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Founded in Finland in 1970, Ponsse manufactures cut-to-length forest machines for construction firms of all shapes and sizes. From harvesters to loaders, Ponsse’s innovative equipment is a logging site staple for a diverse value chain: machine operators, contractors, forest management associations and sourcing departments for timber companies.
Modern forest machinery is all about precision and reliability. And the software that powers each vehicle is no different. If a harvester has an operating issue due to a buggy app upgrade, the customer not only loses valuable logging time — they lose trust in Ponsse. Each minute of downtime comes at a premium.
Euros Saved Per Month
Automated Test Cases
Hours of QA Work Saved Per Month
Bugs Caught and Corrected Per Week
In 2017, Ponsse set out to overhaul their digital infrastructure from the ground up. They developed a new tool — Ponsse Manager Application — to help machinery contractors explore working conditions, locations, maintenance needs and vehicle history.
In tandem, Ponsse kicked off an end-to-end IT system upgrade to ramp up their software lifecycle and deploy more custom applications to support their machines. But innovation requires synchronization — and the diversity and complexity of Ponsse’s tech stack presented a challenge.
Ponsse used Microsoft Azure to build software and manage data, Mulesoft for API integrations and Salesforce for customer information management. As a result, Ponsse was hampered by merge conflicts and overwritten changes, siloed teams and deployment bottlenecks due to manual quality assurance.
Ponsse realized they needed a cloud-native test automation solution to ramp up software releases and drive disruption-free support systems. They were looking for a platform-agnostic tool that offered seamless integration and automated software development testing across platforms, browsers and devices.
Ponsse implemented Copado Robotic Testing to automate QA for each new app before deployment. Today, Ponsse is able to release new software every two weeks. Every week, Ponnse runs 3-4 automated regression tests to monitor new software updates and lower the risks in their product development cycle.
With Copado, test executions take as little as 30 minutes to complete — saving Ponsse over 25,000 euros per month (the equivalent of 1.5 full-time employees). The automated testing covers 10-15% of Ponsse’s entire test suite while Copado catches 10% of errors in the manufacturer’s pipeline.
Ponsse’s test automation journey is still in its infancy. While Copado has made a huge splash in the realm of regression testing, the manufacturer is still growing their test practice and planning more ways to leverage automation in the future.
One focus area for the future is mobile testing. Ponsse is in the process of revamping their mobile platform framework and plans to leverage automated testing to de-risk the development cycle. Ponsse is also in the midst of an ongoing ERP project to build a comprehensive test automation program for Microsoft Dynamics.
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