Tag: Quality Center

Case Study: Bendigo Bank delivers a higher quality customer experience with HP

Bendigo Bank provides banking and wealth management services to individual and small to medium businesses. It is represented in all states and territories with almost 900 outlets, including more than 190 company-owned branches, 250 locally-owned Community Bank® branches, 90 agencies and 800 ATMs.

With a tradition of adding value for customers through quality personal service, the bank recently began to look to technology as the enabler of service delivery and business performance. Realising its existing systems were account-centric and not customer-focused, the bank embarked on an ambitious program to align technology more closely with its business strategy. The result? It purchased Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Universal Customer Master (UCM) applications to streamline customer-facing operations.

Known as ‘Enable Customer Phase 1’, the objective of this 18-month project was to introduce CRM and UCM capability across the organisation. As this would significantly impact 5,000 users and would result in considerable change management, the bank knew it had to deliver high-quality applications that functioned and performed at the levels demanded by the business.

“Enable Customer Phase 1 is the single largest implementation undertaken across the Bank in the past 15 years,” explains Robert Murphy, the project’s Technical Implementation Manager. “We had one chance to get it right and we knew quality assurance had to play a big part in the equation. We decided to make use of HP Quality Center software, which has been in the organisation for the past seven years. By leveraging an existing quality management solution, we could reduce our total cost of ownership and ensure a smoother transition to our new CRM platform.”

Objective

To drive the business value of its new customer facing solutions, Bendigo Bank sought to standardise system quality and performance 

Approach

Bendigo Bank adopted a quality and performance assurance approach using HP Quality Center software and HP LoadRunner software

IT improvements

  • Standard platform manages every aspect of system quality and performance
  • Centralisation enhances productivity
  • Isolated and fixed defects quickly
  • Established benchmarks for future enhancements
  • Fine-tuned testing efforts around data migration

About Bendigo Bank

The Bendigo Bank is the retail arm of the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Group, an Australian company formed in November 2007 as a result of the merger between Bendigo Bank and Adelaide Bank. A publicly listed company, the group is owned by more than 82,000 shareholders.

Industry

Banking and Finance

Primary applications

  • Siebel CRM
  • Siebel URM

Primary software

  • HP LoadRunner software
  • HP Quality Center v9

Partnership provides valuable and timely expertise

To complete the quality approach and ensure all aspects of the new system were tested, the bank appointed JDS Australia to provide services in load testing and performance management.

An HP Platinum Partner and winner of the coveted HP Software Partner of the Year Award for the past four years, JDS is widely regarded as a leader in the Quality and Performance testing space. The company provides extensive and in-depth knowledge of the HP suite of testing and monitoring solutions offering support to clients in a variety of industries.

Steve Smith, JDS Australia’s Account Manager, believes that validating performance of newly deployed mission-critical systems is the key to achieving high user adoption and enhancing the consumer experience. Ensuring that applications are available and performing as intended is something that all organisations grapple with. JDS assisted Bendigo Bank by deploying HP LoadRunner to stress-test its Siebel CRM/URM system to ensure it could handle the peak loads and transactional volumes it would be subjected to, once live.

A quality ownership imperative

Prior to the adoption of HP Quality Center, the bank performed quality assurance on its core systems using a mixture of spreadsheets and documents. Following two mergers, the bank expanded rapidly and decided it needed to standardise its approach to quality assurance as a way of gaining some unity across the business and driving competitive advantage in a tough financial market. Today, the bank is firmly focused on retaining and growing its customer relationships, increasing loyalty and delivering personalised and consistent service experiences.

“We began the quality assurance part of the Enable Customer Phase 1 project by putting the ownership of quality in the hands of the business. We sought to make the business accountable for its operational outcomes. In short, we wanted quality management to be part of everyone’s mandate and HP Quality Center enabled us to do just that,” says Murphy.

“The quality management structure of this project was somewhat unusual. We used an iterative approach to development and put the business analysts, testers and developers into the one team. This allows us to fast-track time to success by facilitating communication and collaboration. But more importantly, it bridged the gap between business and technology expert, aligning testing more closely to business outcomes.”

Standardised processes improve decision-making

By providing a seamless, repeatable process for gathering requirements, planning and scheduling tests, analysing results and managing defects, HP has brought structure to managing quality for this project.

Murphy explains, “HP Quality Center creates an end-to-end quality management infrastructure to enforce standardised processes and best practices, such as our policy of ‘no work without a ticket’. It has given us the ability to streamline the management of defects, so that we can make effective ‘go/no-go’ decisions.

“By standardising on one quality platform we can do a lot of work in a short space of time, knowing that it is all contributing to our overall quality objectives. We can monitor the advancement of our work against these objectives to determine whether we are on track, on budget and on time. Having such insight into our progress delivers good governance and greatly improves decision-making.”

Testing what’s needed reduces risk

With quality firmly embedded in the centre of the organisation’s development mandate, ensuring that testing is prioritised according to business need was vital to achieving timely results for the bank.

HP Quality Center provides risk-based quality management to objectively assess and prioritise the highest-risk, highest-priority requirement, so testing efforts can be fine-tuned based on quantifiable business risk.

“HP Quality Center supports our approach of not wanting to test everything,” adds Murphy. “It enabled us to marry testing priorities with risk. We focused our testing efforts around data migration from our legacy systems into Siebel, as this was an integral part of future functionality.

“Prioritising our testing was also cost-effective in terms of centralisation and reusability. It meant that our people could store tests in one central location, review test planning information and reuse entire test plans or amend test cases across project components. Plus, having access to quality metrics put the business at ease because we could show that elements had been effectively tested and would work as intended.”

Validating performance

Gaining an understanding of how the Enable Customer project would meet the performance and scalability of the business was another objective the bank sought to achieve. Specifically, it wanted to obtain an accurate picture of end-to-end system performance before going live.

HP LoadRunner software was used to emulate the bank’s working environment with thousands of concurrent users. It stressed the application from end-to-end, applying consistent, measurable and repeatable workloads and identified issues that would affect its users in production.

“As we drove loads against the system, HP LoadRunner captured end-user response times for key transactions. It showed us that had we gone live, our users would have experienced slow performance when printing following a query. We rectified the issue in five days, but without HP LoadRunner it could easily have taken us a month or more to fix it.

“In the end, HP LoadRunner verified that our new Siebel CRM/URM system would meet specified performance requirements including sub-second response times,” confirms Murphy.

Quality, confidence, and success

After extensive testing and a successful pilot in two branches, the bank recently went live on Enable Customer Phase 1 without any showstoppers.

“We are delighted with the success of the project’s deployment and have achieved good outcomes through quality and performance testing,” adds Murphy. “Throughout the course of the project, we were able to isolate and fix defects quickly, automate quality processes and establish benchmarks for future enhancements. Quite simply, we delivered a high-quality, high-performing, robust system to support our people.”

“The value that HP Quality Center has brought to Bendigo Bank can be summarised in terms of standardisation, visibility and insight. We gained an end-to-end quality management infrastructure that gave us visibility into every element of the system and the insight we needed to make good decisions.”

Business Benefits

  • Gained 360-degree visibility into application quality
  • Went live on the single largest IT implementation in 15 years (Siebel CRM/URM) which functioned and performed at levels demanded by 5,000 users
  • Rectified performance issue in five days instead of a month
  • Aligned testing to business outcomes by facilitating communication and collaboration among business analysts, testers and developers
  • Reduced application deployment risk
  • Streamlined management process to assist with go/no-go decisions
  • Monitored the progress of work against objectives to track timeliness, budget and readiness

Looking ahead

HP Software will continue to play a key role as the backbone of Bendigo Bank’s quality and performance validation engine.

“We have successfully deployed one of the largest customer-facing projects in the history of the bank. Our focus now is on continuing to manage quality and performance of this system on a quarterly basis, ensuring that updates, changes, and upgrades are validated prior to release.

“Overall, HP has helped Bendigo Bank set the benchmark for ensuring our mission critical applications are high in quality and give the best performance to support our users in delivering excellent products and services,” concludes Murphy.

Case Study: CitiPower and Powercor take action to ensure quality

“Technology underpins the ability of CitiPower and Powercor to safely and effectively deliver power to more than a million customers. It’s critical that our applications are current, functioning and available,” says Fiona Hocking, CSA assurance team leader, Powercor.

Objective

To deliver top-quality, high-performing business applications that are current, functioning and available

Challenge

Develop an effective Quality Assurance (QA) discipline for application lifecycles across the enterprise

IT improvements

  • Provides HP Quality Centre (QC) to application groups with zero outages
  • Provides a holistic view of an application testing status
  • Allows application teams to manage up to 30 test cycles with 500 test cases, resulting in the management of over 6,500 defects

About the Client

CitiPower and Powercor are Australia’s leading electricity distributors owned by Cheung Kong Infrastructure Ltd (CKI) and Power Assets Holdings Ltd. Combined, the group operates the largest electricity distribution network in the state of Victoria, servicing over a million customers.

Operating in a highly controlled industry and tasked with providing critical services around the clock, the group relies heavily on its IT infrastructure to deliver energy to customers and to meet regulatory requirements.

This infrastructure is complex to say the least. With over 11 critical business applications, 2,000 users, and multifaceted interfaces to a central information hub for the business facing systems alone, delivery expectations on the IT department are high. Field staff, the group and the government regulator all need real-time information from the electricity network, such as usage patterns, meter data and consumption. Information accuracy and availability can mean the difference between someone getting power or not. Significant penalties apply for missing the mark, so it’s important that the IT department gets it right.

Industry

Power

Primary software

  • HP Quality Center

High availability

To deliver on its strategic objectives, the group mandates that its IT department provides high-performing business applications with a 99.8 percent availability rate. There is zero tolerance for level one defects.

As an internal service provider, the Quality Assurance Team had to define how to best facilitate enterprise testing capabilities with limited resources and tight timeframes. At any one time, an application could be managing 20 to 30 test cycles, with over 6,500 defects being handled across its project lifecycle. The Quality Assurance (QA) Team quickly identified that HP Quality Centre (QC) could be of immediate benefit to application owners. Providing a holistic view of an application’s testing status would allow an application owner to assess priorities, allocate resources and deliver quality applications on time and to specification.

In order to be effective and highly responsive when called upon by stakeholders, the QA Team identified three key areas for HP QC success. Firstly, they enlisted support services from HP Platinum Partner JDS Australia to ensure that HP QC continued to be operational with fast issue resolution.

“When it comes to HP Quality Center, JDS keeps the lights switched on. We simply don’t have to worry about HP QC not being available or operational. JDS ensures that we are aware of product developments, new features and functions, and that our system is kept healthy. I know that any time I call them, they can answer my questions. Our HP QC users have aggressive targets, and using JDS as support means that we can keep our users happy,” said Hocking.

Tester training

Secondly, the QA Team packaged training programs that could be easily rolled out when required. As each testing requirement is based on secondment, an application owner can nominate different testers as deemed appropriate. Given that testing groups have often never used testing tools, the QA Team has to equip new testers with the skills needed to get the job done.

“HP QC is very customisable to meet the needs of each specific project. This means that we have to be nimble enough to roll out project-specific training,” says Hocking. “The fact HP QC is intuitive makes the training process easier. In some cases, we can train large groups on the basics in less than thirty minutes. Thirdly, the QA Team assists project teams by helping define testing requirements, developing test scripts, and leveraging HP QC for optimal outcomes.

“Since we were tasked with rolling out HP QC capabilities across the enterprise, we have increased its use by 78 percent and improved user-uptake by 67 per cent.”
With a solid QA platform in place that is supported by JDS, CitiPower and Powercor are now better placed to maintain quality applications under pressure and amidst rapid change.

When the government of Victoria announced its smart meter program for improved accuracy of billing, faster connections and disconnections and real-time usage information, the group welcomed the challenge. The project includes a tight time-frame for the installation of 1.2 million smart meters that can transmit two-way data to a central repository.

Leveraging the capabilities provided by the QA Team, the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Network Management System (NMS) support team used HP QC to drive the testing. HP QC is used to ensure that a third-party vendor meets Service Level Agreements (SLAs), that the AMI NMS application (Utility IQ) functions as it is supposed to, and that changes to the application do not present performance risks. HP QC allows the application owner to deliver quality solutions that meet company standards.

Field Mobile Applications

Further adhering to government regulations and business drivers, the group has deployed the Ventyx Service Suite to enable the accurate capture of real-time information from the field through over 500 PDAs. Adopting a thorough end-to-end testing process, the application group has aligned business expectations and security issues with the application itself, according to Alan King, manager, Field Mobile Applications. Incorporating HP QC allowed the team to effectively manage over 500 test cases and improve application functionality with the third-party vendor, based on discovered SLA deficiencies.

“HP QC allows us to manage our vendors and internal customers, as we can negotiate patches and articulate the priorities. It also improves our service levels to our internal customers as they have visibility into the defects and can contribute to the priority fix list,” says King.

Hocking adds: “selecting a high performing tool such as HP QC was the first step but having a skilled group of testing and monitoring consultants behind us makes all the difference. Put simply, JDS keeps the testing technology working so that other critical applications continue to be highly available with minimal defects. We would not have achieved the results without them,” says Hocking.

Powercor and CitiPower will continue to draw upon JDS’s expertise in the areas of technical testing, IT monitoring, and HP Software Support for the future.
“JDS Support has provided outstanding service levels. In the past three years, 60 percent of all support calls have been resolved instantly, and the rest within days,” concludes Hocking. “I can have skilled technicians on-site quickly if I need and can access a large pool of expertise for troubleshooting. With JDS, the Quality Assurance Team has been able to deliver on its service levels and we will continue to work together as we further enhance QA capabilities.”

Business Benefits

  • Rolled out HP Quality Centre across the enterprise to improve uptake of QA processes by 78 percent and increased application performance quality
  • Leveraged HP QC’s capabilities to support application testing for the Smart Meter project
  • Improved quality processes to enable IT application teams to deliver on service levels

Our team on the case

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