Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management applications for software testing, training and evaluation, announced today that Sisters of Mercy Heath System (Mercy) has selected Surgient Virtual QA/Test Lab Management Systems (VQMS) to accelerate the deployment of its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. With Surgient VQMS, Mercy will cut estimated testing times for their ERP rollout from six years to six months, drastically reducing quality assurance testing costs while ensuring the stability of the new system.

Sisters of Mercy Health System is the ninth largest Catholic health system in the United States. In 2006, Mercy began implementing an ERP system to streamline finance, human resources and supply chain operations. As part of the implementation of this multi-million dollar system, the healthcare provider needed to perform compatibility testing on the 15,000 dependent client systems and application configurations used throughout the enterprise. To achieve full test coverage for each of these systems would have required six years of total testing time using the existing test lab – a delay that would leave Mercy unable to meet critical ERP rollout deadlines.

"To provide the best possible support to Mercy, we need to have information and technology systems that are stable, standardized and easy to access through a system like our ERP implementation," said Chris Marr, Lead Systems Engineer at Sisters of Mercy Health System. "With Surgient VQMS, we will be able to test and rollout our ERP application quickly, not only improving the quality of our deployment, but drastically cutting the cost of implementation. Surgient’s virtual lab solution is helping us provide the assurance of an ERP system that offers performance and reliability, enabling us to quickly realize those benefits across the entire organization, passing that level of care directly on to our customers."

Mercy considered several approaches and determined the ideal solution was the Surgient VQMS test lab management application integrated with HP’s Mercury QuickTest Professional™ test automation application. The evaluation and implementation of the combined solution was completed in less than 90 days. Once implemented, the automated solution quickly began to assess and test the necessary components of their ERP system. Mercy Information Services Division staff has determined that all 15,000 components can be tested within a six month period. Surgient VQMS has significantly increased the productivity of the testing team and greatly reduced the time and resources required to fully test these critical components.

"Ensuring high-quality, rapid and seamless deployments of strategic applications is critical to enterprise organizations such as Sisters of Mercy Health System," said Bill Daniel, CEO and president of Surgient. "We are pleased that our VQMS solution is helping Mercy realize faster time-to-success with one of their most critical enterprise applications."