Shiseido

Shiseido Beautifies its UAT with Panaya

About
Shiseido

Shiseido is one of the oldest cosmetic companies in the world. Founded in 1872, they are a Japanese multinational personal care company with over 33,000 employees worldwide. Operating in over 120 countries and regions, Shiseido is the fifth largest cosmetics company in the world.

“Panaya is like a light in the darkness. We all of a sudden have the visibility of what we need to test and the confidence that we can share this with the business users. We know the impact precisely, something we never knew in the past.”

Sebastian Hebert | Technical Director, Shiseido

The Challenge

Shiseido has over 300 users and 6 SAP competence centers throughout Europe. The company had to perform an overall upgrade, moving from ECC EHP4 to EHP6.

Shiseido faced organizational and structural challenges. The company had not done any major SAP projects since the 2010 go-live. Despite that, they had a tight deadline to migrate: 5.5 months. They had to mobilize all of their business users to perform User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and control their tests throughout their European division – eleven countries and almost 80 testers.

Culture can be a major impediment to changes. With infrequent changes and teams spread worldwide there was no culture of business users doing large-scale tests. The plan for the UAT cycle was to run eleven countries in parallel with 676 business processes to test. The most complex scenario had 23 steps and involved seven different testers!

Here are some of the challenges that Shiseido faced in this project:

Manage the planning in Excel of the 676 business processes.
Share the Excel files between sites, ensuring that everyone had the correct version to describe the updated sequence to test the business processes.
Full visibility of test progress.
Find a way to have collaboration between testers: Tester A must notify Tester B when A completes a step so B can start it. Idle time impacts project quality.
Centralize and communicate changes or defects to all relevant stakeholders.
Improve management visibility to track progress.

Shiseido needed a modern tool to manage user testing.

“The move to ERP agility also means that we need to look differently at how we handle UAT since it is becoming the new bottleneck of digital transformation”

Sebastian Hebert, Technical Director.

The Solution

Shiseido’s affiliate began using Panaya in 2012 when they upgraded EHP3 SPS 11. Following the project, Shiseido knew that they had to use it for their upgrade to EHP6.

Panaya enabled Shiseido to realize that it will be realistic to actually migrate to EHP6 within less than 6 months. The above challenges will be easily addressed.

No need to manually notify different testers when tests are ready. Testers are instantly notified by email as soon as a test is ready.
Users only need to confirm results and their confirmation is documented and recorded automatically.

Migrating to Panaya increased visibility. Indicators are available and updated in real-time. There was no excuse for inaccurate estimates. Team leaders and managements saw where the project stood.

The Results

The upgrade met the deadline. The entire process only took five months. UAT only took five weeks! The speedy progress happened because they were able to get full team buy in mobilized around a modern tool, instead of tedious Excel files. Despite the quick progress, they had more precise control of the projects and more detailed tracking systems. They had full recording of tests and their results.

Panaya also helped them in unexpected ways:

Shiseido was able to use Panaya to record results and proof for all tests on all platforms beyond SAP.
Tests were organized and well-structured so that they have a reusable test repository at the end of the project. A rollout project is already in the plans and there is no question regarding how UAT will be managed!
Panaya’s capture functions were used to generate comprehensive training documents.