Automation for Post Implementation Release Testing on Procurement

Project Overview

  • Customer is a large manufacturer of consumer products.
  • The customer was embarked on a large multi-year, multi-phase Oracle ERP program. As part of that program, the customer has implemented Oracle Applications E-Business suite for Financials in Phase 1 and Oracle Procurement applications in phase 2. Centralized Oracle purchasing was implemented while self-service applications (Oracle iProcurement and SLM, iSupplier Portal) was implemented for a few vendors.
  • The customer was rolling out the procurement solution to all other vendors over few releases and they were required to test phase 1 and phase 2 deployed applications (Financials and procurements) in multiple test cycles like CRP1, CRP2, SIT, UAT, etc.
Process Point - Customer

Objective / Challenges

  • OATS automated scripts were developed for Financials was useful during the procurement implementation.
  • The company wanted to extend automation to Oracle Procurement applications as well to reduce the testing cycle time of procurement rollouts in subsequent three releases.
  • Due to several entities and various modules, the customer required to close the Oracle periods for each operating unit and by the module. The period closing process was taking a lot of time for finance business users.
  • The customer planned to automate this process in production by leveraging OATS automated scripts to reduce that burden.
Challenges

Solution Implemented

  • Leveraged OATS environment 12.1.0.2 for extending the automation to Oracle E-Business Suite R12 for Oracle Procurement applications.
  • Modules automated were iProcurement (iProc), Purchasing (PO), iSupplier, Supplier Life Cycle Management (SLM), Supplier Data Hub (SDH), Product  Data Hub (PDH), EB-Tax, Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM), etc.
  • Automated Period Close Process by adding additional scripts for Period Open, Accounting Reconciliation reports and Period Close functions.
  • Over 250 automated scripts were developed across Oracle Procurement modules and additional modules.
Process Point - Solution

Benefits Delivered

  • The customer was able to run period close scripts in a cloned test environment prior to actual period close in a production environment to find any close process issues for a quicker resolution which reduced close cycle time.
  • Procurement release cycle time was reduced by a few months due to faster regression testing.
  • Cost savings of $800 K were realized while business user dependency was eliminated.
  • Automated testing improved quality of testing as data preparation and data quality issues were eliminated which are reasons for defects generally.
Benefits