Client Profile
The client is a large national healthcare purchasing organization that provides group purchasing aggregation and performance improvement for its members. The client serves more than 1,600 hospitals and health systems, and 55,000 other locations nationwide, including ambulatory surgery centers, physician practices, long-term care, and alternate care sites. They are recognized as having the industry’s only entirely committed and aligned group purchasing model.
Business Challenge
The client looked to Xpanxion to help prepare for a move from a completely manual, time-consuming legacy system to an off-the-shelf, configurable and customizable contract management solution. Xpanxion created a QA (Quality Assurance) automation system for testing the configuration and integration of external systems. The flexibility and scalability of the automation system allows the client to reach its full growth potential.
Additionally, the existing manual contract management system was placing constraints on their ability to develop and maintain third-party applications in today’s modern DevOps environment, which combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten application development life cycles.
The client operates in a complex technical environment consisting of 12+ integrated systems linked with an equally complex business environment made up of 10+ different business units. The need to create a robust, unified automation system for quality assurance and testing was paramount to consolidate these disparate business units and siloed systems into a single, centralized automated framework accessible company-wide.
Solution
The Xpanxion team designed a configurable proprietary test automation framework fully automating QA and testing across the client’s various systems and applications. The applications managed by the Xpanxion team as part of the engagement includes a cybersecurity solution.
The Xpanxion test automation framework is founded on an open-source, selenium-based portable framework. The framework provides the flexibility and scalability needed to meet the client’s specific requirements for quality assurance as well as quick and reliable web application testing. It runs tests directly on the target browser, steers the exchanges on the necessary web pages and reruns them without any manual input. The Xpanxion framework conforms with the intention of Agile and DevOps and upholds the continuous delivery workflow.
“We have found the Rural Engineering model a good blend of cost, time zone, and language convenience and quality. When I compare Xpanxion to our other vendor partners, the quality of technical resources is usually the best.”
Patrick Lowry
VP IT Strategy & Planning | HealthTrust
Results
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Identified functionality gaps and required custom development needs
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Implemented full automation across the entire application landscape within 24 months
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Achieved 40% time savings over traditional requirements- based testing and reduced run-time from 30 hrs to 4 hrs
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Reduced testing time from approximately 56,000 hours to 16 hours at 100% coverage and 99.97% accuracy
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Prepared a consolidated project plan including vendor custom development, internal IT development, and cross-team dependencies, as well as process redesign and improvement activities required to ensure a smooth system transition and organizational transformation.
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Created and maintained automation for several products visible at the highest acceptance levels, automated daily system status emails, incorporating load testing as an option and providing ongoing guidance and successful QA practices.
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Created well-documented go-live training and change management plans to minimize business disruption.
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Developed an approach to change management and training to ensure successful transition.
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