We are constantly turning to technology to boost our business outcomes, either by increasing our revenue or decreasing our costs. This is where automated testing for Microsoft Dynamics 365 can impact both your organization’s revenue and costs.

In this second blog post in our series on automated testing, which is a part of our suite of 20+ AMS services for Microsoft Dynamics 365, we’ll build a business case for implementing automated testing in your IT department. Keep reading to find out why it makes sense for your team!

Release more often and cut your deployment costs

As a result of deploying more frequently – say, from 6 to 24 planned annual releases ? then IT will spend more time in total, as their work per release will not be decreased, but considerably less time on testing, if on any testing at all.

Assuming hours spent for testing exceed the hours spent on deploying, then it can actually end up being more expensive to test by relying on the involvement of the end-users.

If your specific calculations are showing a zero-sum or worse, it is a strong indicator that your current test is probably not thorough enough and that you can expect an even bigger impact on the cost.

Reduce costs resulting from reactive handling of production issues

Every support ticket created holds the cost of IT resolving it and the cost and lost earnings for the business users being inconvenienced by it. Notice the plural in users, because that is the key to your business case. With automated testing, you increase the quality of your test and lower the barrier to release urgent fixes. IT’s cost of handling each ticket will remain the same but the number of tickets will decrease. And the business impact per ticket will also decrease as the bugs will be less significant and the fix applied faster.

Let’s look at this example:

1. A company gets 20 critical bugs per year on their Dynamics solutions.
2. IT spends an average of 10 hours per bug at an internal cost of 50 euros per hour.
3. Each of their 200 end-users experience an average productivity loss of 1 hour per bug at a cost of 50 euro per hour and an additional 10 euro per hour in lost earnings.
4. Total cost is 250,000 euros per year.
5. The company invests 60,000 euros in automated testing which lowers the number of bugs by 25% while the business impact per user per bug is also lowered by 25%.
6. As a result, the company saves 47,500 euros per year or 20% of their cost for reactive measurements already in year 1.
7. In year 2, where the investment in maintaining and enhancing the automated test might be 300 hours of 50 euros per hour, the total yearly saving would be 92,500 euros or 37% of the total spending for reactive measures.

The above calculation is naturally quite simplified. You could granulate it further by, for example, applying different parameters for major incidents, normal bugs and general support tickets. However, when you play around with the numbers, you’ll see that it does not really matter whether you change the numbers up or down. The output remains the same ? this is a clear-cut good investment!

Reinvest in the platform

You could naturally take these cost reductions and walk away. But you could also exploit the fact that automated testing has removed a major risk of introducing new features and re-invest some of these savings back into the platform in the form of new features to maximize your total business gain even further.

Watch out for the pitfall

Whether to invest in an automation test is typically a decision made by IT. But as the above calculations reveal, the biggest financial benefits is in the business. So, if you want to take this idea to your own organization, ensure that both sides understand the gain and are onboard.

I hope to have inspired you to read more about automated testing. Check out other blog posts in this series:

• It’s just so obvious! 4 reasons why Automated Testing for Microsoft Dynamics 365 makes big business sense
• All you need to know about the technology behind Automated Testing for Microsoft Dynamics 365
• AlfaPeople Automated Test: Now you get the gist, it’s time to dive into your Dynamics 365

Contact us today!

AlfaPeople has, for the 10th consecutive year, been recognized as a top-1% Microsoft Partner and a leading consultancy firm for Microsoft Business Applications including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.

Would you like to hear more about AlfaPeople’s Automated Test? Our talented consultants are ready to speak with you today. Contact us at +45 70 20 27 40 or email dynamics365team@alfapeople.com to let us discuss how we can help you!