Case study: Acutest testing and assurance at Sanlam Investments

Read about how Acutest’s consultants accelerated Sanlam’s digital transformation with their leading assurance and testing approaches.

Background

Sanlam Investments is an international financial services group that delivers wealth and investment management services to private clients, families, financial advisers, and professional investors.

They recently undertook a major programme of change, across a number of programmes including the replacement of their asset and wealth management platform, Pulse Symphony with XPLAN. As such, they needed a partner they could rely on to initiate a testing solution and approach that would support their operations.

The Challenge

Prior to engaging Acutest, testing was undertaken by business subject matter experts (SMEs) and IT resources on a ‘best endeavours’ basis. Sanlam recognised the value and need to have a more agile, structured approach to testing using proven processes and techniques they could rely on.

They sought the support of Acutest to define and implement a structured, consistent and repeatable testing process to work with them to support of all their planned changes.

“Acutest has been a key pillar in the success of Sanlam’s transformation programme over the last few years. Their ability to develop a testing function from scratch using proven methodologies was a game-changer. This enabled the delivery of high-quality complex system implementations across multiple business areas. Sanlam also leveraged Acutest’s experience in automation building out tools supporting both operational processing and major software upgrades. It’s been a pleasure working with their highly professional team throughout.”

Alex Knott, Chief Technology Officer, Sanlam

The Solution

Acutest consultants undertook an enterprise testing improvement review (health check) to determine the scope and priorities of the test service.

Following on from the review, Acutest implemented:-

• test function leadership and governance
• programme testing capability and capacity
• a test automation framework supported by ongoing development and execution
• enterprise-wide testing framework with supporting repository and reporting
• specialist resource on a ‘as needs basis’ to ramp up and down as required
• a robotic process automation (RPA) solution to enable data reconciliation
• coaching and transition to enable a Sanlam testing capability to be maintained inhouse

“During our work with Sanlam, our skilled testing consultants helped drive forward Sanlam’s major programme of change using the tried and tested Acutest approach. Based on an outcomes-based methodology, shaped by our customer-centric principles and practices, that offers value for money and best-in-class testing performance.”

Ian Coe, Acutest Account Manager

The Benefits

Sanlam benefitted from having a solid testing assurance framework, which increased the quality of testing across the change programme. Some of the benefits include:

• test execution timeframes significantly reduced
• reduced data reconciliation timeframes and improved accuracy from the implementation of the RPA solution.
• freed up resources on the upgrade of the asset and wealth management platform and allowed the Sanlam subject matter experts on other areas of the project.
• improved governance in 3rd party and internal testing through the testing repository and dashboard MI reporting.
• enabled visibility of status and risk to support informed decision-making.

Take control of your testing

If this sounds like a solution for your organisation, then why not talk to your Account Manager. You can book a scoping call to find out how Acutest can help with your testing, governance and quality assurance needs. Find out more about Acutest, including the full range of Testing and Quality Assurance Services on the Acutest webpage.

Written by Julia Bluckert.