Northrop Grumman has turned to automated testing to keep its SAP environment stable as it moves through a major S/4HANA migration, according to a case study published by Worksoft and covered by SAPinsider.
The aerospace and defence group, which supports operations spanning finance, supply chain and manufacturing, relies on SAP to keep business-critical processes moving across a global footprint. With more than 70,000 users dependent on those systems, even a small software fault...
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could ripple through production and compliance workflows. For years, much of the validation work was done manually, with test cases tracked in spreadsheets and executed step by step in the SAP graphical interface.
Tony Morello of Northrop Grumman said the team had experimented with automation before, but the efforts tended to be fragmented and short-lived. Leadership then pushed for broader automation across the business, just as the company was preparing to move from SAP ECC to S/4HANA. That transition brought extra complexity, including new integrations and dependencies that had to be checked before each release.
Northrop Grumman selected Worksoft Certify after comparing several tools in a side-by-side test. According to the company’s account, Worksoft completed the sample SAP scenario in hours, while other vendors struggled and required repeated troubleshooting over several days. The team now uses Certify to validate business processes across both ECC and S/4HANA, with codeless automation reducing the maintenance burden on a small testing group.
The migration is now around 80% complete, and most of the newer automation work is focused on SAP Fiori, the interface used for many of the company’s updated workflows. Morello said that is where much of the day-to-day work now takes place, making it the most valuable place to apply automation.
The effort has also expanded beyond SAP itself. One automated process links SAP with Ryder, Northrop Grumman’s shipping and logistics platform, creating and validating shipping documents across systems. The company said this was the sort of task that had once been viewed as too awkward to automate.
The impact has been significant in some areas. In SAP Concur, a process that once took two employees a full week to complete manually can now be finished in a few hours, representing a cut of more than 85% in processing time. Morello said automation has allowed the team to run repeatable checks before production releases rather than relying on one-off manual tests.
Northrop Grumman said its automation coverage is still relatively small, at about 5%, but it wants to increase that to 20% in the next test cycle. The company also plans to involve more business users through Worksoft Business Capture, which would let them record workflows for automation themselves.
The broader transformation is also being supported elsewhere. SNP has separately described its work with Northrop Grumman on modernising a complex ERP landscape through migration to S/4HANA, underscoring how the company’s overhaul spans both transformation and testing.
Source: Noah Wire Services
