Città Case Study

Città increases staff productivity with test automation.

Learn how Città reduced their average testing hours by more than 90%

About Città

Città is a design company that prides itself on creating beautiful furniture and homewares for every room in the home. Città is New Zealand’s most successful retail and furniture homeware business and design, import, and distribute a comprehensive range of homewares sourced from leading manufacturers around the world.

Città was founded by Margot Acland in 1989. After an inspired trip to Italy in her early 30s, Margot decided to move away from her corporate career and start a business importing Italian hand-painted ceramics. Over the past 32 years, Città has evolved to become a business firmly focused on original design.

Città is proud to be family-owned and operated with 13 stores throughout New Zealand. Their designs can also be found at more than 500 locations worldwide.

The Situation

With a highly integrated environment including e-commerce, in-store retail, CRM, and ERP, the risk of system failure increased exponentially whenever an update or change needed to be applied.

A forward-looking business, Città was the first retailer in the world to plan their retail business in the cloud on the Microsoft Dynamics platform, providing a foundation for future growth.

Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management is at the core of Città’s business, managing Finance, Sales, and Logistics transactions generated from their physical stores and online e-commerce portal.

In 2020, Città recognized the need to automate their Unified Commerce Platform testing as the potential failure points were becoming too time-consuming to test manually.

Microsoft releases eight software updates annually for Dynamics 365, with a mandatory requirement for Città to accept at least two of these.

“Whenever an update was due, we needed to scramble to get key users to complete the appropriate level of manual testing required. This was a huge drain on our key employees and above and beyond their normal day to day activities. We needed to find a less labour-intensive way to upgrade”

Emmett Vallender

COO, Città

The Solution

Città chose to partner with TheTestMart who had developed a unique automation testing platform with pre-built configurable test libraries and commands for Dynamics Finance and Operations.

TheTestMart is an efficient, user-friendly regression testing platform that eliminates the need for expensive automation experts. Città can quickly build hundreds of automated tests with minimal training and support with our platform. Città continues to expand its test automation suite, now including Dynamics 365 Finance, E-Commerce, and Retail, to cover various scenarios and systems. In 2020, Città recognized the time-consuming nature of manual testing and opted to automate their Unified Commerce Platform.

Additionally, Microsoft releases eight software updates annually for Dynamics 365 Finance, requiring Città to accept at least two of these updates.

“We have been able to automate our test scripts, meaning our Subject Matter Experts are spending less time testing and more time in the business. With TheTestMart, we are now able to tackle more frequent upgrades with fewer resources”

Emmett Vallender

COO, Città

The Results

Città is now able to decrease the time it takes to prepare for upgrades and project go-lives.
Their growing test automation library can be run anytime without impacting staff workloads.

Both video and documentation are generated automatically and can be used for training and onboarding purposes, allowing a more consistent understanding of end-to-end business processes.

Employees can now focus on the business not IT. Business disruption during updates is now minimised for employees who barely notice when an upgrade happens.

Upgrades and project releases with TheTestMart are more like a health check than a major IT project exercise.

Tests can be built quickly using TheTestMart technology and run against multiple companies and environments such as Dev, UAT, and Pre-Prod.

Using TheTestMart, Città now gets access to new features and functionality faster with a significantly lower risk of failure. All of this leads to a good ROI and the ability to be more agile with IT-related business decisions.