Tea was officially introduced to England by the young Portuguese wife of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza, in 1662. She served it to her aristocratic friends and soon tea became the fashionable drink of the day. Thomas Twining was fascinated by the possibilities offered by this fast-growing beverage.
He learned well and quickly and by 1706 knew enough to strike out on his own. He bought Tom’s Coffee House on London’s Strand and so began the world famous tea business. The location of the shop was perfect and still operates today at 216 Strand, London. In 1787, Twinings chooses its logo. Today, it is the oldest commercial logo that has been in continuous use since it was made. Here are a few more corporate milestones:
In 2012, Twinings took the decision to implement SAP; the project has led to wholesale changes to their business with the deployment of a comprehensive SAP System at the heart of the operations. In 2013, UK operations were moved onto using SAP. The second phase of the international rollout was to implement the global template in Poland and China, thereby enabling all of its tea production to be managed in a fully integrated system.
Twinings IS had been actively managing the UK system and were responsible for ensuring that the business was unaffected by the introduction of international changes for Poland & China. This would involve a thorough assessment and ultimately detailed testing of UK functionality to ensure the business would not be impacted by such significant changes. Timelines, resource capacity and adopting the best testing approach was going to be a challenge and Twinings decided to seek support from an external organisation.
This, in itself, brought further challenges to Twinings, where insufficient business process and SAP knowledge from their testing provider ultimately placed too much pressure on their Business Process Leads. Timelines were being compromised, confidence was sinking and costs were in danger of spiraling out of control.
Ultimately the decision was made to switch testing providers to one with in-depth SAP and business process knowledge.
The challenge was set:
Qualitest were engaged and deployed genuine SAP testing experts to focus on specific areas and Business Processes which required testing to guarantee the UK-specific functionality would continue to serve the needs of the business.
Qualitest not only achieved the goals with a successful go-live; but also, was determined by Twinings as the model of testing to be followed into the future.
“We brought Qualitest in to help us ensure the project delivered on time and to the requisite quality” – Kathryn Palmer, IS Director
The project took 13 weeks from a standing start having picked up where the previous testing organisation had left the engagement. The timeline was incredibly tough and the usual challenges of scope, SAP & business process expertise and data sourcing/creation meant there was no room for delays or mistakes. As these skills sets are at the heart of what Qualitest does, we were able to analyse all the UK & IS processes and provide Twinings with fast identification of test cases and scenarios along with the relevant risk profile.
This profile was used to prioritise the development of tests and their subsequent place in the execution schedule, ensuring the highest impact areas were tested as early as possible. SME’s and Business Process Owners 100% bought in to the process as they reviewed and approved the scope and test results; this was achieved with minimal impact on their time. Data was also sourced by the Qualitest team by extracting the necessary master or transactional data directly from tables within SAP.
Execution for the regression pack took 3 weeks with a further week for re-testing. The clarity provided by our scope and risk-based models ensured Twinings were in control of the level of testing needed. The tight timeline for the project was achieved and resulted in a Go-Live with zero P1 incidents for the impacted business units.
Going forward, Twinings has a reusable test pack, which could be automated at the appropriate time, giving opportunities to reduce the overall cost of testing and to provide the ability to test on a weekly basis if needed.
“Qualitest enabled us to deliver an outstanding user experience”
— Rob Ellis, Project Manager
