Multinational Pharmaceutical Company Overview

This multinational pharmaceutical company is a customer of Salesforce through Veeva CRM, a specialized CRM solution for the life sciences industry built on Salesforce’s Force.com platform.

They also use Content Management System OrchestraCMS, integrated with Salesforce applications and data. They came to Provar to improve their Salesforce test automation capability.

The Challenge of CRM Solutions in Pharmaceutical

Regression testing is a crucial part of every release. This consumes vast resources at this company due to the manual testing required each time: in just 2014, they completed 54 releases.

The company had the vision to reduce manual testing effort through a Salesforce test automation solution, but they struggled to find the right option.

After spending time and money building a Salesforce test automation regression suite using other automation tools such as Selenium® and QTP®, they still hadn’t found an optimized or scalable solution.

There was also a maintenance cost to unintegrated tools: every minor change in workflow had to be reflected in external scripts. The process was time-consuming and expensive and was delaying releases.

They came to Provar to see whether an integrated Salesforce test automation tool could fill the gap in CRM Solutions in the Pharmaceutical.

The Solution Using Salesforce Pharmaceutical Tool

Provar is an end-to-end Salesforce test automation tool that can be used for pharmaceuticals, designed especially for Salesforce.

Because Provar is tightly integrated with Salesforce, it provides a more efficient way to implement Salesforce pharmaceuticals test automation.

The minor environment changes to an environment become easier to accommodate, taking away the pain of maintenance and the difficulty of scaling.

Using Provar, the company was able to get up and running in a short period. They ran 20 days of workshops, targeting 15 complex scenarios that covered all the areas of the workflow. In the time given, they found that two complete beginners could create more than 20 scripts – this was a more significant number than expected and included time to learn using the tool!

The company found that Provar handles testing Veeva and OrchestraCMS very efficiently and requires far less effort to implement than other tools.

Provar also allows executing the same set of automation scripts on multiple environments, which offers significant efficiency savings.

The Results of Using Provar

For this company, implementing Provar helped reduce testing time and effort but also helped increase test coverage of different permutations.

Today, they have greater confidence in each release, knowing that the risk of release has been dramatically reduced with an integrated Salesforce test automation tool.

Technical Solution

S-Control Support

Veeva uses s-controls, an older Force.com technology superseded by Visualforce. Provar’s integrated solution handles these easily, unlike traditional tools, which proved challenging to manage.

Environment Management

Provar maintains its algorithm for testing Visualforce locators independently of the environment. This makes it easy to run scripts across multiple environments and with numerous users.

On-Screen Navigation

Provar’s ‘On Screen’ functionality takes the user directly to the relevant object screen, removing the need for login and additional screen navigations and speeding up the automation process.

Embedded Frames and Tables

Veeva and OrchestraCMS both use embedded frames, nested frames, and tables. The automation of testing these elements is complex and laborious in many standard tools. Provar could handle these automatically in a single step, and the complexity is hidden from the user.

Veeva uses related lists and other dynamic list screens, which other tools struggled to handle. Provar has built-in support for dynamic related lists and list screens, making searching and locating elements quick.

Frame Switching

Veeva involves switching between frames and screens, which can be a stumbling block for other tools but is handed automatically by Provar.

Tab Management

OrchestraCMS manages screens based on tabs (Task, Content, etc.). Each Tab defines a frame whose index or locator is dynamic, and each frame contains nested frames and tables inside it, making it extremely complex to automate.

Provar has inbuilt support for OrchestraCMS, allowing direct navigation to Tab home screens to speed up Salesforce pharmaceutical automation. Provar also populates and handles tabs automatically, supporting navigation between different tabs quickly and automatically and hiding the complexity from the user.