Organizations are increasingly moving to the Cloud for enhanced control and insight into operations such as finance, planning, procurement, and asset management. Bloomberg projects the Cloud ERP market to hit $73 billion by 2026. Similarly, Allied Market Research forecasts the global ERP market to reach $117.09 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 10.0% from 2021 to 2030.

Undoubtedly, ERPs radically improve productivity and operational efficiency for organizations but implementing them within predefined timelines and budgets can be a challenge for ERP implementation partners.

In this blog, we’ll highlight major challenges that ERP implementation partners face and present them with Opkey’s AI-enabled, No-Code test automation as a solution.

Common business challenges ERP implementation partners often face:

Budget Overruns

Oracle states that 70% of implementation projects fail to stay on schedule or within budget, and two-thirds have a negative return on investment due to cost-overruns.

Some of the reasons related to this are:

Comprehensive Scope: ERP implementations cover a wide range of business processes in different departments. Often uncontrolled changes lead to extended timelines.

Testing & Quality Assurance: Testing is critical to avoid misalignment with project initiatives. However, multiple testing cycles including unit testing, integration testing, and user acceptance testing (UAT) can consume a significant amount of time, if performed manually.

Solution: Test automation speeds up the testing cycles, reducing the time required to validate critical business processes. As tests can be executed more frequently, stakeholders can easily ensure that all aspects of the ERP system are aligned with the business objectives. This reduces the risk of missed defects that could cause delays later in the implementation process.

Change Management

According to McKinsey, more than 70% of all digital transformation projects fail. One of the biggest reasons for ERP failure is the poor adoption by end-users. Careful planning is required to avoid such overruns.

Effective UAT is considered to be the most effective change management strategy, as it provides business users the chance to operate ERP before going live. However, UAT is time-consuming and performed by business users whose plates are already full. Therefore, testing is often an afterthought and a rushed process rife with errors. This defeats the whole purpose.

Solution: Test automation supports business users by speeding up the testing process and increases their engagement by positioning them as primary stakeholders. This allows them to fine-tune the ERP software to their specific needs. It leads to much higher ERP adoption rates and meaningful business process improvements.

Project Management

ERP implementation is a vast project that involves multiple business processes and multiple teams. Effective communication and collaboration between the implementation team and the client are vital for ERP implementation success. Miscommunications can result in misunderstandings and project delays.

Solution: Test automation helps ERP implementation partners to realize CI/CD practices. Since it ensures continuous testing and integration of code changes, issues are detected and resolved promptly, preventing project bottlenecks and delays.

According to IBM, it costs 6X more to fix a software bug found during the implementation phase–right before it goes live–than earlier, during the design phase. Thus, testing early, often, and by using automation helps you efficiently find software bugs in development life cycle, saving costs and time.

System Integration and Compatibility

Integration of a new ERP system with existing legacy systems can be complex. Ensuring seamless integration with existing applications involves extensive testing and development work, adding to the implementation timeline.

Solution: Opkey’s test automation platform offers end-to-end coverage across 14+ ERPs and 150+ technologies including web, mobile and back-end systems like custom or databases, ERP and CRM systems.

Test Automation: Key to Successful ERP Implementation

Undoubtedly, test automation plays a significant role in mitigating major business challenges during ERP implementation. However, the key to success is selecting the right test automation platform.

Here’s why:

• While ERP implementers are heavily involved in testing and providing guidance throughout the implementation process, substantial client representation is recommended. This is where business users come in. Business users will use the ERP to accomplish their daily tasks. Since they are non-technical folks, any test automation platform requiring coding skills to operate can be of limited/ no use for them.

• Nobody wants to create test scripts to throw them away in the end. It is a waste of time, energy and money. There are many tools in the market today that lack the ability to build and reuse automation. Thus, you need to incorporate a test automation tool where automation scripts can be used repeatedly.

• Test authoring from scratch is another nightmare for the QA teams. It is very frustrating to write a test suite from scratch.

Succeed in ERP Implementation with Opkey’s AI-enabled Test Automation

Opkey is industry’s leading AI-enabled test automation platform. Recognized by industry’s leading analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, and G2 Crowd, Opkey has helped its customers in saving major time and money by automating testing processes.

AI-enabled Test Management: Powered by Opkey’s ERP language model, Wilfred Opkey's Chatbot simplifies test creation for both technical and non-technical folks. Wilfred helps you generate and maintain test scripts using Opkey’s business-specific language model. Our Natural Language Processing chatbot Wilfred also helps you with a wide variety of tasks, including planning, support tickets, and much more.

AI-powered Self-Healing: Opkey's AI-powered Self-Healing feature ensures that when your apps change, your tests won't break. The time and resources required for script maintenance are drastically reduced and AI’s ability to continuously learn and adapt to changes ensures that your automated test suite remains functional.

End-to-End Coverage: Opkey tests across entire enterprise application landscapes, from front-end such as web and mobile to core, back-end systems such as custom or databases, ERP and CRM systems. As a result, you can eliminate critical gaps in your end-to-end journey.