Industry
Retail
Omnichannel CX and Intelligent Innovation – The Future of Retail
Highlights
- Tapestry wanted to upgrade its legacy point-of-sale (POS) systems to Aptos Store across all brands and regions for seamless operations and selected TCS as the strategic partner for the program.
- The project aimed at ensuring customer-centricity and frictionless customer experience, by leveraging automation solutions.
- TCS enhanced the existing test automation framework using unified functional testing (UFT) with the cognitive test automation framework, an intellectual property of TCS.
Overview
Tapestry Inc is a global luxury fashion retailer housing leading brands like Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman.
The luxury retailer has over 1,500 stores across the world and employs more than 20,000 people running its digital and in-store operations.
As part of its enterprise-wide digital transformation journey covering ecommerce, stores, and SAP systems, Tapestry intended to replace their point of sale (POS) legacy system with Aptos—a system designed to offer high transaction speed and security while ensuring ease of use. This was also a part of the POS upgrade project, and quality assurance of the upgrade spanning multiple brands and regions had to be completed within a year.
The TCS team decided to use united functional testing (UFT) for automation to ensure project completion within the one-year deadline. Additionally, to address UTF limitations pertaining to hardware-related components, we proposed a solution with robotics.
Challenge
Projects related to end-user experience, such as introducing new payment method and launching promotional sales, could not be delivered fast enough.
The POS upgrade project ensured Tapestry stayed aligned with the current trends and ahead of the competitors. With that in mind, TCS took on the automation of operations on the PIN entry device (PED).
The quality assurance team identified the following key challenges in automating hardware peripherals connected to the POS:
- Aptos store POS testing was either a manual process or partially automated via UFT.
- Given the peripherals that were connected, the complete testing of POS systems required physical intervention. Additionally, the following peripherals could not be automated using the UFT interface:
- PED: Used for accepting payments via credit, debit cards
- Receipt printer
- SKU barcode scanner
- Manual regression testing comprising card operations, screen reading, and operating on-screen menu, and PED keypad operations needed more time and effort.
These challenges were limiting the automation coverage of the regression suite, while significant manual effort was spent on covering tests that could not be automated.
A digital road map
TCS designed a robotic arm to fast track the testing activities that involve automating the operation of physical devices.
This involved testing new projects, including features that enhance end-user experience in the stores, such as introducing new payment methods or launching promotional sales. This would have otherwise needed manual effort, translating into significant time investment. This implementation helped the testing team to deliver results with faster time to market.
The TCS team decided to deploy hardware automation solutions with artificial intelligence to address the challenges. Cognitive solutions available in the market offer extensive ability to automate interfaces and peripherals of applications spanning touch, sense, and vision. For systems like POS, this means automating handheld operations via robotic arms and validating receipts with augmented reality. TCS initiated the deployment of the robotic arm POS in collaboration with the internal internet of things (IoT) team.
The team started by addressing the most challenging part—PED automation—using a robotic arm. The key components of this solution include:
- Automated regression testing of POS screen actions using UFT test automation tool
- Automated physical actions on PED, like swiping, inserting, tapping of credit, debit cards, using a physical robotic arm, and also PIN entry on the PED keypad
- Established integrated framework to make both UFT and robotic application work together
The business and technology teams collaborated effectively to achieve all the milestones while ensuring quality.
Benefits
Test automation coverage was extended to point-of-sale systems by removing the physical barrier of hardware devices in test automation.
The implementation is setup in the offshore POS lab in India and the robotic arm can span three POS registers in a fixed state. This enables quality engineers to operate it for their intended validations. Additionally, the configuration can be changed as needed to test different sets of registers.
The significant investment in the project has made Tapestry an early mover among luxury retailers in implementing the innovative POS verification solution that offers reduced human intervention. The solution has not only saved cost for the client but also enabled automation of POS systems across brands. It offers multiple benefits:
- Removed the need for in-person visits to lab for testing
- Five-fold increase in automation throughput
- Improved testing cycle time by up to 60 percent
- Improved regression test automation coverage to 80% from 55%
- Enabled automation across brands and regions for faster and bi-weekly releases
The solution automated about 80% of the regression suite. Going forward, the AI automation framework is set to be extended to other peripherals of the POS systems. Additionally, TCS and Tapestry are planning the next phase of the solution to achieve 100% coverage with the automation of other peripherals like the barcode scanner and printer systems.
At Tapestry, maintaining the highest standards of quality and ensuring flawless execution during system upgrades are paramount to delivering exceptional experiences to our customers and store associates. Through our strategic partnership with TCS, we leveraged advanced cognitive robotic automation to significantly enhance our quality assurance capabilities and streamline our release cycles. This collaboration was instrumental in enabling a smooth and efficient rollout of our new POS systems across all brands and regions.”
