British American Tobacco achieved 30% reduction in QA and Testing cost via an industrialized delivery model 

Client Background

British American Tobacco (BAT), headquartered in London, sells its brands in more than 200 markets. The company, which makes cigarettes and cigarillos, operates in the Americas, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and several other geographies. With over 250 brands in their portfolio, BAT has over 40 manufacturing facilities where it rolls out next-generation nicotine and tobacco products.

Industry Landscape

The tobacco industry continues to be a substantial contributor to the economies of many countries across the globe. The resilience of the industry is underlined by the continued year-on-year net revenue growth at constant rates of exchange. However, factors such as regional regulatory pressures, frequent entry of new players and growing alternatives to combustible products are constantly keeping organizations in this space on their toes. To keep the competitive edge, companies are looking to increasingly invest in technology and bring in enterprise-wide IT resilience.

Opportunity

In the face of growing regulatory pressures and volatile market conditions, BAT wanted to enhance their Testing and Quality Assurance (QA) landscape by infusing greater agility and responsiveness. They were looking to increase market share and build a better brand image.

The company wanted to weed out enterprise-wide technology glitches via large scale ERP implementations, thereby giving shape to their plans to expand into Continental Europe and several other markets. . The need of the hour was a centralized QA and Testing function having metrics-driven standardized Testing processes and methodologies, and specialized Testing service competencies. BAT was looking to move away from a time and material pricing model to a catalogue-based industrialized model, which would reduce cost of delivery.

Solution

Being a global player with experience in large scale QA transformations, Wipro was BAT’s partner of choice. Wipro spearheaded the setup of an independent Testing function which operated in a factory model.

Here is what we rolled out:

• End-to-end QA and Testing ownership of SAP as well as non-SAP application portfolios: Services included key Testing tracks such as regression, automation, performance, etc.
• “Industrialized” delivery: SLA driven, lean and standardized domain-centric solutions and accelerators
• Innovative, flexible in scope and cost-effective “Unit Price Service” delivery model: Catalogue-based pricing for Testing units with defined activities and defined rates per unit
• Enterprise-wide automation framework, globally, for regression Testing
• Unified and transparent view of the entire engagement progress; frequent audits and QA gate reviews
• Tool rationalization: Setting up of centralized Testing tools administration service
  

Business Impact

• 30% reduction in overall cost of Quality Assurance and Testing as a result of unit-based pricing model
• The unit-based pricing delivery model led to 100% predictability in demand management
• Industrialized set-up/best practices resulted in improved maturity of Testing processes enterprise wide and improved productivity by 40%
• 15% increase in time to market products and services
• 60% increase in automation footprint, leading to over 1000 person days’ reduction year-on-year 
• 99% containment of defects within the Testing phase, prior to go-live
• Insight-driven decision making: Efficient reporting enabled better demand forecasting and budget controls
  

The Testing and QA processes that Wipro rolled out helped BAT cater to business variability efficiently.