Client overview 

Our Client is a leading US retail supermarket business that has been in operation for over a century. From its start as one small neighborhood store, the company has grown into a chain that now includes stores in several hundred locations and employs a workforce of almost 25,000.  

What’s missing from this picture? Way too many apps

The Client’s conversion to Workday HCM (Human Capital Management) and FIN (Financial Management) to serve as its single ERP system had been implemented by a Workday implementation partner. The sweeping conversion involved multiple modules:  

  • HCM: Absence, Advance Compensation, Benefits, Core Compensation, Core HR, Onboarding, Payroll, Performance, Recruiting and Talent 
  • FM: Banking & Settlement, Budget, Business Assets, Customer Accounts, Expense, FDM, Financial Accounting, Inventory, Procurement, Projects, Supplier and Supplier Accounts  

The implementation also included the conversion of over 100 integrations from Oracle PeopleSoft and multiple legacy applications. Previous vendors had restricted testing focus to Workday applications, excluding upstream/downstream apps. This resulted in constant change of the configuration workbooks as the project developed, endangering timelines and budget. Also, test strategy and processes were not standardized, resulting in overtesting in some areas.  

To get the transition back on track, the Client needed a Quality Engineering partner with deep expertise in Workday and a solid understanding of business processes, calculated data fields, reports and related areas. Qualitest’s successful track record with Workday projects and our business-critical, holistic solutions made us a fitting choice.  

An end-to-end approach ensuring business alignment

Qualitest deployed a team of quality engineers who were also experts in Workday and business processes. They immediately widened the project strategy from Workday apps exclusively to a big-picture view of the Client’s entire end-to-end business process.  

  • To ensure business alignment and introduction of supporting applications, our experts identified and introduced relevant upstream and downstream apps and introduced key stakeholders to the program. This expanded the technical and integration strategy to include critical amendments to configuration workbooks and workstream processes.  
  • They used a test prioritization process tailored for Workday cloud to identify tests based on risk, along with configuration and regulatory requirements specific to the Client, eliminating redundant tests and saving time while expanding testing scope.  
  • They also created end-to-end scenarios by leveraging the existing unit test cases plus integration test cases aligned to critical business processes in a holistic approach to quality.   
  • The team created variations to support the business requirements and state localization demands for automated upgrade testing and regression testing. These tests were executed on the implementation tenant, and defects were reported to the system integrators. 

Key benefits

  • The high unit test pass rate of 90% for HCM and 96% for Financial drove successful E2E testing of all business processes, assuring a timely go-live.  
  • Expansion of the testing plan from Workday applications to include   upstream/downstream apps eliminated the need for constant, unplanned change as the project developed.  
  • Even with an expanded testing plan, coverage remained at 100%, justified through data-driven risk-based prioritization.  
  • The Client gained assurance that Workday could function effectively within their entire digital ecosystem. The processes implemented created QE capabilities designed to support automation for upgrades and regression testing, forming the guidelines for post-go live.  
quality engineering free assessment