Smart Test helps Chemours boost Workday efficiency and security
Project Requirements
- Customise Workday to fit Chemours’ processes and improve operational performance
- Ensure compliance with internal controls and data protection standards
- Reduce time and resources required for Workday testing
Project Results
- 6 SMEs freed up for higher value activities
- 48,428 tests ran annually
- 5,000+ testing hours saved annually
About Chemours
Chemours is an American chemical company founded in 2015 as a spin-off from DuPont. It manufactures and sells titanium technologies, thermal and specialised solutions, advanced performance materials, and chemical solutions. Headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, Chemours has 6,500 employees and 30 manufacturing sites serving 3,300 customers in 120 countries.
Adapting Workday to a dynamic business model
In the run-up to spinning off Chemours in 2015, DuPont cloned several of its own applications to help launch the new company. Included in the application suite was Workday HCM with a basic configuration comprising Payroll US, Compensation, and Time and Attendance modules.
While this setup helped Chemours operate from day one, the company quickly realised it required a more customised configuration. The technical team began developing and adapting Workday to the company’s needs. The primary goal was to create an in-house payroll solution for North America and integrations with external vendor solutions for international payroll. The payroll project took 18 months to complete.
Eduardo Fernandez is HR Information Systems Manager at Chemours. “We adopted Workday from our parent company DuPont, which gave us a baseline to get up and running, but Chemours has changed dramatically over the past five years becoming more dynamic with very different processes.,” he said. “Considering Workday is highly configurable, we have since been able to successfully adapt it to fit the particular needs of our business.”
Seeking a robust testing solution
As Chemours’s Workday configuration became more complex, so did the company’s testing requirements. Since the technical team at Chemours was very small, the company did not have the resources to create a dedicated testing team. Instead, it outsourced testing to an external partner that performed the tests manually, which was time-consuming, costly, and limited in that they could only run certain reports or test particular transactions without regression testing and would only test large changes.
With testing inconsistent and incomplete, the arrangement was too risky to continue, especially as Chemours needed to comply with accounting, internal controls, and data protection standards.
Chemours had to be SOC-compliant and wanted a testing tool that could reduce the risk of any changes to Workday subsequently impacting compliance or day-to-day operations. Eduardo sought a robust testing solution that would give his team complete and actionable results and help reduce all security risks.
“We needed to be able to identify issues in advance to avoid crises such as payroll going down for thousands of employees, but we didn’t have the bandwidth to create a dedicated testing team,” Eduardo said. “That’s why Kainos' Smart Test is a fantastic solution. It allows us to validate the impact of patches and any configuration changes every single week.”
The impact of Smart Test
Following a former colleague’s recommendation, Eduardo selected Kainos' Smart Test to deliver automated testing across all Workday modules. Eduardo’s team works closely with the Kainos expert team each week to ensure testing is complete and thorough. With Smart Test, Chemours can test across all tenants. The team frequently runs tests in sandbox so they can detect and fix issues before they hit production, significantly reducing the risk of loss of service.
“Since deploying Smart Test, we no longer need a dedicated testing team, which has freed around six people up to focus on more strategic work. The team at Kainos creates the test scenarios for us, and because testing is automated, it ensures the process is efficient and comprehensive. With Kainos’s support, Smart Test has transformed our testing strategy and helped us dramatically reduce our testing activities with savings of over 5,000 hours annually.”
Securing testing confidence
Smart Test has given Chemours peace of mind by improving security, enabling validation of patches and configuration changes while minimising risks of data breaches or downtime during Workday deployments
As Eduardo explains: “The complexity of security in Workday is enormous. In the last five years, we made a huge reconfiguration of our Payroll and Time and Attendance modules. We have 4,000 workers on our US payroll, and it would be disastrous if something broke because we ran an update. Smart Test has reduced that security risk and helps us stay compliant with all data protection standards.”
Cutting integrations testing complexity
Chemours’s integrations are also running more smoothly thanks to Smart Test. Chemours passes large volumes of data between various external vendors across the world, and it is vital that integrations remain secure and function as expected. With Smart Test, Chemours can rest assured that integrations are not affected by any changes or releases to Workday.
“The flexibility and capabilities of Smart Test are very impressive,” Eduardo said. “Smart Test goes far beyond my expectations, particularly as it’s capable of running integrations. If you are looking to reduce your costs or your overall testing effort, Smart Test is a really great solution.”
Looking to the future
Chemours recently launched Workday Learning and is working with Kainos to identify further improvements to optimise that deployment. The company’s next goal is to improve user experience so that employees, managers and HR professionals feel more comfortable using Workday.
“The service Kainos provides is invaluable. We have a dedicated person at Kainos who understands and really knows our business,” Eduardo said. “Kainos is proactive in identifying issues that might be a problem for us and supports us in solving them, which really adds the value to Smart Test. It’s a partnership where we know we can approach Kainos at any time with any issue, confident that we will receive help and advice.”
Eduardo concludes, "Our relationship has grown beyond a traditional, basic supplier relationship. Together, we have a partnership, and our teams are fully integrated."