Caterpillar Inc. gain Workday confidence with Kainos & Smart Test
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Kainos has the breadth to handle a company of our size and complexity and that allows us to expand with a level of confidence, testing across different geographies.
About Caterpillar Inc.
Caterpillar Inc. is an American Fortune 100 corporation and the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, off-highway diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives. Founded in 1925, it is headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois and employs 107,700 staff globally and has 160 dealers serving 193 countries.
Caterpillar does business on every continent, and has a portfolio of brands offering machines, engines, components, services, and solutions to meet the unique needs of a variety of industries and customers around the world.
Workday’s functionality the driver for change
As the world’s largest construction-equipment manufacturer with a global workforce, it is critical that Caterpillar’s internal operations operate at peak efficiency to ensure its continued success. With that in mind, Caterpillar made the strategic decision to invest in Workday, moving away from siloed systems to aid talent development and lower costs.
“The applications we were using were not very modern and did not exploit the functionality that Workday has in terms of allowing us to interact with our employees for talent development. We knew that Workday’s functionality would enable us to capture skills and find those individuals who are ready for that next move,” explains Paul Starks, Global HR Director at Caterpillar.
“We knew the pay back would be much more than the cost savings because we would have the right people in the right chairs, to drive success for our businesses.”
The Challenge: Deployment resource gap brings testing challenges early on
With a fast-paced go-live in January 2021, Caterpillar rolled out Workday with the modules HCM, Payroll, Recruiting, and Security to 100,000 employees in 120 countries.
“As you can imagine, our transition to Workday presented us with several challenges. One of the primary obstacles was the burden placed on our teams for testing both during deployment and go-live. With a new system, it was difficult for us to know everything to test, and we wanted to get more experience in the platform. We are quite proactive, so we created dedicated testing teams across the world, primarily HR partners and managers and we used that as an opportunity to learn. We also built a Workday Product Support team which consisted of about 30 people who were working across various streams of Workday, and they were responsible for developing their test plans and conducting tests prior to moving things throughout the different tenants and into production," explains Paul.
During their deployment, Caterpillar relied on a small, automated testing routine from an external provider to help reduce the burden placed on SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) from manual testing.
Paul explains, “We used a provider to give us some level of automation, but it turned out that we were designing, testing, and teaching the provider about Workday and we didn’t always know what to test or how to test ourselves. With that, it was clear we needed a larger scale test automation solution to create better processes and reduce our dependency on manual testing.”
Paul continues, “It was critical that we looked for a service provider who fully understood Workday. That was the biggest gap from what we had before. We really drive employee self-service here. So, understanding how we test from that standpoint, to make it easier for our employees to work, is critical.”
The Solution: Selecting Smart Test proves an easy decision
Caterpillar went to market for an automated testing solution that would significantly reduce manual testing effort while increasing test coverage and allowing SMEs’ efforts to refocus on strategic work. With leadership buy-in and budgets granted, the team purchased the Kainos Smart Platinum service for HCM, Finance, Security and Recruiting.
Caterpillar credited Kainos’ reputation and knowledge of Workday as the ultimate deciding factor in purchasing Smart Test.
“Kainos truly understand Workday and with our ultimate goal of getting more experience in the platform, seeing how competent they are, reinforced the decision,” says Paul.
The Benefits: Building relationships to drive strategy and innovation
Soon after achieving their Workday go-live, Caterpillar would be facing their first major Workday update.
“The March 2021 update was when we first used Smart Test extensively. Not only did we use the platform, but we also had a Kainos consultant working with us. The consultant attended more than the weekly meetings, they assisted in our whole set-up process, helping to establish the routines that ensure we have governance around what we lease to production. They were on every call and helped to design the release approach. They were part of the team.”
Paul’s team has been particularly impressed with Kainos Smart Test consultants who help support his team. He shares, “Not only did the consultants have an extensive knowledge of Workday, but they also understood Caterpillar and when you understand what we are trying to accomplish, that provides a different level of intimacy between the customer and the consultant.”
The Results: The Impact of Kainos Smart Test
Since implementing Smart Test, Caterpillar have benefitted from reduced testing efforts and time spent on updates as well as huge cost savings. During their first major update using Smart Test, the team ran over 7,000 tests saving 700+ hours.
“Smart Test provides the opportunity to really make sure that you are testing at the level and volume that you need to detect issues. You cannot test that much manually. It's more than an added layer of risk prevention. It gives you that because there is no way that one team could test that number of transactions or scenarios that we can test mechanically. It's just – if we can think of a scenario to build, we can test it," explains Paul.
“Our team relies on testing, for every change that we make in addition to monitoring our tenants to make sure we do not have disruptions. By using automation, that allows us to get a lot more done, faster."
Leveraging expertise to accelerate expansion
Smart Test has provided the HRIS team with increased confidence and enhanced control over their Workday configuration, security, and resources. The team are impressed by the level of customer service delivered by Kainos and look forward to continuing the expansion of testing beyond updates.
Paul adds, “Kainos has the breadth to handle a company of our size and complexity and that allows us to expand with a level of confidence, testing across different geographies. We’re still deploying different elements of Workday. For example, we have just recently launched a project to put time tracking in globally. With Kainos represented on our project team, we can get that sort of ground floor participation in test design and do a lot more testing prior to going live than we did previously, and more than what we could do manually, essentially saving us a lot more time and resources. Having Kainos as part of that project team and building scenarios and testing with us along the way will be critical to these kinds of larger implementations."
Looking to the future
In addition to Smart Test, Caterpillar have also adopted Smart Audit and use Workday Extend services and are delighted with the support and access to expertise that Kainos provides.
Looking ahead, Caterpillar Inc. plans to continue to work with Kainos to create efficiencies and develop new functionality.
“Testing is the foundation, but the value add-on comes from the other products that Kainos has to offer and that is where we have opportunities to use those better. It gives us assurances going forward, that we have got valid internal controls across the world,” says Paul.