Kainos Smart automated testing ensures clean bill of health for insurance firm
The goals
The results
86%
12,000
600,000 +
"We can be progressive and aggressive with our new feature deployment and innovation and part of that's because we aren't constrained by our testing capabilities. Having a tool like Kainos Smart Test, it just allowed us to be more efficient."
About the company
This large American health insurance provider employs thousands of medical professionals across 16 hospitals. Founded in the 1930s, it became known for its forward-thinking and innovative approach to business – an approach which has facilitated constant expansion, providing nearly 1 million customers with accessible healthcare in 2022.
Lack of testing strategy results in increased test demands
In 2016, with new leadership in place, the organisation made a strategic decision to upgrade legacy applications to a flexible and scalable cloud-based HR and Finance system. Workday HCM and Financials were selected and deployed in 2016, with further phases planned to support company growth.
With Workday now live and boosting efficiency, the organisation knew it needed to take a more mature, proactive approach to testing to match the pace of change. But a manual approach to testing was more resource intensive than anticipated and required regular input from SMEs across the business. This was disruptive and prevented teams from focusing on high-value activities and growing the business.
“We needed to formulate a test plan and we'd have to pull in Accounting, Venture Reporting, Treasury and other areas to participate if we were going to do it right. But those folks just wanted to use the system and be happy about it. We needed to think about resourcing efficiencies,” said the organisation’s Director of Finance Technology.
He continued, “Our IT department wanted to grow and promote testing progressiveness but as a small team, we didn’t have the capacity to custom built all the scripts and tests.” The result was a lack of a defined testing strategy, leaving the business to rely on an ad-hoc, limited approach to testing."
Due to this, the company had to prioritise testing core business processes (BPs) without a holistic view of its entire testing requirements. After experiencing its first major Workday update without a full testing approach in place, there was agreement amongst leaders that a more sustainable strategy was needed.
“During our first update window, we did some semblance of testing, but I would characterise it as not thorough. There would have been some gaps, and we were not able to be confident that things were going to work the way that they should. We also felt that we wanted to focus more on the new releases and new features during the release window, but our testing requirements made that more difficult.”
Seeking a ‘hands-off’ approach for more ‘hands-on’ testing
The company knew that to become more proactive and increase its testing capabilities, it needed a solution that was scalable, future-proof and met its needs as a lean non-profit organisation.
To begin with, the company explored the possibility of creating a custom-built testing application from scratch. Various existing solutions were explored, however, none of them were scalable or designed for Workday. After a one-to-one session with the Kainos team at Workday Rising, it became clear that Smart Test was the most viable solution.
“To custom build all of these scripts and tests was so resource intensive. Smart Test was the only solution that was cost effective, met our needs, and was even specifically made for Workday. We were really happy with the idea of bringing on an automated testing solution within that overarching strategy to support this more modern technology transformation.”
A key focus for the company was ensuring that it could take a “hands-off” approach to implementation and testing—whilst increasing testing capabilities. “We weren't interested in the learning curve of figuring out how to create our own tests. Our whole strategy was we want to be as hands-off as possible and Smart Test allows us to do that. It really has helped us keep up with the ever-changing list of business processes and other changes that we're making.”
Originally deployed in 2018, Smart Test supports the team to conduct automated testing for their core business processes including HCM, Security, Financials and Payroll. Since then, Smart Test has conducted over 600,000 tests to ensure the reliability of these vital systems.
Confidence to create efficiencies with Workday updates
With automated, scalable testing now in place, the organisation is able to take a proactive approach to change. Stakeholders have confidence that core business systems are always functional and technical teams are provided peace of mind when implementing change.
“Now, we have total peace of mind about the level and thoroughness of testing tha's being carried out, especially for releases and payroll. It just gives us more confidence."
Manual effort required from multiple teams and senior SMEs has also been lessened significantly. Testing effort has been reduced by 86%, freeing up staff to focus on other projects, allowing the organisation to explore the increasing value offered by Workday during major updates. Overall, Smart Test conducts 127,000 automated tests, equivalent to the work of a full-time team of 23 people.
“It has allowed us to get more efficient across the board—really get to the place that we're operating a pretty lean operation. Smart Test has enabled our approach to feature rollouts to become more progressive and aggressive for our teams,” said the Director of Finance Technology.
An innovative future with Workday and Kainos Smart
The company prides itself on innovation and now that it has seen the benefits of Smart Test, plans to continue with modernising and scaling business operations.
“Workday ushered in an era of technology transformation and, together with Smart Test, it really progressed us from a “stuck in the mud” operation. I think our world would look different if we didn't have this solution."
Asked about the biggest benefits of Smart Test, the organisation concluded, “The testing process touches a lot of people so Smart Test has really taken the burden off both our technology team and our business overall. The benefits are twofold, it brings visibility to major issues that otherwise just would not have been visible. Secondly, we have peace of mind knowing that when changes are implemented, the stress of manually testing isn’t there.”
The next step for the organisation is to roll-out Kainos Smart Audit to better mitigate risk and compliance issues by increasing security monitoring capabilities. “It helps to know that our team can’t access information that they shouldn’t and make sure there are no segregation of duties violations. There's just a lot that has to be sorted through and it's comforting to have a solution like Smart Audit on our side.”