Case Study: Global Pharmaceutical Company achieves 50% faster SAP update testing with Avanade intelligent automation

Global pharmaceutical company speeds up manual SAP updates by 50% with intelligent automation

A global pharmaceutical company needed to accelerate and de-risk updates to its core SAP model, which are rolled out to 49 plants and sites worldwide. The challenge was to evaluate whether automating the execution and validation of the SAP test cases that drive those global updates could deliver measurable productivity gains and cost savings.

Avanade ran a six-week proof of concept using a sample from a 120‑case library toward a goal of automating about 100 test cases. The RPA solution captures screenshots of each test step, pastes them with descriptions into a Word document for human review, and cut test execution time by 50%, delivering cost savings equivalent to 1–2 offshore FTEs and faster SAP deployments, with potential for further automation to reduce human approval.