In 2015, Fortune named Lannett Company, Inc. the fastest-growing business in the United States, following a record $274 million in sales in 2014, which capped nine consecutive quarters of record net sales, and the acquisitions of Silarx Pharmaceuticals and Kremers Urban Pharmaceuticals. With those acquisitions, Lannett — a developer, manufacturer, and distributor of generic pharmaceutical prescription products — added nearly 400,000 square feet of manufacturing space and gained 15 additional products that have applications pending at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Developing and manufacturing specialty pharmaceutical products is a complex and highly regulated business, requiring meticulous processes to research, create, and bring to market new medications. Lannett leans heavily on SAP Business Suite applications for many of its end-to-end operational and back-end processes, including finance, manufacturing, distribution, inventory, quality assurance, and other production operations.

By onboarding two major acquisitions into its SAP landscape, Lannett adds to an already intricate tapestry of processes running through SAP ERP. Because this has occurred following a planned upgrade to enhancement package 7 for SAP ERP 6.0 (from SAP R/3 4.7), the issue of testing these integrated business scenarios and the overall application landscape rose to the forefront, making Lannett reconsider its traditional approach of manual-based business process testing. In this high-stakes business, every process has to perform as expected.      

“With the planned upgrade, we recognized that we’d have to do extensive testing to ensure we didn’t miss anything during the upgrade prior to going live into production,” says Bob Ehlinger, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Lannett. “This was the trigger to introduce automation into our testing environment. Without it, it would be virtually impossible to achieve coverage and ensure the quality of all of our business processes.”

Even before planning the SAP upgrade and bringing Kremers Urban and Silarx onboard, Lannett recognized that its manual-based testing environment was not as efficient as it could be. While ultimately effective, the time-consuming and cumbersome testing process utilized too many resources, diverting functional users from higher value-added tasks. It wasn’t uncommon, for example, for a quality assurance (QA) team to be temporarily diverted from a product release process by being asked to work through and certify the accuracy of a certain business process procedure.

When the IT department, working with the business, identified which business processes required testing based on changes introduced to production, it then pulled the appropriate business processes from its regression test script repository, printed them out, and identified the needed functional team resources. As an example, Lannett’s material creation process touches about 10 transactions and involves five different departments. Manual testing required Ehlinger’s team to coordinate multiple resources from each of those functional teams to work with IT to ensure accuracy in the system change.

This is why undergoing an SAP upgrade in parallel with a significant onboarding project made manual testing untenable in the long-run. “Manual testing was time consuming and required collaboration with many technical and business resources to work through the process until it was completed effectively,” Ehlinger says. “It’s certainly not the most efficient strategy, especially when you make a change a few months down the line and have to do it all over again. So we decided to look at automation.”

Building Business Process Automation

A search for an automated testing tool that offered integration to its complex SAP environment led Lannett to Worksoft Certify, the flagship product from SAP partner Worksoft, which offers end-to-end business process testing for high volumes of both SAP and non-SAP process workloads. (For more information about Worksoft Certify, refer to the sidebar at the end of the article.)

“When we started looking at Worksoft Certify, our focus was to create a strong foundation for our SAP applications with a plan to then expand that coverage to our non-SAP landscape,” says Jag Shivaramaiah, Director of IT Application Services at Lannett. “Right away, we could see that leveraging Worksoft would mean the functional teams we had engaged for manual testing cycles could be pulled out and deployed elsewhere.”

The main reason this was possible is that the centralized platform’s database can store high volumes of business process tests, which Lannett created with the intent to run its Worksoft test environment as a mirror image of its production system. This system would enable the business to run automation scenarios without impacting production.

“We went across all of our functional areas to identify every end-to-end business process, such as order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, and created test automation for all of them to use for our regression test cycles,” says Shivaramaiah. “Initially, there were about 100 business process tests that we had in place for the upgrade.”

Because a process like order-to-cash involves several transactions, end-to-end testing could entail upward of a dozen or so test components linked together to simulate a complete production flow. With the business process tests verifying as-expected outcomes, the immediate benefit of automation, beyond a reduction in resources, has been better assurance and confidence that system defects will not make it into production.

Streamlining Compliance Reporting

In addition, automated reports and documentation in Worksoft Certify enable Lannett to more easily comply with FDA validation and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. With an audit trail that reveals the author of every business process test, its output, and its changes, Lannett can tailor compliance documentation to match the requirements of specific regulators.

“The traceability is very important in terms of documenting the link between test scenarios and user requirements,” says Shivaramaiah. “Typically, regulators ask for proof of testing in terms of acceptance, regression, and integration testing, and Worksoft allows us to achieve that traceability across the life cycle. Worksoft makes it very easy to comply with FDA compliance and audit requirements whenever they come up. I simply have to print out a report with the complete business process showing who did what.” And because the test scenarios are run and maintained on a regular basis to ensure quality, there is a much higher likelihood that the process descriptions are accurate and up to date when the time comes to use them to generate compliance documents.

Achieving End-to-End Visibility and Boosting Quality

According to Nick Kostiou, SAP ERP Business Analyst at Lannett, the company has achieved automated coverage of roughly 90% of its business processes run by SAP ERP, with a goal of increasing that to 95%. Lannett has also seen an immediate 60% reduction of defects making it into production.

“This coverage of our SAP business practices would be virtually impossible from a manual viewpoint,” Kostiou says. “From a resource perspective, instead of tying up the business, we now can have one person initiate the automated process — and we have the results overnight. We know exactly what to expect.”

Ehlinger says that in addition to preventing costly downtime during implementations, other benefits include business users feeling more trusting of the quality of the overall system because of increased confidence in the accuracy of the data provided.

“Because the business processes are all clearly laid out within Worksoft, functional as well as technical teams can much more easily see and understand how all the different pieces integrate,” Ehlinger says. “When new people come on board and want to understand how a process such as sales and distribution works, they can just go through the processes in Worksoft to understand how it all ties together.”

There are innovation advantages as well. Ehlinger says that with a newfound visibility into process integration, business teams seem to be more open to using new technology and adapting to new business processes because they know they will no longer be challenged with the cumbersome task of integrating new processes into the testing cycle.

From a time-savings perspective, Shivaramaiah says that if a 16-week project introducing new SAP technology typically involved four weeks of testing, automated business process testing with Worksoft Certify helps shave off about three of those weeks — shortening the elapsed time of test cycles by roughly 75%.

“Instead of having to deploy five resources for a complex project, now I can leverage those resources elsewhere in the business to drive innovation across the organization, and that translates to a savings of around one or two full-time employees each year,” Shivaramaiah says.

Expanding Test Automation Beyond the SAP Landscape

In addition to Lannett’s stated goal of achieving up to 95% coverage of its SAP business processes through automation with Worksoft, the company also intends to increase coverage of its non-SAP portfolio, including its electronic data interchange (EDI) processes.

“While the upgrade to SAP ERP was the fundamental driver for Worksoft, the system isn’t limited to SAP software. Expanding it out to EDI is just one of the ways we see Worksoft automation continuing to drive additional value across our other applications,” Ehlinger says.