Process Point Drives Strategic Oracle ERP Testing for Consumer Products Leader, Delivering $800K in Cost Savings
The Client
A large consumer products manufacturing company undertook a multi-year Oracle ERP program to streamline its operations. Phase 1 focused on implementing Oracle E-Business Suite Financials, followed by Phase 2, which introduced centralized purchasing and partial deployment of self-service procurement tools like iProcurement, SLM, and iSupplier Portal.
The Challenge
As the company expanded procurement capabilities to more vendors, it faced time-consuming and repetitive testing cycles for each release. Regression testing was largely manual, except for Financials, which had some automation. Additionally, closing financial periods for each business unit and module was resource-intensive. The company wanted to reduce testing effort and cycle time using automation.
Our Solution
To address this, OATS (Oracle Application Testing Suite) was extended to automate testing for Procurement modules such as iProcurement, Purchasing, iSupplier, SLM, SDH, PDH, EB-Tax, and OPM. Over 250 scripts were developed, including those for automating the financial period close process. This covered tasks like period open/close, reconciliation reports, and related validations.
Benefits
Ran period close scripts in a cloned test environment to detect and resolve issues early
Reduced period close cycle time significantly
Shortened procurement release cycle by several months through faster regression testing
Eliminated dependency on business users for testing
Improved test quality by removing data preparation and data quality issues
Achieved $800K in cost savings through automation
