by Eggplant, on Jun 21, 2021 4:46:31 PM
Automating test functions using Keysight's Eggplant software helped Keysight compress the ERP stabilization period by 80%.
Overview
With nearly 15,000 employees working across 100 countries, Keysight is a multibillion-dollar design and validation company processing 20,000 orders a day to market-making designers, manufacturers, and integrators around the world. Keysight’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system manages over 500,000 components with API (application programming interface) connections to 100 different internal systems processing 90,000 records per day.
Keysight CIO Dan Krantz has been leading an internal shift from waterfall to agile software integration within the IT team. He has also been promoting a similar shift in the internal software development within the company’s product solution teams. With Keysight’s recent acquisition of innovative software automation company Eggplant, Krantz saw an opportunity to automate test functions to increase test depth and repeatability. Implementing the Eggplant software solution would save the company time and money to implement future cloud updates.
"An ERP system is the heartbeat of your internal infrastructure. Every time you touch it, you risk months of issues afterwards as you “stabilize.” By intelligently automating testing with Keysight Eggplant software, we stabilized within weeks of go-live."
- Keysight Technologies, Dan Krantz, CIO
Challenges
Keysight’s original ERP system was implemented in 2001 and underwent a major upgrade in 2011. By 2020, it was time to upgrade again during several parallel system upgrades. The one common theme in every upgrade – system complexity of the test matrix, would usually lead to launch delays. A complete Oracle upgrade was implemented on time for the first time in the company’s history using Keysight’s Eggplant software.
The ERP system manages global manufacturing and shipping logistics across more than 75 legal entities, assembling upwards of 8,000 products with as many as 10,000 dynamic configuration rules per product. The internal project team consisted of 300 full-time staff running 40 end-to-end macro-level tests consisting of 50 to 100 steps each. Every configuration change, API adjustment, or bug fix would activate most, if not all, of those test resources.
IT projects of this magnitude routinely experience delays with a prolonged stabilization period after go-live. IT leaders perform risk management to eliminate competing priorities. However, Keysight’s digital transformation was accelerating convergence to a new customer relationship management (CRM) software while expanding the company’s global e-commerce platform.
The dependency on manual, platform-isolated testing proved to be the overall project risk as developers transitioned to pandemic-triggered remote work.
Solution
First, the IT team trained using Eggplant software to automate thousands of test scenarios for the ERP effort. The result — an immediate 30% acceleration to implement the upgrades. Next, the project team expanded the intelligent test automation framework to create end-to-end visibility for the quote-to-cash process spanning both the CRM and ERP systems. This automated capability was not possible with previous platform-isolated testing. Lastly, the expansion into real customer insights with the new web platform helped the team to improve the customer’s digital experience measurably.
