Change Healthcare develop agile Workday Test strategy with Smart Test
Project Requirements
- Support 3x growth in company size
- Reduce testing complexity & time
- Free up team bandwidth
Project Results
- 10,916 hours saved testing annually
- 161,671 tests run
- 7 employees’ worth of resource augmentation
About Change Healthcare
Change Healthcare (Nasdaq: CHNG) is a leading healthcare technology company focused on insights, innovation and accelerating the transformation of the U.S. healthcare system through the power of the Change Healthcare Platform. Headquartered in Nashville, TN, and operating in eight countries with over 15,000 global employees, Change Healthcare provides data and analytics-driven solutions to improve clinical, financial, administrative, and patient engagement outcomes in the U.S. healthcare system.
Supporting rapid growth with Workday
In 2017, a divestiture by Change Healthcare’s parent organization, McKesson, resulted in Change Healthcare’s staff tripling from 5,000 employees to 15,000 employees—and this rapid increase in size could only be supported by a proportionate increase in the company’s technological capabilities.
Additionally, while McKesson was using one software platform, Change Healthcare was using another. In order to simplify HR operations across the board, it was decided to move both legacy systems to Workday.
“We had two different HR systems in place, and this was our opportunity to move to a better, more user-friendly and self-service promoting platform,” says Pinky Raghav, Senior Director HR Systems Enterprise Applications. “And that was Workday.”
With a fast-paced go-live in April of 2018, Change Healthcare rolled out Workday’s modules for HCM Core, Advanced Compensation, Payroll, Recruiting, and Talent Management.
Testing places “a big burden” on the business
During and after their transition to Workday, Change Healthcare faced a number of significant challenges in relation to testing. One of the primary obstacles was the burden placed on members of the Change Healthcare team who, despite approaching it hands-on, still weren’t enough to tackle the humongous task of of testing.
Pinky explains: “At Change Healthcare, we have dedicated teams of HR professionals. This is a best in class team and very hands-on when it comes to Workday. However, executing hundreds of scenarios manually is no joke. It was taking a lot of time and resources.”
Beyond the sheer scope and difficulty of conducting testing effectively, Change Healthcare’s employees were also new to Workday, which didn’t make things any easier— devoting all of these valuable team members to testing, as opposed to more big-picture business priorities, was something that needed to change.
“We were working in a chaotic mode,” says Steven Martin, Sr Application Manager, Workday HCM. “We had hundreds of requests and tickets, and we were reacting, changing, fixing, reacting, changing, fixing. We each had modules we were responsible for, we all had to help with integrations, and within each module, we had a number of SMEs who we had to work with to test things. Then we would try to expand to our other teams for regression testing. But the volume was so high. It was just like a hamster wheel.”
Manual processes present a need for automation
For the Change Healthcare team, testing procedures were completely manual—so beyond requiring extensive time and effort, succeeding with Workday meant increasing coverage and eliminating human error as well.
Pinky explains, “Of course, we were missing things testing manually. There were just too many scenarios and we knew that no matter how much we tested, there was always the possibility of forgetting something or causing knock-on effects. We were finding that we were self-inflicting our code, we would do a changes and then it would impact somewhere else. It’s easy for that to happen. Sometimes, you do a change in HCM, and that eventually would impact Compensation or Payroll. And integrations as well are impacted by everything you do in Workday.”
Pinky adds that, when it came to the bi-annual updates, “it was especially time-consuming for the team with such a tight window. We would go and launch integrations in both Sandbox and Sandbox Preview manually, download files manually, compare manually. Everything was manual.”
Moreover, when the team would handle Workday testing, Pinky says they would send one change—but then it would take five days to test that change and make sure it wasn’t negatively affecting anything else.
“Our leads were spending a lot of time in manually testing which was taking their time way from strategic roadmap and ensuring they respond faster to changing business needs,” Pinky says.
Searching for a solution
In response to these challenges, Change Healthcare were determined to find a solution to make Workday testing easier and more efficient for their teams.
“We did some market analysis on what tools were available,” Pinky says. “We also tried to see whether we could build something internally—we thought about if it would make sense for us to dedicate all this time to develop a tool and script for Workday. But after doing some good comparisons, we thought we should go and tap into something which is already out there, something especially developed for Workday."
"We landed on Kainos Smart Test. We learned that Workday themselves use Kainos Smart Test and overall customer feedback was great. Additionally considering other factors like ease of implementation, increase in productivity, faster delivery and reduced cycles, Kainos came out on top in our review.”
The Impact of Kainos Smart Test
In July of 2019, Change Healthcare implemented Smart Test’s modules for HCM, Integrations, Smart Security, and Payroll in Workday.
“Since we began using Smart Test, we’ve seen a significant increase in testing frequency and coverage, achieving 161,671 tests annually, as well as a reduction in testing effort and resources. Smart Test is doing the equivalent of the work of seven people, and it’s saving us more than 10,000 hours of testing. We've seen a huge shift. We’re more forward-thinking instead of reactive—it’s been a big and impactful change.”
Revolutionising biannual Workday releases
Another major positive change Kainos made for Change Healthcare, according to Nagesh Potla, Integration lead, was the assistance Smart Test provided when the company had to tackle biannual Workday releases.
"Certainly, with the biannual releases—launching integrations in both environments and doing the initial compare—Smart Test has taken at least 50% of the effort off of our plate,” Nagesh says. “That is huge, given that we have 100+ integrations across all the functional areas.”
Steven agrees, saying that the twice-yearly updates are “the biggest bang for our buck” that Smart Test provides.
“For releases, it's a big difference,” he says. “Instead of spending 40 hours a week, per team, looking at making sure we can still do our job—now, we’re actually able to see the changes and do a little bit more forward-thinking. It’s great to see how much we can achieve now during the update period specifically with Smart Test doing the bulk of the heavy lifting, running 44,536 tests.
"And Smart Test is so cool: If I add a step to onboarding, it's automatically executing that step and creating documents or something for me. So personally, it's helped me tremendously with my monthly releases. But the biggest bang comes from all the free time we've spared up for our partners for the bi-annual releases."
Pinky adds that, because Workday uses Kainos to do their own testing, Change Healthcare receives “sneak peek” early access for upcoming Workday releases: “Kainos actually have the sneak peek to the release earlier than anybody else."
Leveraging the Kainos team’s knowledge and skillsets
Lastly, the Change Healthcare staff say that the Kainos team provide significant value for their employees.
“The Kainos team is really, really great to work with,” Pinky says. “We feel like Kainos want our business, and care about it. We definitely worked quite a few months to really establish and implement Smart Test for Workday, and the Kainos team has been really amazing.”
Pinky says that the Kainos team’s expertise, trustworthiness, flexibility, and investment in Change Healthcare’s success stood out. “It was not about them coming in with a solution—saying, ‘Here is how we are going to do it.’ Rather, it was Kainos’ people asking, ‘What works best for you? Do you want a phased go-live?’”
Additionally, Steven recalls instances when different Kainos teams worked together to resolve issues for Change Healthcare, keeping the company informed and on the ball. “The partnership with Kainos is just fantastic,” he says.
Looking to the future with Kainos Smart Test
For other companies considering testing software for their Workday modules, Steven says, “If you’re serious about it, do it as part of the implementation. A lot of companies wait until they need it. And I think they would see a lot of value to be part of the front end.”
And Nagesh says, in terms of automating Workday integrations: “For any company who is looking to save time and effort for their team during the biannual releases, it is certainly a big gain for them to be able to come over to Kainos and use Smart Test. The efficiency gains are huge—even the integration security is huge, too.”
In terms of Change Healthcare’s own future plans, the company’s partnership with Kainos is built for the long run. They’re now using Kainos expert AMS team and expectations are high because of the fruitful relationship so far.
“We have actually signed up with AMS as well,” Pinky says. “Our integrations team is tapping into the Kainos AMS summaries, because we have a big workload on the integration side. That's been an added bonus of the partnership, because we have that kind of trust in Kainos, and they delivered a quality product in Smart Test. We definitely have high expectations from the AMS team as well.”
The Change Healthcare team believes in their partnership with Kainos—and that when it comes to Workday, the sky is the limit.