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Client overview
McKesson is the leading provider of supply, information and care management products and services to the healthcare industry. As the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America, McKesson is responsible for one-third of the medicines used on the continent and supplies over 40,000 healthcare locations. The company employs over 32,000 people across the globe and brings in an annual revenue of $112 billion.
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Many of McKesson's wholesale and pharmacy customers employ ‘just-in-time’ ordering, expecting delivery by the next business day. Without a consolidated and accurate view of the orders processed each day, they weren’t able to easily identify and intervene on orders that were in danger of not shipping on time. Gaining accurate, real-time insight throughout their distribution processes became a top priority.
McKesson embarked on a project to modernise its legacy Oracle-based Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) architecture and migrate to SAP BW on S/4 HANA to give them the real-time information they needed.
The challenge
As McKesson’s testing partner for over 20 years, we worked with our colleagues across the Prolifics group to provide full end-to-end testing and validation for their SAP S/4 HANA migration. This entailed:
- Finding scalable Test Automation tools and an optimised test strategy
- Ensuring database migration to SAP S/4 HANA has ‘zero impact’ on the ongoing and new business processes
- Adhering to the strict timelines of the project while reducing total cost and effort, and safeguarding the criticality of the data
- Validation of data from diverse systems (Oracle and SAP HANA) and formats
- Production of parallel run validations – comparing huge volumes of data in a production system (As-Is and To-Be Data)
- Ensuring business processes are thoroughly tested and rolled out within the timescales
- Generating a customised report highlighting the results of testing in detailed and summary formats
Our approach
Prolifics implemented a People, Process and Tools approach: we used processes we have developed
over 30 years as a testing specialist; we called upon our extensive pool of SAP Test Engineers; and implemented internally-developed SAP Test and Validation Accelerators to ensure we could deliver the project successfully.
Solving the problem
We quickly arranged a team of over 150 SAP Test and Validation specialists to meet the challenging timescales of the project. To speed-up the process, we used our Test Accelerators to automate file comparisons and validations, which included billions of fields of data.
Schema Validations were performed from validating the target system against the source. All transformations and validation rules were managed by our purpose-built Accelerators.
Final outcome
Through our approach, we were able to successfully deliver the project within budget and on time. Using our internally-developed SAP Test and Validation Accelerators allowed us to promote Shift Left testing, enable early defect detection and increase the test coverage.
The Accelerators delivered over 60% savings in cost and effort, and a Defect Removal Efficiency (DRE) of over 99%.
