We have seen ROI but it's very hard to capture because a lot of the benefits are hard to monetize. We have seen a huge reduction in the time to test and a huge reduction in the number of people needed to test. Rather than lay off a bunch of people, we've chosen to do more projects, so our rate of implementations has gone up. 

The 93 percent reduction in labor that the Middle East calculated was pretty impressive. I would say that, on average, it would be more like a 70 percent reduction in test time, because you still have to have people review the tests to make sure they're comfortable. Even though we say everything passed, they're going to want to review them. And then there's the retesting of any remediation that needs to be done.

We have seen an ROI. In the end, it is money and time. You save time for the testing, and you also save time in making corrections. If you don't have such high-quality testing, you will end up with errors in the production system. You will also have some interruptions in the daily business in your SAP systems. That's one aspect of the return on investment. The easiest way to calculate the ROI is in terms of the effort that you are reducing for testing.

It has saved us significant time. I have an entire dashboard that I use to showcase to everybody the amount of manual hours that we have saved and how that equates to dollars saving.

On our last big SAP implementation project, we inserted an automation resource into the beginning of the project. Between automating regression processes, data staging, and using our automation to help repair cutover and conversion issues, we saved the project about $1,700,000.

Worksoft has paid for itself fives times over.

We have seen ROI.

By using automation, it reduced about 75 percent of the time when compared to any other tool. The changes for Worksoft used the same script as the script automating UFT. Manually, running our tool takes about 4 hours, but with Worksoft, we were able to do it in less than 30 minutes. Whereas, the same thing that you had to do would take you almost 55 minutes to an hour. There is now a 50 percent savings in terms of other automation tools and an 85 percent savings in terms of manual to automation.

We have seen more than 40 to 50 percent reduction, in terms of all around time, where we were doing five days a week for a major maintenance testing of our first cycle. We have reduced it down to three days now. So, that is a 40 percent savings which we are seeing. We are not completely automated because we are still doing sampling. We have just automated a good 40 percent of our things. When we go to 80 to 100 percent, it will reduce 60 to 80 percent of our time, which is what we are looking for.

Our ROI is primarily a reduction in testing time. The testing, when we were doing it manually, was 30 to 40 percent of the project's cost. This was a $450 million USD deployment of SAP, and testing is 30 to 40 percent of that cost. We spent probably about a million and a half in test automation, but managed to reduce our testing times from weeks to days. There is a clear cut return.

If we write a new test that's 80 percent the same as an existing test, it is pretty straightforward to reuse the steps from existing tests for our new tests and build upon them. We found that there has been increasing ROI automation as we built up our library. When we write new tests now very seldom is a new test build from scratch. It is normally a variation of something that we already have, so we can turn those around pretty quickly within a couple of days to two weeks.

We have seen ROI with its efficient reporting and ability to provide results to management. It has also increased collaboration between different teams, such as, purchasing and sales.

We have used Worksoft Certify as an RPA tool when we have needed to create the master data or upload some documents. This saves a lot of time. It can reduce 10,000 transactions from weeks down to a day and a half.

Worksoft Capture 2.0 can help our customers to accelerate their automation development at least 40 percent faster than any other commercial tools available in the market.

We have seen that the initial Worksoft implementation has helped our customers reduce their testing cycle time by 50 percent. With further continuous improvement, we have seen cycle time reduced up to 75 percent. That is the level of productivity achieved using Worksoft Certify.

If I compare Worksoft Certify with other script-based automation tools, the test maintenance is relatively faster. We save about 60 to 70 percent of the maintenance effort by using it because it's model-based and scriptless. This helps the business team and the automation testers to quickly identify the changes needed to be introduced in the automation scripts.

The typical value realization takes about six to 12 months based on the number of scripts and how often the customer wants to execute.

An example of saving time and dollars: We had project going on that used to require manual testing. The first time that they did manual regression testing, we had a group of about 15 testers who sat in our office for a period of two weeks to do the testing. Now, when we have to regression testing with automation scripts ready in our Worksoft Certify, we do it in a day or two. 

We have a res-usable re-runnable asset built which is saving a lot of time across the functional teams/business user community.

Our final goal is to utilise this for 'Unify', our new global solution which is currently being deployed, which will deliver common processes and systems to all sites and sectors, replacing all our existing legacy systems, which will demand extensive regression testing. 

The return on investment, when we count the 160 man-hours we save monthly, will take about seven years for our scale

There have been several times where it has highlighted an important issue. Some of the defects we've found have been high-impact defects that would've really been costly had they made it to production. There are other times where, because we were able to test with Certify, we knew within a day whether there were gaps in the way we configured a change, things that we had missed that we wouldn't have been able to find if we didn't have the ability to test quickly.

That one defect we found easily saved us $1,000,000. That was just one. Over the years, the amount of money that it has saved us is certainly in that range.

The ability to test quickly has enabled us to develop quickly. We've been able to capture lots of savings in terms of projects that have been delivered faster because we can test faster.

There are savings on a lot of fronts because of this solution.

We have seen ROI.

During our yearly upgrades, we have now gotten them down to ten days or less. We have Worksoft run all our integration tests, where it used to take probably six weeks to do that manually.

As far as maintenance testing, it has saved us time. We find problems a lot of the time that they aren't aware of. This is because we run the tests even though they don't ask us.

We get at least a 2x return on investment (time, cost, labor) over manual efforts. When tests repeat execution the ROI can go higher. Tests often repeat when executed annually with planned annual system upgrades and additional time, labor and cost to maintain factored in. Including and reusing the tests in other testing activities such as sanity checks and regression cycles increases the overall ROI and investment value.

Saving money and better quality, these are the benefits of Certify.

We have seen ROI. This was one of the goals from our top management when investing in automation. They want to see savings in the following year.

We have seen ROI from using Worksoft Certify. For example, in the mobility sector, we are frequently finding issues or defects that might have come into production if not properly tested. Some of them might cost some $10,000 if we had waited to solve them after they went to production.

Automation using Worksoft Certify has saved our testing times by 40% to 50%.

Normally it can take clients a lot of time for doing the regression. Using Worksoft Certify has reduced the time needed for this process. They don't need to replace all their SMEs for performing the regression because normally it used to take a lot of time for doing the initial regression activation. There were a lot of bugs that were reported and were reduced when we started using this tool. They used to use 10 people for doing the regression previously, for a span of a week. By using Worksoft Certify with using the automation scripts and 10 different systems activations happening, we saved a lot of time. We have seen a return on investment by using Worksoft Certify.

We've saved over 80 percent in time savings.

We haven't seen ROI yet because we are in start-up mode with Certify. At this time we are only investing in the solution. Hopefully, we will be able to have some insights into ROI within a half-year from now.

It saves us time. It makes it so we are not as worried about changes which are going into the system. We know that we have nightly runs to ensure that things are working. In general, with upgrades, we can always rely on the testing to make sure that certain business processes are working. If they do stop working, we know when/where and can tie that back to changes in the environment easier.

Because we haven't built out our suite of tests yet, we haven't saved that much time. However, we know that it will allow us to save a lot of time and money, because once we are fully DevOps, we'll be able to spin up and spin down our systems on demand. Then, we will know within 30 minutes whether the system deployed successfully or not.

We no longer have any manual efforts for our regression testing, which we run on a weekly basis. So, we are saving two resources at 80 hours a week.

Automating our manual processes has saved us 70 to 80 percent of manual effort.

We saved $1.3 million using Worksoft Certify in 2017. 

Our 2018 numbers aren't available yet.

Worksoft Certify is an investment. We see value in it more than the money. We see value in it because the user can look at different aspects of testing and what they can do.

This solution has enabled us to automate in order to tremendously save time. Only first time when you are recording and creating the script will you spend some time with it, the rest of the time, you are just executing. If we do one manual process, it could take approximately two hours. The same process using Worksoft probably takes ten minutes.

It help cut test maintenance time too. An eight hour manually project using Worksoft can be done in an hour.

This product is a good one, if you are really focusing as an ERP. We really need to have a solution which is really end to end rather than just focusing on key product. It's good to be aware if there something that can support you end to end rather than one specific product.

ROI is pretty good so far.

The solution has cut our clients' test maintenance time for changes, like patches or system upgrades. They used to take a lot of time until the production validation completed. Now, it is just seconds until it is ready, so they can do executions within couple of minutes. 

This solution has enabled our clients to automate and save time (approximately 40 to 50 percent).

The product has saved our clients' money

We have seen ROI by being able to free up and give time back to the business for other value-added work.

We save probably 50 percent of our time. The tool does what it's supposed to do, and we are able to actually work.

We get feedback from all areas that the return on investment is there. Not just regarding time savings, but also cost-reduction. The return on investment in one case was reached at something between five and six runs, which is pretty fast, especially in an Agile environment.

What is also very important for us here is the avoidance of human error during the execution of tests. Usually, if someone is sitting in front of a laptop and doing testing eight hours a day, he or she will make some mistakes. This does not happen with a tool. Another important factor for us is the availability for testing. Usually, it's pretty hard to plan a test phase to bring all the testers to the table and get the time blocked off for the test phases. For the tools, we just need the systems up and running and then it's a matter of minutes to set up the test plans and to run the tests.

Our customers are saving money.

It saves us time: approximately 50 percent.

We have cut test maintenance time by 70 to 80 percent.

I can't give you any specific dollar amount on the fly but, for instance, I was at the Certify Users Conference in the fall of 2016 and the manager from AAA Southern California mentioned that the system I architected and developed for them while training two of there business analysts back in 2006 is still being used. The system is a mainframe system for applying for insurance with quite involved requirements.

ROI tends to be substantial because business analysts can be trained in just days to be effective with Certify. With almost all other tools, you need programming experience.

What autotesting has helped us do is consolidate our test cases because our company departments were testing in their own individual silos, running their own test cases manually. Now, with autotesting, we have been able to eliminate duplication of test cases across those departmental areas. This has helped us knock down our number of test cases. Our test cases are also running more optimally. Therefore, it has very much helped in that sense, so we were able to eliminate a lot of test cases and get out of manual silos by running on autotesting, which is more efficient.

Autotesting can runs overnight. It can run faster than someone doing it manually. The assumption is the system is not making any errors, but someone who is manually doing all the testing could miss something, get tired, etc. Be human, basically. Consequently, the autotesting eliminates some of those types of errors. Put all that together, and we are able to run autotesting and get our whole testing cycle done along with regression testing for an upcoming release, which is being done on these agile four to six-week sprints.

Overall testing has gone from six weeks down to pushing a button on a Friday. We may come in a couple days later, and the testing is done. At the moment, it takes less than a week for the testing, as opposed to six weeks in the past.

We haven't really seen the cost saving come in yet.

We have cut maintenance testing time by 30 to 35 percent.

The solutions has saved us money. If we were doing everything manually, it would be two and a half times the cost.

The typical range that we see is between 50 to 90 percent improvement in speed capabilities. Another aspect comes with the depth that they're able to test. It increases their capabilities overall to test at a broader level.

The product has save us time by not needing highly skilled people, since it is hard to retain experienced development resources. Once we train our functional testers who are running the automation, they can the tool well and stable.

• Expanded test coverage/fewer defects