How Automated Testing Optimizes Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM)

May 4, 2023

/Iffat Ara Khanam/

Oracle Human Resources Management System (HRMS) was born in the early 1980s in order to provide solutions for managing payroll, benefits, talent management, and other HR-related tasks. As Cloud technology gained popularity, Oracle introduced Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud Service in 2011, which was the first cloud-based HR management software in the market.

Oracle HCM Cloud (Human Capital Management) is a well-known end-to-end HR solution that helps firms manage every stage of the employee lifecycle. It is a leader in Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites.

What are the Oracle HCM modules?

• Global HR
• Talent Management
• Workforce Rewards
• Workforce Management
• Work Life Solutions

HCM software can be used and accessed both on-premises in the Cloud. The Cloud is the way of the future. By utilizing Cloud-based HCM software, businesses can significantly reduce maintenance costs, improve access, and enhance the employee experience.

Is Oracle HCM Cloud the right choice for your company?

Understanding Cloud-Based HCM

On-premises HR solutions cannot meet the demands of the modern workforce and the pace of today’s business. To maintain a competitive advantage and adjust to change, organizations must be more adaptable, operationally efficient, and innovative. Because of this, clients all around the world are switching from on-premises HR systems to Oracle Cloud HCM.

The Benefits of Oracle HCM Cloud

• Modern user experience: The cloud offers modern user experiences that are not possible with on-premises solutions. Users can easily locate the information they need whenever and wherever they need it with a consistent, personalized, and intuitive experience that is accessible on all devices.
• Business agility: Cloud-based solutions are the only way to quickly and affordably meet new business requirements.
• Operating effectiveness: If your HR systems are not linked with the rest of your business, leaders lack the visibility they need to make informed decisions. With the use of cloud-based HCM solutions, data from all HR operations and other business functions, like planning and payroll, are combined into a single source of truth. This consolidated data provides a better user experience that supports better business outcomes.
• Cost saving: Cloud-based HCM solutions do not have the substantial costs associated with managing, upgrading, and maintaining them like on-premises HCM solutions. By switching to the cloud, your company can also go from a licensing model to a subscription model, which is significantly more cost-effective.

The Significance of Testing in Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management

Oracle Cloud HCM is updated on a quarterly basis, providing your company with new features and capabilities. Every update needs to be tested at least twice, once in the production environment and once in the test environment. It is crucial to have a thorough testing strategy to guarantee that nothing goes wrong during these update cycles.

One of Opkey’s customers, Northwell Health, was migrating their system from Oracle EBS to Oracle Cloud with agile methodology. This required them to perform testing every three weeks. They made the switch to continuous testing. With Opkey’s continuous testing methodology, Northwell Health’s testing costs came in 68% below budget.

See how Northwell Health could cut their Oracle HCM Cloud implementation time by 2 months and save $1.2 million.

Migration to Oracle Cloud HCM Also Possesses Significant Testing Challenges: Let’s See How It Goes.

• Regression testing must be performed at least eight times per year due to Oracle’s quarterly changes. This is nearly impossible to execute manually.
• Oracle HCM apps are inherently dynamic. This means that a test automation tool like Selenium that relies on fixed elements to control a screen cannot be used to automate Oracle HCM tests. Even simple UI changes might cause test failures.
• Oracle HCM Cloud testing must have a defined scope in for every new implementation. Too much testing can cause the implementation to run late and beyond budget, while not enough testing might expose your company to considerable risk.

According to Oracle, more than 80% of implementations go over time or budget.

• Non-technical business users, such as analysts and functional consultants, typically generate test scenarios, whereas technical staff writes automation scripts. As a result, creating test cases is a time-consuming and expensive process involving numerous groups of personnel.

However, testing will be a hard nut to crack if you are implementing a fresh Oracle HCM Cloud system or migrating from an on-premise system to the Cloud.

Oracle HCM Cloud Automated Testing With Opkey

Opkey is the industry’s premier AI-powered Oracle HCM test automation tool, ensuring that your migration/implementation is completed on time and under budget.

• No-code test automation: Opkey uses natural language processing (NLP) to enable business users to write test cases in plain language. This enables non-technical personnel to write and automate tests without requiring IT assistance.
• Pre-built test assets: Opkey significantly reduces the load of test creation with 8,000+ test assets built specifically for Oracle testing.
• Change Impact Analysis: Opkey’s impact analysis lets you know precisely what will change between your processes as-is and to-be, and it makes sure that the most significantly affected ones are tested first. Opkey’s self-healing features fix broken tests with a single click. As a result, test maintenance efforts are reduced by 70%.
• Smart regression: Opkey’s AI-powered test engines advise executing the fewest number of test scripts possible, based on the areas affected by an Oracle HCM Cloud upgrade.

We hope that you now better understand how automation testing raises the bar for Oracle HCM applications. At Opkey, we help Oracle customers upgrade their workforce systems more quickly while lowering the risk of change.

Opkey is a member of the Oracle Partner Network. Our AI-driven solutions help our joint customers achieve business agility with speed and confidence.

Iffat Ara Khanam

Technical Content Lead

Iffat is the content lead at Opkey. She has expertise in writing technical content focused around ERP testing, Cloud apps, automation and other IT related topics. She has rich experience in writing content for marketing collateral like whitepapers, case studies, newsletters etc. which helps in funnel creation for sales.