommissioning of SAP.
• Cloud-based ERP with desktop-based field service management toolset to enable efficient resource use.

The SAP transformation involved several different components. One of CoreFlex’s main goals was to improve customer satisfaction on a customer-by-customer basis while also taking steps to increase efficiency and streamline business processes. CoreFlex used the results from each area to improve the overall transformation effort. This included:

• Implementing an end-to-end regression coverage for the system allowed for testing every process after it was created.
• Creating a strategic end-to-end testing framework, enabling the client to execute over 400 different tests each week, spread over five weeks. This helped accept change and ensured the business was getting value from the software application.

This resulted in reduced cycle time and improved quality standards while simultaneously creating efficiencies across the process group. In addition, it was bringing down the defect reduction to a substantial 13% improved deployment for each cycle.

CoreFlex engaged its efforts to get the desired end-state for this project –to ensure that all functionality being developed was built on a secure foundation and that the code met all quality standards. All functionality was defined as test cases, and CoreFlex scripted the requirements with data migration and security testing in mind. This involved creating mock cutovers, executing functional tests, running empirical tech reviews, and conducting security assessments. CoreFlex’s full compliance matrix details how we tested this system with each technique to avoid missing any testing aspect.

Results

• 2100 commissioned tests authored and designed
• Established agile testing best practices and ERP testing process expertise with proper release management
• 13% improved deployment for each cycle
• Zero defects identified through thorough testing in the development phase
• Reusability and accurate findings for defect resolutions
• Regression cycles shorter through proper identification of tests
• 6 mock cut overs enabled through proper release management and test execution