At the recent Oracle AI World, the discourse around ERP maintenance moved beyond simple feature updates to tackle a persistent operational challenge: the high cost of manual testing. During a joint session, UL Solutions and Emerson, two global enterprises managing complex Oracle landscapes, presented data on their transition to automated quality engineering.
Their case studies offered a quantified look at modern testing strategies, detailing how they reduced testing cycles by 85% and managed ecosystems exceeding 17,000 test cases through the strategic implementation of Tricentis solutions.
The Efficiency Data: UL Solutions
For UL Solutions, a global leader in applied safety science, the operational friction of legacy testing had become a measurable drag on productivity. Erika Phillips, IT Manager at UL Solutions, outlined a scenario common to many Oracle shops. She said that her team was losing approximately 40 hours per week to manual testing cycles across a fragmented environment that included Oracle EBS, HCM, and Salesforce CPQ.
However, the turning point came with the integration of Tricentis Tosca for automation and NeoLoad for performance testing. Phillips presented post-implementation metrics that highlighted a drastic reduction in overhead. By deploying Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) agents and virtual machines, the team collapsed its weekly testing timeline from 40 hours down to six.
Beyond speed, the quality of coverage improved. The team consolidated 178 manual scenarios into 40 streamlined, automated flows. “That has allowed us to have our engineers focus on other tasks,” Phillips noted during the session. “They can work on production issues, the next deployment, the next patch… whatever is coming up.”
Managing Scale: The Emerson Case Study
While UL Solutions focused on speed, Emerson provided a case study in managing volume. LeAnn Wang, IT Director of Quality and Testing, detailed the logistical challenge of maintaining an ecosystem with 17,000 test cases. Prior to modernization, nearly 40% of her team’s capacity was consumed solely by script maintenance—a figure that made rapid innovation difficult.
Emerson’s strategy centered on reducing this technical debt through a centralized object repository and reusable modules. Rather than rewriting scripts for every update, the team established a library of modular components that could be easily adjusted.
Wang emphasized the critical role of risk-based testing in this transformation. By using Tricentis solutions to identify exactly which objects were impacted by an Oracle update, Emerson moved away from the test everything approach. This helped the company to pinpoint high-risk areas scientifically. It also ensured stability without the redundancy of full regression cycles on untouched code.
The Shift: From Maintenance to Strategy
This session at Oracle World underscored that the maintain and sustain model is evolving into a broader trend in the ERP sector. As Oracle environments grow more complex, the reliance on manual validation is becoming a liability. Both Phillips and Wang demonstrated that modern testing is not just about finding bugs. It is about reclaiming engineering hours.
By shifting from defensive manual checks to offensive, automated strategies, both organizations effectively decoupled their growth from their maintenance overhead.
What This Means For ERP Insiders
Integrate cross-platform testing. Testing Oracle in isolation is insufficient for modern enterprises. For example, UL Solutions’ success relied on validating workflows that spanned Oracle EBS, HCM, and third-party apps like Salesforce. Thus, effective strategies must mirror the actual business process, which rarely stays within a single application.
Adopt risk-based scope to test efficiently. Emerson’s handling of 17,000 test cases illustrates that volume does not equal quality. Utilizing risk-based analysis to determine what to test is just as important as the testing itself. This approach drastically lowers execution time while maintaining high security standards.
Metric-driven resource allocation is a must to manage resources effectively. The most compelling metric presented during the session was the return of hours to the business. Reducing testing loads by 85% transforms QA from a cost center into a talent strategy, freeing up senior engineers to focus on architecture and innovation rather than repetitive script execution.
