Test Automation

A joint, global Accenture internal Finance and IT team selected to use Worksoft Certify® for finance and HR regression testing based on favorable experience at Accenture client projects and proof-of-concept results. A core automation team was enabled to provide governance and support, and functional SAP teams were trained to automate test scenarios.

Normal regression testing efforts began with Accenture’s SAP® Business Suite on Microsoft SQL (ECC) and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on Microsoft SQL systems. Testing efforts then transitioned with the company’s migrations to SAP® Business Suite on HANA and SAP BW on HANA, and ultimately to SAP S/4HANA.

The new automation capabilities enabled the testing teams to work through changing over from manual to automated ways by business priority. Regression testing effort declined 60 percent, enabling Accenture to deploy more changes to the business, and with more agility.

Test automation was a key enabler to Accenture’s successful implementation to SAP Business Suite on HANA, followed by SAP S/4HANA.

Testing the new functionality of the SAP S/4HANA software necessitated having to remediate existing automated test scripts as well as creating new ones to test new functionality.

The remediated test scripts were then used to automate 80 percent of functional regression testing during the extensive product and regression testing cycles conducted. This automation saved approximately 12,000 manual hours of effort and identified SAP system defects—none of which appeared once Accenture was in production.

Internal IT also executed a parallel financial close impact test, comparing Accenture’s financial results processed in SAP Business Suite on HANA and SAP S/4HANA to ensure the ongoing integrity of Accenture’s financial results.

In addition, internal IT was involved in automating 50 cutover activities, practicing cutover 16 times to progressively reduce the amount of cutover time and to confirm execution quality. These efforts contributed significantly to reducing cutover time by 40 to 50 percent of the total duration of manual cutover actions and enabled a high-quality cutover.

A final area of automation was the automation of testing the 120 SAP S/4HANA-impacted security roles, uncovering 92 defects in the process that were remediated.

Another initiative of using Worksoft Certify, this time in combination with robotic process automation (RPA) concepts, was to automate business processes—specifically the execution of Accenture’s financial close process.

This process consists of thousands of repetitive activities, most of which were already automated in SAP jobs, but a number remained manual. Internal IT addressed an initial 180 most-critical manual activities by executing them in the test cycles to validate that the close playbook activities work correctly.

In addition, by using RPA concepts to automate the entire span of financial close activities in testing, Accenture can secure the same automated test scripts in production and eliminate human intervention.

In this way, Accenture has innovated an approach to automate its financial close execution.