Intelligent automation solution from Expleo helped its client achieve 80% cost savings and allowed project teams to focus on more value-adding tasks, such as business development and client management.
IBS Intelligence

With a presence in over 30 countries, Expleo is a global engineering, technology, and consulting service provider that partners with leading organisations to guide them through their business transformation, helping them achieve operational excellence and future-proof their businesses. The company has 15,000+ employees and has more than 40 years of experience developing solutions, optimising manufacturing processes, and ensuring the quality of information systems.

Project Background

The client was using an automation tool to manage and approve dynamic price changes to insurance products. However, the process, which used regression testing, had several complexities that their existing test automation tool could not handle:

• Applications undergoing testing involved multiple systems built on various platforms, legacy mainframe systems, and file formats like PDF/Word/Excel/Flat files and others.
• Tests involved multiple day runs and batch job requirements.
• Pricing validations were real-time in nature.

This resulted in frequent manual intervention to complete the automated tasks. The client wanted to implement a solution that facilitated unattended automation. A need, hence, arose for a more effective RPA tool-based test automation framework that could handle pricing considerations dynamically.

Solution

The framework adopted was highly adaptable to clients with a heterogeneous application landscape under regression test requirements. Some of the key features that made the framework flexible were:

• A tool-agnostic framework could be implemented across the enterprise.
• Wide scope for customisation.
• A user-friendly Test Orchestration Interface with the ability to design and create test scenarios. The interface measures and configures test steps to functional reusable components, test batches and end-to-end data and views test results and logs effectively.
• Breakdown of business requirements into functional components for ease of development.
• Elimination of redundancy – optimisation of code as functional reusable components to reduce repetitive development.
• High reusability – the solution focuses on functional reusable components tightly coupled with objects built in the RPA tool.
• Technical independence – Easier maintenance without coding/technical knowledge.
• Test Continuity – test scripts validation in a single flow across multiple days.
• Customisable integration with most Test Management tools, although the tool provides the test results and logs.

Results

Implementation of the project took 6 months, with the project team consisting of six members, including one functional consultant, 1 RPA Lead and 4 RPA developers.

Most RPA tools help in accessing scripts via an API. The following components of the framework readily took shape:

Front-End – Configuration, Test Design & Results

• User-friendly front-end for managing and mapping of automation test scripts
• Sequenced test scripts triggered as requests to SoapUI
• Each script with multiple reusable components mapped with the test data requirements
• Call from the front-end for an appropriate SoapUI API when being activated for test execution

Middleware – Communication

• Usage of SoapUI as a middleware to send/receive API requests (WSDL) between the front-end and RPA tool
• Creation of business objects in the RPA tool indicated as a web service with the configuration in SoapUI

RPA Tool – Functional Reusable Components

• Execution of the RPA Tool as per the SoapUI requests and invocation of various applications under test as per the object definition
• Presence of corresponding objects in the RPA tool for reusable components in the front end
• Logging of responses in the output file along with screenshots after each test run
• The end-user will be indicated only to the front-end while executing the pack, while the RPA tool and SoapUI run in the backend.

Client benefits

In today’s dynamic market, businesses must deliver value quickly to attract and retain customers. The achievement was possible by placing the automation framework where testing and deployment challenges in various application technologies were to be validated, which required different automation tools.

By best utilising the existing process automation tool for deploying a business solution that runs across multiple applications and business processes, the client maximised the speed to market multi-fold.

By using the RPA tool, the applications were harmonised, and several key results were achieved, namely:

• 70% reduction in testing and deployment window
• 99% reduction in timelines for pricing validations, which is one of the most critical checks
• Bulk validation of multiple output documents with each having 2000+ data values
• Expansion of the framework to multiple business functions

In addition to the savings on effort, timelines and cost, this solution relieved project teams of the most laborious part of their work which enabled a greater focus on more value-adding tasks, such as business development and client management. The solution also covered transactions that had validations across multiple business days while eliminating human errors that might occur during manual verification. The framework/solutions were easily maintainable, scalable, and reusable by different project teams with minimal maintenance efforts. Overall project deliverables were fast-tracked, and the client benefited from 80% cost savings.

Conclusion

More than 3 decades of domain expertise and extensive experience in hyper-automation solutions helped Expleo win the client’s confidence without a formal RFP. In fact, it challenged the erstwhile process by delivering the project from offshore.

The dynamic, intelligent solution provided to the client will allow them to experience benefits every time the business demands a rate/price change.