Scalable, Future-Proof Test Automation Fuels Workday Expansion at SCI
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“I’d definitely recommend Smart Test to anyone considering test automation. It’s been a great partnership with Kainos, and Smart Test has been a great addition to our ability to help our field associates.”
About Service Corporation International
Service Corporation International is North America’s largest provider of funeral, cremation, and cemetery services. Based in Houston, Texas, SCI operates with a workforce of 24,000 employees across 1,500 funeral homes throughout the United States, Canada, and Central America. Having grown rapidly through acquisitions, more than 80% of SCI’s employees work directly in the field.
Big-bang rollout intensifies testing pressure
In 2014, SCI launched Workday as part of a strategic move to the cloud. Their existing ERP system was overdue for an upgrade, which pushed leadership to accelerate a large-scale, “big-bang” deployment across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Stabilising the configuration and ensuring smooth adoption of Workday became top priorities for the HRIS team.
Greg Holliday, Director of HRIS at SCI, explains, “In our line of work, our field staff are meeting bereaved families every day. Leadership’s goal in moving to Workday was to streamline processes and eliminate the added burden of paper-based admin. We were only using our previous ERP for payroll and as an employee system of record, but the business had bigger plans to add compensation, benefits, and employee self-service. Moving to Workday made sense because it offered all of that and more.”
However, the HRIS team only had the bandwidth to perform thorough testing during update periods. SCI tested Workday 22, 23, and 24 manually, involving roughly 20 people from HRIS and each functional area. Each person spent about 80 hours during the first three weeks of testing, leaving just two weeks to apply fixes. As Greg put it, “Our teams were completely maxed out.”
Inadequate test coverage increased risk
While SCI planned to expand its Workday footprint, it quickly became clear that their testing approach wouldn’t scale. After three update cycles, Greg and his team realised their manual testing was only covering about 15 to 20 percent of what truly needed to be validated. “Building the test data consumed most of my team’s time,” Greg says. “Subject matter experts were learning Workday, testing, and still doing their regular jobs. All things considered, we were taking significant risks. We were fortunate that nothing major went wrong. It became obvious very quickly that we had gaps, and avoiding a critical issue in production that we’d have to scramble to fix was my main motivation for finding a test automation tool.”
The impact of Smart Test on SCI’s Workday testing
Keen to follow Workday best practices, SCI began looking in 2015 for a solution that would cut manual testing efforts, expand coverage, and free up resources to test new Workday functionality every week—not just during updates. Greg wanted a tool that included pre-built APIs, required no scripting, and could be easily managed by HRIS and business users.
The decision to implement Kainos Smart Test delivered immediate results. During SCI’s first Workday update after introducing Smart Test, the tool reduced testing time by 400 man-hours and boosted test coverage by 85 percent. Smart Test also enabled the HRIS team to start running weekly security test packs, which became instrumental in supporting SCI’s growing use of Workday.
“We’ve always been interested in following best practices at SCI,” Greg says. “Having worked with automation tools in a previous role, I knew this was the logical next step. When I evaluated the market, Smart Test was the only solution that didn’t require hiring an entire development team to maintain it. That alone was a deal maker.”
Scalable, repeatable testing drives Workday expansion
By adopting Smart Test, SCI was able to extend their testing beyond just Workday updates, dramatically broaden test coverage, and reduce the manual effort involved. The HRIS team built more than 100 repeatable test scenarios that can now be executed at the click of a button. Testing for Workday’s bi-annual updates, which previously took three weeks, now takes only three days, allowing HRIS to focus on more strategic Workday initiatives and company priorities like acquisitions.
“My team no longer has to worry about preparing test data,” Greg explains. “We use EIBs to load synthetic data into Smart for testing. I don’t have to investigate whether real workers have been terminated, promoted, or transferred, and whether they still fit the test scenarios. When I execute test runs, I know the scripts will always work. The quality of our testing has improved dramatically, and we’re now able to achieve full coverage when testing end-to-end business processes.”
Greg adds, “With Smart Test doing most of the heavy lifting and update testing largely automated, my team has more time to support strategic projects, like preparing for acquisitions and exploring new areas of Workday. We’re also about to go live with Smart Test for Workday Payroll. That simply wouldn’t have been possible under the pressures of manual testing.”
Catching critical issues before they reach production
By running full regression tests on Workday security every week, SCI is able to catch and correct configuration issues long before they can impact the business or end users. Greg recalls, “We were preparing to roll out a very important payroll report for our field operations. Right before it was due to hit production, Smart Test identified that a security domain had changed from constrained to unconstrained. If it had gone live as planned, people in different departments would have seen payroll details for other teams. Each field location manages its own operating P&L, so this would have been a huge privacy breach. Smart Test gave us the ability to spot the problem, pause for a moment of relief, re-engineer the reports with the right security settings, and then push them to production later.”
Future-ready payroll testing with Smart Test
With clear ROI and firsthand success using Smart Test, SCI expanded automation to include Workday Payroll in 2019. This allows the team to perform future-period testing and parallel payroll testing during update windows.
“Before, we could only test payroll scenarios that happened within the five-week update window. Now, because Smart Test lets us test for future periods, we can look at the full year ahead and cover exceptions we need to plan for,” Greg said. “For example, our associates in Puerto Rico receive bonuses at Christmas. Even though December is outside our update window, Smart Test lets us make sure they’ll be paid correctly. Similarly, because we pay every two weeks, there are months when employees receive three paychecks. In these cases, certain deductions should apply and others should not. Being able to test this in advance means we’ll save a lot of hours fixing overpayments or recovering money that shouldn’t have gone out. It’s a big win for our back-office teams and reduces the burden on our field associates.”
Looking ahead, Greg is eager to begin running parallel tests—comparing production against the new update—to ensure nothing gets missed during upgrades. “There’s still so much more we hope to achieve with Smart Test. We’ve barely scratched the surface, and the results so far have been outstanding. I’d definitely recommend Smart Test to anyone considering Workday test automation. It’s been a great partnership with Kainos, and the Smart Test tool has been a fantastic addition to how we support our field associates.”