Cargill Global Finances
Case Study
A short run was saving a couple of hours of man hours, however in one example a process that previously took 260 hours to test manually was now being done in just a few hours with TestBench, representing a time saving of around 95%.
Our client
Cargill Global Financial Services is an administrative arm of Cargill, the international food, agricultural and risk management company. Global Financial Solutions is responsible for designing, modifying, and supporting financial software packages across the Cargill organization worldwide.
Why they came to us
Cargill are big users of JD Edwards World Software with more than 7,000 users worldwide. A critical consideration for them was the ability to test PeopleSoft applications with unprecedented depth and detail, whilst at the same time improving the quality, quantity and consistency of their testing procedures without incurring extra costs.
They quickly realized that Original Software's TestBench for iSeries solution could provide the necessary process improvements they were looking for quickly and efficiently.
What we did
Cargill Global Financial Solutions used TestBench to automate their processes by recording scripts, creating test data and building test packs for aggressive development and regression testing. The tests were all documented on the company's intranet, enabling any team member to see if a test relating to a process they are running has already been developed.
In this way, Cargill were able to gradually build up a comprehensive library of tests to cover a huge range of business scenarios for its applications. Upwards of 80% of scenarios were covered.
As well as the library, using TestBench's Variable Data feature enabled Global Finance Solutions to run a single script multiple times with different data returned on each run, avoiding the need to build and maintain multiple scripts to replicate the process.
How it worked out
The automated tests are scrutinized on a payback-time basis. It soon became evident that huge savings could be achieved.
A short run was saving a couple of hours of man hours, however in one example a process that previously took 260 hours to test manually was now being done in just a few hours with TestBench. Representing a time saving of around 95%.
Original Software's Variable Data solution also saved hundreds of man hours by eliminating the need to manually build and maintain multiple scripts to replicate the use of different data.
Over and above the tangible benefits, the most significant benefit is the increased confidence the team now has when making changes to functional server processes.
...now, working on such programmes is almost a non-event. TestBench has removed the fear and reluctance, which means we can react to issues more quickly.
Over a 12-month period, TestBench has saved Cargill Global Financial Solutions conservatively more than $270,000.
Chip Lee, Product Manager, Cargill GFS