CQE supports insurance provider with HCM system implementation.
The company is one of Ireland’s leading life and pensions companies with over 1.3 million customers. Established over 80 years ago, it helps people embrace change and build better futures through its innovative products and dedication to customer care.
The company has two operating divisions, providing both retail and corporate insurance products and plans to personal and business customers.
The Challenge
A leading insurance provider was implementing an SAP Success Factors system, consisting of all modules including Employee Central Payroll, across Europe. The project included the consolidation of regional payroll systems into a single instance.
The project team consisted of HR from each region to capture requirements who worked alongside a central IT capability that oversaw the programme and managed the technical implementation of a number of integrations.
The team had no testing or QA experience and did not understand how QA could be used to prevent defects and how effective testing should be used to identify, manage, and resolve the issues that would inevitably occur. There was also an unrealistic expectation of the level of effort involved, particularly in test preparation and execution.
A failure to address these fundamental issues could have led to a cancelled project (worst case), a delayed project (likely case) or an unsatisfied user base (best case).
The Solution
CQE integrated a senior test and QA leader with expertise in HCM implementations to work with the project leadership team who implement CQE’s bespoke testing and QA methodology. Aligning with the iterative delivery method of the SI, CQE’s strategy introduced stage and deliverable quality gates, defect prevention processes, and test automation. In addition, it identified gaps across the programme that were quickly filled by specialist testing experts. These experts, distributed across each module to coordinate testing activities, reduced the burden on the HR teams who were under immense pressure and ensured each module was thoroughly validated against the requirements.
The Results
The rollout of the HCM modules across each region was completed on time and with minimal disruption to the business. The most critical change, the payroll system consolidation, went smoothly other than some minor operational changes that needed to be implemented as a result of the new technologies involved.
A regression pack was automated and used to validate configuration changes and determine the impact of mandatory quarterly updates. This was beneficial in helping the HR team communicate change to users and resolve any problems introduced by new or changed features.
Ultimately the definitive way to determine how successful testing and QA have been is to monitor post-go-live incident rates. In this case study, there were minor incidents only with the majority of the post-go-live effort spent on resolving known issues identified prior to go-live.