Aritzia Case Study

Online Retailer Aritzia Test to Perfection While Reducing Business Disruption

For retail and digital commerce companies, consumer experience innovation is lifeblood. Constantly reinventing consumer experience inevitably means frequent releases of enterprise applications changes. Imagine for example a new Point-of-Sale implementation. This type of customer-facing change would have so many touch-points with enterprise applications; inventory, supply chain & distribution, human resources – to name but a few. Without the right test methodology, introducing change comes with long delivery cycles and greater risk.

The Challenge: Satellite Systems Sync-Up

When in the process of change implementation to their business application, Canada-based fashion retailer Aritzia found out that their testing methodology was complex and unscalable. With many distributed teams, satellite locations and third-party partner systems, such as supply chain management, involved with the change delivery, their current testing practices were inefficient, and time consuming.

 

Aritizia, like many enterprise organizations were using spreadsheets to manage their test cycles. The spreadsheets were maintained on a per-project basis and there was no central visibility into overall testing coverage and methodology. “As projects discontinued, testing spreadsheets were also disconnected as there was no central hub,” RJ Caswell, Director of Business Applications at Aritzia was quoted as saying.

 

From Manually Maintained Spreadsheets to a Testing Platform

Overhauling their entire test management methodology, Aritzia has shifted away from disparate, un-auditable spreadsheets and applied the Panaya Test Center platform for full visibility and optimization capabilities on a unified, central platform.

 

By using Panaya Test Center to centralize and standardize test orchestration and automate corrections, Artizia is now able to shorten project duration and reduce business disruption by 54% on average. For example, the EHP0 SPS 15 to EHP7 SPS5 upgrade timeframe was reduced from 1,607 to 731 hours (saving 876 hours).

 

RJ Caswell, Director of Business Applications at Aritzia attributes some of the implementation’s success to Panaya’s system-wide defect tracking “[It] is so smooth, we use it to communicate not only with developers, testers, users but also with our external applications partners” he was quoted as saying.  Read Aritzia’s Case Study for the full story.