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December 04, 2024
Refining processes across different business areas is a key strategic focus for Valmet. This particularly applies to customer relationship management, sales, customer service, marketing, and business analytics, whose smooth operation is crucial for business success. A significant part of these operations relies on Salesforce technology, which is continuously developed and updated.
“We didn’t have dedicated people for testing, so for example all changes to our Salesforce environment were tested with very limited resources by people from business units and IT. We wanted to make testing more systematic and documented, so it would provide more value into the future as well.”
Katja Nisumaa-Saarela, Salesforce Platform Manager, Valmet
“Our resources simply weren’t enough to handle testing at a consistent level or to even think about regression testing. This was slowing down changes, bringing unpleasant surprises after pushing things to production, and ultimately limiting our production capacity.”
Xavier Borel, Manager, Sales & Marcom solutions, Valmet
Having identified the limitations, Valmet chose Sogeti as their testing partner in 2020. Confirmation was found in the good experiences of working with Sogeti on Valmet’s Infor-based cloud transition. Also, work done with Capgemini on the Salesforce stack had given proof of Sogeti’s capabilities and expertise on the platform.
Approach to consistent testing and test automation
The goal of achieving higher testing maturity, quality, and performance directed our work to a few key areas. Right from the start, our mutual understanding was that all new change requests would need to be tested and approved by our specialists before proceeding into production. The customer also requested continuous reporting and weekly status checks to keep track of testing development.
“Initially, Sogeti’s test automation expertise helped us screen and evaluate different tools. After some trials, we chose Copado Robotic Testing, which turned out to be a good match for testing changes in Salesforce releases. Following the technology selection, Sogeti’s experts have used the tool for writing test scripts and creating scenarios.”
Support for business-critical processes
To advance Valmet’s strategic targets, we have implemented extensive testing practices across different business units. To maintain and improve systematic testing, a team of testing experts works with the customer in a combined onsite-offshore model. This gives us the needed speed and intimacy to stay on top of evolving testing requirements.
Services and solutions include:
Client: Valmet
Region: Finland
Industry: Manufacturing
Offer: Quality Engineering and Testing
Development of the Salesforce environment
Alongside the need to support business critical processes, we set out to extract more value from Valmet’s Salesforce application portfolio. The team works directly with Valmet stakeholders, conducting for example SIT (System Integration Testing) and test automation with Copado.
Test tool services and more
Finally, we also provide test tool services and help Valmet configure efficient workflows, set up projects, manage upgrades, and more. The customer’s ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tool is at the heart of this work.
Results & impact
Despite a complex environment that continues to challenge the thinking of our testing teams, we have achieved notable improvements on several fronts. The benefits can be summed up as:
“Quality, release rate, and the number of incidents after release are key performance indicators for us. Sogeti’s testing services enable us to be efficient without compromising stability or continuity. It’s like an insurance – we know that the foundation is solid whenever we need to release something new.”
The ROI of automation is on average 98 hours per implementation in one environment. In both QA and test environments, this means an average saving of 196 hours per cycle, which amounts to nearly 1,000 hours saved over five cycles. It is important to note that these figures are based on the assumption that the corresponding tests would be done manually, which would not be practically possible. The speed and efficiency of automation enable testing volumes that would be unattainable by manual means.
“Especially our work on Salesforce has received pioneer status with the inclusion of a dedicated testing team. People from elsewhere in the organization have asked us about test automation, and we plan to share our best practices even more in the future.”
Feedback and future roadmap
After being restricted by limited resources, the addition of Sogeti’s testing expertise has made a clear difference in how Valmet is able to pursue process excellence and maintain business continuity.
“Sogeti has proven their capabilities in a multi-vendor environment by providing high-quality testing services on a process and application portfolio that are in constant flux. Their reports give us peace of mind that existing functionalities keep working in the middle of all the change.”
“Sogeti gives us more time to focus on the essentials of our business. The cooperation flows smoothly, and the testing team is open to our ideas and capable of executing them. Having no surprises means that things are working.”
In the following years, we aim to extend our testing capabilities to new Salesforce and other applications, such as the CRM and more comprehensive regression testing. We also share the vision of building an end-to-end testing capability for Valmet’s testing and test automation needs.
Find out more about this partnership
Have you identified a need to make testing more systematic? Looking for performance and quality improvements with changes to your application portfolio or Salesforce?
We’re happy to discuss improvement opportunities and share more details about our work with Valmet.