Due to high market demand for a new product line, a global manufacturing company had to rapidly extend their production capacity by opening new factory sites.

The entire production at the plants are managed with a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) built on top of the DELMIA Apriso platform. Any issues with this system can cause an interruption in production which would hurt the manufacturer’s plans of fast market expansion. Therefore, it is highly critical to test this system continuously.

The MES, delivered by an external vendor, had to be tested on various levels using very strict and well-documented processes. Most of the testing activities were planned, executed, and managed by experts from DREDAR, a Leapwork partner. The DREDAR team specializes in quality assurance of IT solutions in manufacturing, the financial sector, and more. 

Challenge

The main challenge was to find a way to automate a Manufacturing Execution System solution based on DELMIA Apriso.

As part of Dassault Systèmes’ DELMIA brand, the Apriso MES product is an enterprise, global solution to manage production, warehouse, quality, maintenance and labor tracking processes across locations.

The client had not previously made a decision to implement test automation. With the sudden need to scale production, the client explored different quality assurance activities for their manufacturing system. To ensure continuous testing of their MES at production sites, automation had to be rolled out fast.

The challenge for the provider of testing services, DREDAR, was to find a way of automating the DELMIA Apriso system that was efficient and scalable. DREDAR had previous experience with trying to introduce Selenium-based test automation to the client, but for the current situation, there was a need for an automation tool that could be adopted must faster.

Key project requirements:

• Find a tool with capabilities of seamlessly automating manufacturing system DELMIA Apriso.
• Due to the many integrations with the MES, including SAP applications and manufacturing devices, the project required an automation platform that could work seamlessly across several technologies.
• The test automation tool would have to be capable of end-to-end automated testing of critical scenarios.
• The project had to follow the very strict standard of GMP (Good manufacturing practice) which requires a high degree of traceability, reporting, and documentation of all aspects of the project.
  

Solution and results

The DREDAR team completed a Proof-of-Concept of the Leapwork Automation Platform as the solution for this project’s requirements. In just eight days, the project team of four people had enough proficiency with Leapwork to build automation flows for end-to-end scenarios.

The team relied on both self-study in Leapwork's Learning Center and Leapwork’s Customer Success Team to achieve the short learning curve.

To adhere to the documentation and reporting requirements dictated by the Good Manufacturing Practices, the DREDAR team relied on Leapwork’s automated video recordings of the machines running the test cases, combined with the auto-generated reports and logs. This saved the team from having to produce documentation afterward, which is very time-consuming.

With the Leapwork Automation Platform, the DREDAR team was able to automate both end-to-end and unit scenarios, including:

• Creating and sending Process Orders from SAP to the Apriso work center
  
• Data-driven flows using both SQL and Excel data sources
  
• Finding, copying, editing, moving XML files using graphical interface, command line and C# code
  
• Color and image recognition
  
• and much more