How to Maximize Your ROI With Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud ERP vendors have long touted the benefits of SaaS. It boasts a flexible and predictable cost structure, higher quality of workflows, and reduced reliance on IT for routine maintenance. A new study from Nucleus Research shows that the return on investment for Cloud solutions is four times greater on average than for on-premises deployments.

While migrating to Oracle Cloud enables organizations to be agile and respond to business needs faster, many organizations struggle to achieve a quick ROI on their Oracle Cloud investment.

In fact, more than 80% of Oracle projects go over time and budget. 

What’s the leading cause of these delays and expenses? 

Oracle Cloud migration & implementation projects require thousands of hours of testing. With four major quarterly updates a year, each requiring at least two rounds of testing, the benefits of Oracle Cloud can quickly be negated by the time, money, and effort required to test. This blog discusses how automated testing can help you achieve a faster ROI on your Oracle Cloud investment.

Learn more: How to Save Money with Test Automation

How Testing Impacts Your ROI

‍According to Oracle, testing is one of the main costs associated with implementing and maintaining Oracle Cloud.

To determine the ROI of your Oracle Cloud investment, you calculate the Net Return / Cost of the Investment. To maximize the ROI of your Oracle Cloud investment, then, you should minimize the cost of testing. That being said, you must still robustly test your Oracle Cloud environment because if your Oracle Cloud apps break, the results can be catastrophic for your business.

Learn more: Practical Guide to Testing Oracle Cloud Updates

Migration and implementation projects often have tens of thousands of processes and configurations to test. As you can imagine, the cost of testing and the time required to test quickly add up and consume a large share of IT budgets and bandwidth. According to Oracle, more than 80% of migration projects go over-time or over-budget. Because manual testing doesn’t scale and companies must hire more testers as testing needs grow, costs can quickly balloon with the increased testing demands from migration or implementation. This is especially true with recent wage inflation, as manual testers are now charging $25 per hour or potentially much more.

Even when the migration is complete and your organization is live with Oracle Cloud, testing remains a burden. This is because Oracle pushes four mandatory quarterly releases per year, and organizations only have 2 weeks to certify the releases for each cycle. With the rise of composable ERPs–which refers to Oracle Cloud modules integrating with other applications and technologies–each quarterly update represents a major testing task, as dozens, if not hundreds, of integrations, must be thoroughly tested to ensure business continuity.

Maximizing Your ROI With Test Automation

Here’s how test automation lowers your testing costs and increases the ROI of your Oracle Cloud modules:

• Finding errors earlier and more often:  According to the IBM Systems Sciences Institute, finding a bug post-release costs 4–5 times as much as finding it earlier in the development process. Fixing a post-release error takes twice as long as fixing it in earlier stages. When you use test automation to expand your test coverage, you’ll find more defects before the software goes into production. The result: you can avoid significant delays in software delivery and save your company from costly fixes.

• Automation built to scale: Manual testing simply does not scale with your Oracle Cloud testing needs. As time goes on, the cost of testing your Oracle Cloud rises in direct correlation to the amount of labor needed to create and maintain the tests. Alternatively, automated testing requires an up-front investment, but costs less in the long-term. Once you’ve created test scripts, you can use them over and over at no additional cost. 

• Testing what matters: Intelligent test automation solutions help organizations focus testing on their most at-risk business processes. With this approach, organizations can cover up to 80% of their risk with only 20% of the effort. 

• Increased team productivity:  Automated tests don’t require any human involvement while running. Because these tests can run repeatedly on their own, software developers, QAs, and business users can spend less time on testing and more time on critical tasks. Additionally, these tests can run 24/7 because computers don’t require sleep, unlike manual testers.

• Ensure worst-case scenarios don’t happen: Given the frequency of Cloud-based ERP updates, the consequences of the changes pushed, and the short time frame to test, manual testing is risky because it doesn’t provide enough test coverage. Test automation enables teams to test all their most critical processes so that worst-case scenarios don’t occur.

• Take advantage of new features, faster: As we mentioned, ROI is calculated by calculating Net Return / Cost of Investment. Test automation essentially increases the Net Return of your investment by enabling you to take advantage of Oracle Cloud’s new features faster, increasing your ROI.

Learn more: How to Justify Test Automation Spend to Your Boss

Opkey’s Test Automation Platform Maximizes Your Oracle Cloud ROI

Now that you’re convinced that test automation is vital to achieving a positive ROI on your Oracle Cloud investment, we’ll share some reasons why Opkey is the logical choice for your Oracle Cloud test automation needs.

1. Opkey comes with 7,000+ pre-built, automated Oracle Cloud tests

You can apply these tests to your environment in just hours to begin enjoying the benefits of test automation. Expanding your test coverage with the pre-built test library allows you to test more processes and find more defects before the software goes into production. This helps avoid significant delays in software delivery and costly bug fixes.

2. Opkey has user-friendly dashboards

Opkey helps users keep track of each test step in easy-to-understand dashboards. Through these dashboards, users can assign tasks, track testing progress, and communicate about specific tests.  ‍

3. Opkey educates clients on changes to their Oracle Cloud instance

Opkey’s change impact analysis shows our client's "as is" vs. "to be" processes, with each update. This allows clients to focus their testing on the processes with the biggest expected changes.

4. Opkey’s test scripts have self-healing technology

This capability saves you countless hours of test maintenance work. Whenever a test script breaks from a change, the self-healing feature identifies and fixes the script automatically. Non-technical users only need to click the accept button. This reduces test maintenance efforts by 80%.

5. Opkey’s platform doesn’t require coding

Opkey’s no-code platform enables any employee—no matter their technical expertise—to contribute to test automation. Technical resources are notoriously expensive, and Opkey’s solutions don’t require these resources.

6. Opkey supports end-to-end testing

Opkey incorporates end-to-end testing to make sure a business process works from beginning to end, and that changes in an application don’t affect third-party integrations and other applications in another part of the business process. With support for over 12 packaged applications and 150 technologies, Opkey makes it so you only need one tool for all your test automation needs.

Testing is a common pain point for organizations hoping for a quick ROI after migrating to Oracle Cloud. In the same way that migrating to Oracle Cloud allows you to adapt your ERP to your business needs more quickly, test automation can help organizations achieve a faster and positive ROI.