ChristianaCare gains greater control over Workday with Kainos Smart Test
The Goals
The Results
86,000
9,214
2
$306,736
“Smart Test has delivered huge wins from day one. Kainos works closely with us to define our business processes as we grow to ensure we always have a robust system that we can trust.”
About ChristianaCare
Headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, ChristianaCare is one of the United States' most dynamic health care organisations, centered on improving health outcomes, making high-quality care more accessible and lowering health care costs. ChristianaCare includes an extensive network of primary care and outpatient services, home health care, urgent care centers and three hospitals. The nonprofit teaching health system has more than 260 residents and fellows. With its groundbreaking Center for Virtual Health and a focus on population health and value-based care, ChristianaCare is shaping the future of health care.
Moving to Workday for greater efficiency
As one of the largest providers of healthcare services in the US, ChristianaCare needs to ensure its internal operations perform at optimal efficiency. When its ERP provider announced it was moving from an on-premises solution to a SaaS environment, the IT team at ChristianaCare saw it as an opportunity to evaluate other cloud-based ERP solutions. The team chose Workday and went live in 2014, as they felt it offered the most robust system for business process structures and had the best capacity for integrations and reporting.
As Divya Sridhar, Director Shared Services Technology at ChristianaCare explains: “Out of all the vendors that responded to our request for proposal, Workday came out on top, particularly when it came to tracking transactions. The robustness and non-customisation of the system were particularly appealing as those features would help us manage our operations in a much better way than our previous set-up.”
The challenge: A complex and fragmented testing process
Initially, the team followed Workday’s standardised processes to allow themselves time to get used to the system. They also wanted to avoid creating complexity through customisations, as that had made testing their previous solution difficult. However, as the team gradually became more sophisticated, and Workday users and the business’ needs evolved, they felt increasingly comfortable with customising Workday to fit their requirements.
However, with a high volume of integrations across all departments, testing Workday quickly became overwhelming. ChristianaCare didn’t have a dedicated testing team, so each department was responsible for testing a list of business processes or scripts. As a result, testing became fragmented, and employees had less time to dedicate to their main roles.
“We simply didn’t have enough resources to test the system outside of the six-week Workday update window,” Divya says. “For every Workday release, we had to manually evaluate all the business processes, integrations and reports. We prioritised key areas that simply couldn’t fail, such as pay-related integrations, but for everything else, we just had to keep our fingers crossed that they didn’t break.”
The solution: Selecting Kainos as a testing partner
The team at ChristianaCare wanted to become more proactive at testing and set out to find a partner that would help them achieve that vision. In particular, the team was keen to eliminate the possibility of surprise – they had experienced someone adding a new feature to Workday without informing IT, which had led to various problems across the system.
ChristianaCare selected Kainos Smart Test as it gave the team full visibility across their system. Its automation capabilities would also alleviate the burden on individual testing teams and enable the team to conduct thorough testing 24/7, 365 days a year. With Kainos providing training and quick knowledge transfer, the team went live with Smart Test in January 2019.
“Kainos Smart Test was the best testing solution available for our organisation,” Divya says. “We were very attracted to Kainos’s partnership approach. We knew we would need support to develop a solid testing programme and it’s wonderful to know someone who understands our organisation is just at the other end of the phone whenever we need them.”
The benefits: A partner for the long-term
In 2021, two years after go-live, ChristianaCare acquired another company that came with unique business processes. ChristianaCare worked closely with Kainos to configure Workday so that it could accommodate the data and needs of the new business. Divya estimates that by leveraging Kainos’s expertise, her team cut its testing cycle down by about two weeks.
“Smart Test has delivered huge wins from day one and continues to do so as our organisation evolves,” explains Divya. “Kainos works closely with us to define and redefine our business processes as we grow and shift to ensure we always have a robust system that we can trust.”
The results: Peace of mind through robust Workday testing
In just a year, Smart Test has run almost 86,000 tests and completed about five million Workday actions for ChristianaCare. With such comprehensive coverage combined with automation capabilities, Smart Test enables ChristianaCare to be more proactive in identifying and resolving issues. The team can now troubleshoot before a problem impacts the business, giving them peace of mind that, regardless of what updates they or Workday make, essential systems such as payroll will not break. The team is also now able to test all year round through weekly testing cycles – not just during the Workday update testing window – increasing their trust and confidence in the system.
ChristianaCare has also significantly reduced the amount of time teams spend testing. Line-of-business teams no longer have to test technical aspects of the system or integrations and instead only focus on testing business processes, freeing up their time for higher value tasks.
In total, ChristianaCare estimates it has saved a total of 9,214 hours in testing time over one year, which equates to $306,736 and is comparable to six full-time equivalent employees.
“Kainos Smart Test has delivered so much value for our organisation. It gives us comfort that Workday works and we can rest assured knowing that it’s taking care of all the minute details and will flag any issues for us to resolve. For anyone considering Smart Test, just take the jump. It’s worth it.”
Future plans with Kainos Smart
As ChristianaCare looks to the future, the team plans to extend Smart Test to other areas of its system and continue to build upon their partnership with Kainos. The team are impressed by the level of customer service delivered by Kainos, and have recently adopted Smart Audit, to reduce the risk of non-compliance, and identify and prevent critical issues in their Workday environment.
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