<This is a guest post by Sohaib Zaidi>

In this era of cut-throat competition, global enterprises are facing tremendous pressure to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, increase sales and profitability. For this, more and more enterprises are embracing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software. Apart from enabling enterprises to make accurate, informed and strategic decisions, ERP also helps them to stay compliant. Though the benefits of introducing cloud ERP solutions to your business are countless, yet these benefits come with several challenges.

Enterprises that have already embraced cloud are struggling to keep pace with the frequency of ERP software updates. ERP vendors like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, etc are rolling out new releases and patches on monthly, quarterly, or biannually. Since cloud updates are rolled out at quick succession, enterprises are finding it hard to quickly test the updates and deploy these to production. Here arises the need of ERP testing. 

Why is it necessary to test ERP updates before deployment to production?

ERP updates bring new features and functionality, customer enhancement requests, and patches from previous releases. These updates need to be tested regressively since there are chances that they can impact a variety of functions that may cause disruption to business continuity. So, it is always recommended that before rolling out the ERP updates, QA teams should test critical business processes, validate reports, key workflows and test critical integrations with other applications.

Though manual application testing approach is still prevalent but it cannot be considered as a reliable solution in case of ERP testing. To understand this better, let us discuss an example of Oracle ERP. Oracle rolls out quarterly updates. These updates are first introduced to non-production environments. Oracle offers two weeks’ time to test these updates and raise issues. After two weeks, these get applied to the production environment. So, performing Oracle testing manually for these updates is non-feasible. Apart from time-consuming, manual testing is error prone, fragile and costly. Another disadvantage associated with manual testing is that it can adversely impact business continuity due to limited test coverage and its inability to identify change impact.

Embrace Automation Testing for seamless cloud adoption

Test automation not only reduces testing time of complex ERP systems but also ensures robust software quality. The biggest perks associated with test automation are maximum accuracy with minimum efforts, quick feedback, accelerated results, lower costs, and maximum coverage. Most of the test automation tools perform post release impact analysis to identify the impacted areas. Based on the impact assessment, QA teams can generate most relevant tests to execute validation. This not only defines the accurate testing scope but also delivers wider coverage which is not possible while performing manual testing.

When enterprises use test automation for security testing and constant maintenance, they get the opportunity to easily recognize defects. This approach significantly reduces vulnerabilities, helping enterprises to keep huge losses at bay. Automated testing also helps enterprises to overcome challenges of drowsy routine procedures crop up due to manual testing. Leveraging test automation tools, enterprises can accelerate routine procedures that consume time and cost to ensure a quick turnaround and superior ROI.

Author – Sohaib Zaidi – in his own words-
 
I am a technology enthusiast and professional writer with experience across niches like digital transformation, AI, IoT, & test automation. I love to write technology in simple tone so that readers can easily understand how embracing technology can deliver greater outcomes.