Saved two full-time positions during the testing phase with  Reqtest

Lantmännen’s Digitalization

With nearly 10,000 employees and 40 billion in revenue, Lantmännen is the leading organization in agriculture, machinery, bioenergy, and food in Scandinavia. As part of the cooperative’s digitalization process, a new ERP system was recently implemented at the company’s ethanol refinery. It was a complex project involving multiple integrations and customizations. Furthermore, it took place during an ongoing pandemic.

Replacing the “heart and lungs”

To succeed in their digital transformation, Lantmännen sought the assistance of Elvenite, a knowledge company specialized within the food industry.

– We often compare implementing a new business system with a heart and lung transplant. You go in, make changes and adjust critical business processes. As these are complex processes, it’s often a major challenge for a project manager to meet the budget, timeline, and quality objectives. Two-thirds of all ERP projects exceed their budget and timeline, says Erik Karlström, Project & Test manager from Elvenite.

Saved resources – despite an extensive testing phase

To ensure a high quality, a two-month-long testing phase was conducted, involving over 40 testers from the entire organization. A total of 1500 acceptance tests had to be carried out in various combinations. This task was efficiently managed using Reqtest, which would have been impossible with Excel.

– We used Reqtest to get an overview and traceability during the testing periods. Being able to avoid updating progress in Excel, searching for information in different files, and emailing each other provided significant time savings. Low counted, we saved time equivalent to two full-time positions in just overhead costs during the testing phase, says Erik.

Reqtest, as he mentioned, has advanced functionality for creating, planning, delegating, executing, and tracking tests, ensuring that all aspects of the system are thoroughly tested.

– The most important aspect of the project was quality. If you want to feel confident about the quality assurance as an IT manager or CEO, you need a tool that proves it. Now we have all the information documented in a searchable system and can demonstrate what has been tested, how, and when, he adds.

– At Lantmännen, Reqtest has been used since 2015 in a variety of projects.

Anton Knudsen, who is the Platform Architect at the company, believes that it is the combination of the tool’s overview and the detailed level that makes a significant difference in a project of this size.

– You have an overarching hierarchy of the tests that goes all the way down to a detailed description. It makes it easy for both the testers to know what needs to be done and for me to follow up on what has actually been done,” says Anton.

Showing progress with the reporting module

To meet the schedule, weekly meetings were held where the project’s interim reports were presented and approved. With the help of the reporting functionality in Reqtest, Elvenite could easily visualize the progress for Lantmännen’s steering group.

– We used the information from Reqtest in interim reports to obtain signoff on project milestones. I could build my own graphs and get an overview of the project’s status in just a few minutes, Erik Karlström explains.

Furthermore, the detailed instructions from the test cases could be reused to train users in the business system. This saved time during both the training phase and when new employees needed to be onboarded to the system.

– I found it easy to use Reqtest myself and to train all the business personnel. It’s an intuitive cloud service, so no installations or technicians are needed. I received very few questions about how the system works because it is, so to speak, self-explanatory, says Erik.

Reusing the structure in future projects

Lantmännen has an exciting time ahead with many upcoming projects. Anton Knudsen reveals that, among other things, two companies will merge, new factories will be opened, and the existing business system will be upgraded to a cloud version.

– Reqtest will be an important part of all the projects, especially in the maintenance phase. When our business system transitions to the cloud, new functionality will need to be tested practically every month. In that case, it is crucial that we have a good test suite that we can reuse, says Anton.

Erik Karlström and his colleagues at Elvenite also see several advantages in continuing to use Reqtest in the upcoming projects.

– The platform enables many economies of scale. We compete for time and money. If we can make the testing phase 400 hours more efficient than our competitors because we have an excellent testing system, it likely supports us in winning new business and ensuring customer satisfaction. That’s one reason why we standardize the tools we use, with Reqtest being one of them, concludes Erik.