Cardinal Health enhances Workday experience with Smart Test automation
The goals
The results
8864%
95%
16,000
4 weeks
About Cardinal Health
Cardinal Health is a global, integrated healthcare products and services company. Founded in 1971, Cardinal Health has rapidly expanded and acquired rivals, growing to employ over 45,000 staff globally.
This Fortune 500 company, prides itself on providing innovative, end-to-end solutions for hospitals, health systems, pharmacies, laboratories and physician offices worldwide. Innovation is not just limited to its products, with the firm taking a forward-thinking, data-driven approach to growth and transformation.
Growth intensifies resource pressure
In 2010, Cardinal Health became Workday Customer #100, going live with Workday HCM. At the time, the organisation had 20,000 employees operating only in the US. After rapid growth and a number of acquisitions, Cardinal Health now operates in 56 countries and employs over 45,000 staff.
“During this period of growth, our Workday configuration underwent seismic change,” explains Samantha (Sam) Abdullah, Sr. Advisor, Strategic HR Consulting at Cardinal Health. “We rolled out Talent, Recruiting, Time Tracking and Payroll. We implemented the extensive configuration changes that come with mergers and acquisitions, like expanding our supervisory orgs, building new security groups, and adding business processes. And this was on top of our business-as-usual changes.”
Cardinal Health discovered that, as its Workday footprint grew, so too did its support needs. “We had a cross-functional team of 16 staff from HRIS, HRIT and Change Management that was responsible for managing all HR systems—including supporting and testing Workday,” says Sam. “We’d been regression testing manually since go-live and for every project launch, every bi-annual Workday update, and for the few Workday weekly releases we’d managed to get to. Every new Workday module you add brings a host of new tests that you need to run to protect that functionality—not just during the deployment project itself, but on an ongoing basis after go-live. It’s the same when you add new orgs, locations, and security roles after acquisitions."
"Our testing requirements had grown significantly, but our testing capacity hadn’t scaled to support that volume. Covering all of our bases was getting more difficult, and testing was putting a noticeable strain on our teams. "
Testing pressure undermines feature adoption
Testing pressures around Workday’s bi-annual updates posed a particular challenge. Every six months, the HRIS team drafted in up to 40 staff to help with regression testing. However, despite the added resource investment, test quality and coverage were minimal and left business partners with no time to explore new functionality or optional features within the release.
Sam explains, “We were bringing in the entire recruiting team, everyone in HRIS, and everyone in our service centre for two weeks solid. Yet we’d only manage to complete around 150 HCM tests and maybe 20-25 security tests—nothing we could call thorough. There were so many tests that we couldn’t get to, and we always felt at risk of missing issues.”
Sam continues, “We were also fighting an ongoing battle with test data. We’d test our core scenarios using real worker data, but almost every time we’d go to retest after a fix was applied, we’d find the test data was no longer valid. We were continuously having to source new employees to fit each test’s criteria for retesting. It was enormously time-consuming but critical—because if we didn’t and a test failed, we wouldn’t know if it was because of a configuration issue or bad data. With all of this going on, we had zero time to explore new enhancements or optional updates within each release.”
Misadventures in generic test automation
In 2016 Cardinal Health went to market for a test automation tool that would minimise data preparation, increase test coverage and reduce testing effort—opting for a generic, multi-purpose testing solution. To get the tool off the ground, the organisation invested six months of project time and hired three external contractors to support onboarding efforts, significantly increasing adoption costs. As the project progressed, it became apparent that the vendor had misrepresented the tool’s capabilities and the time savings it could deliver Cardinal Health.
Sam explains, “To create the automated tests, we had to itemise every single point and click step in a scenario. We’d then send these to the vendor, who’d build the automation based on our documentation. We were led to believe that their solution was low maintenance—that once the scenarios were developed, they’d be easily deployable into the system with little effort by our teams. This was not the case. We also didn’t realise until we were getting ready to deploy that they had used real worker data from our system in the tests. So just like with our manual testing, we’d have to review every scenario every time we ran it to ensure there hadn’t been a change to the data set.”
But it wasn’t just the data they’d have to maintain, it was the test automation itself. “We learned that whenever we changed our configuration or Workday made changes, we’d be responsible for updating those scripts,” she continues. “Given the volume of activity in our system and the rate which Workday releases changes, their automated solution was just too complicated and too time consuming. We realised that we’d be spending nearly as much time prepping and maintaining the automated tests and data as we were currently spending on manual testing, so we ended that relationship.”
Truly hands-free Workday test automation
In 2017 Cardinal Health went live with Kainos Smart Test, automating testing for HCM and Security, later adding Payroll to the stack. With true test automation now in place, Sam and the team are armed with a fit-for-purpose testing tool that requires nearly no intervention from HRIS staff.
With Smart Test, Cardinal has reduced update testing time by 775%, cut the number of staff involved in update testing to 2, and significantly increased test coverage by 8867%, all while supporting new Workday projects in line with company growth.
Crucially, Smart Test solved Cardinal Health's test data challenges and delivered the low-maintenance automation they’d been looking for. “Smart Test's synthetic test-data generator has basically eliminated our test data issues,” says Sam.
“We use it in the vast majority of our tests to generate synthetic workers that mirror the data profiles of our existing worker population. This means no more false test failures and no time wasted hunting for workers that fulfil test criteria for retesting. And there’s practically no test maintenance. Smart Test is always in sync with changes made by Workday, and if we make changes to an existing BP and it detects that during testing, it’s just a simple click to tell Smart Test ‘Yes, this is the new, approved process. Make this the new baseline.’ And the automation script updates. That’s it.”
“Comparing Kainos Smart Test to the previous ‘automation’ tool is like night and day. I was sceptical but the whole process was seamless from start to finish. Our tests were ready for review after just two weeks and the Smart Test team provided excellent hand-over documentation, so our team has been able to expand our test packs since.”
Smart Test offers year-round protection and peace-of-mind
"During updates, our time spent testing has shrunk from five weeks to just four hours of effort,” she continues. “We ran a total of 4,699 HCM tests, 685 Payroll and 10,303 Security tests during our first update with Smart Test. And those hours weren’t solely on running our automated tests. That was a mix of running our Smart tests, researching errors, fixing issues in our configuration, adjusting packs, plus carrying out some manual testing that we still do."
“That massive increase in coverage has really helped us mitigate risk,” she adds. “For example, Smart Test recently identified a critical security issue before it entered production. We had made a configuration change that accidentally opened up compensation within a security role that shouldn’t have been able to see it. Had Smart Test not highlighted this, a large body of our population would have been able to see compensation for employees they shouldn’t have had access to, and we would have had a big issue on our hands.”
“Smart Test is just awesome. It really allows us to focus on other things. We truly appreciate the partnership with Kainos, and knowing support is only an email or call away is super reassuring. My only wish is that we had implemented it sooner!”