Debenhams sets store by improved quality
Retailer invests for the future in TestBench
February, 3, 2009 – Debenhams, the leading department stores group, has turned to Original Software to help save its IT department time and money, enabling it to deliver system enhancements more rapidly and raise the quality of its dotcom website through more thorough testing of the back-end systems that drive it.
With online sales bucking the retail trend in the current economic slowdown, the Debenhams.com site is of strategic importance to the group. Now more than ever before, ensuring the quality of, and IT service delivery to, the online shop front, is vital to capitalising on its success.
Dominic Nash, Business Systems Controller at Debenhams is anticipating significant time and resource savings as a result of their investment in Original Software. “It’s been just a few weeks, but we’re already up and running with the system, and a task that had previously taken us more than two weeks – extracting test data – took less than half a day using TestBench”.
The Debenhams team wanted a comprehensive solution to help with unit, system, end-to-end, and regression testing of their IBM systems, which were largely being manually tested up until this point. They undertook comprehensive study of tools on the market, looking at performance, ease-of-use and specific product features.
Nash continued: “The functionality in TestBench is first rate. Being able to automate tests to run overnight will generate substantial time-savings. The database extraction tool allows us to quickly and easily extract data from the live systems, creating a subset for use in a realistic testing environment. You can create checkpoints, rolling back the changes and resetting the environment if it becomes corrupted by any testing activity and TestBench is so user-friendly it’s taken us virtually no time at all to get up and running.”
“The same Debenhams team will prove even more advantageous to the business, delivering applications with increased agility, improving efficiency and raising service levels across the board.” concludes Nash.
About Debenhams plc
Debenhams is a leading department stores group with a strong presence in key product categories including Womenswear, Menswear, Childrenswear, Home and Health and Beauty. Debenhams has a total of 140 department stores in the UK and the Republic of Ireland and 10 Desire by Debenhams stores, which is a small store concept featuring a mix of womenswear, accessories, lingerie, cosmetics and childrenswear. Debenhams has 44 international franchise stores in 15 countries and an online store, www.debenhams.com, through which much of the Debenhams range is available.
Debenhams is the second largest department store chain in the UK.
