Cases

Managing Change in a Complex Environment

Written by Forte Group | Mar 1, 2024

Client:
Major Food Manufacturer

Industry:
Food and Beverage

Technology and Platforms:
Micro Focus, Unified Functional Testing

The Goal

Streamline application release testing process

The test lab of a major food manufacturer was responsible for certifying changes to the company’s 46+ desktop profiles used by over 36,000 employees. The changes included OS updates, security patches, and new application releases that resulted in hundreds of testing events each month. Thousands of staff hours were being spent each month to certify the releases.

Overwhelmed by the workload and the cumbersome, unreliable, and mostly manual testing process, the Manager of IT QA contacted Forte Group to help the company streamline and automate its release certification process.

Working with the client, Forte Group designed and architected an automation engine that covered the entire profile certification process. This enabled a single test lab team member to certify multiple profiles simultaneously in significantly less time. This greatly improved the coverage, speed, and quality of the certification process.

Top Obstacles

Unsustainable workload

Hundreds of testing events per month were executed manually.

Cumbersome Testing Process

The client’s lab team was simultaneously performing four to five testing events on separate physical PCs.

Outcome

Upon implementing the data-driven framework, the impact was immediate. A largely manual process that took days or weeks to complete was converted to a 100% automated process that was completed in hours. The client was also able to reduce external contracting costs associated with the lab, further increasing the return on their investment in test automation.

Key Benefits

Time Savings
Data-driven automation resulted in a 92% reduction in the effort required to certify profiles.

Increased Quality
Errors in the certification process were eliminated by automating error prone, tedious manual activities.

Reduced Cost
The client eliminated most of their external contracting costs.