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cencora logoCencora

Healthcare company enhances software development capabilities with OpenText™ Enterprise Performance Engineering

cencora logo

About Cencora

Cencora is a global leader in healthcare, offering solutions that connect manufacturers, providers, and patients. The company’s 46,000+ employees help innovators expand access to therapies and safely deliver pharmaceuticals.

  • Daily output:
    6.7 million products
  • Company locations:
    1,300
  • Global reach:
    50+ countries

Summary

Challenges

  • Supporting delivery of healthcare services and medicines.
  • Needed performance testing to keep pace with growing business needs.
  • Discovering defects late in the application lifecycle raised costs.

Solution

  • Managed performance testing across complex technology stacks.
  • Supported diverse testing protocols.
  • Enabled flexibility and growth.

Results

  • Increased  application performance by more than 98%
  • Saved money and optimized quality of service
  • Gained peace of mind around software quality

Challenges

  • Supporting the delivery of healthcare services and drugs to patients
  • Performance testing was necessary to keep pace with growing business needs
  • Discovering defects late in the application lifecycle raised costs

As a global leader in healthcare, Cencora works with pharmaceutical manufacturers, healthcare providers, and pharmacies to ensure that people can access the therapies they need, where and when they need them. To make this possible, Cencora has developed a range of technological solutions to help its clients accelerate the value chain from concept to delivery. These include pharmaceutical distribution platforms, distribution and logistics systems for manufacturers, and solutions for healthcare providers.

Ensuring that these platforms and solutions provide effective support to patients around the world is a priority for Cencora.

“Many millions of people depend on the smooth running of our systems to get access to the healthcare they need,” said Josh Bloomer, director of shared services, performance at Cencora. “For this reason, it’s critically important that we have confidence in the performance and stability of the solutions we build, customize, or purchase.”

Over the years, expectations regarding the speed of solution delivery at Cencora have increased significantly. Clients expect new functionality to be delivered faster and more frequently, which places additional demands on internal software testing teams. Cencora’s lean team of 27 performance testers saw that they risked falling behind the new pace set by the business. “We wanted to have greater agility in performance testing, so that we could respond to growing demands from the business for speed in application delivery,” commented Bloomer.

Risk was another concern. “The earlier we can identify and resolve issues, the better,” Bloomer explained. “Above all, we want to avoid allowing errors to make it into the production environment, where they are more costly to resolve and potentially disruptive to our clients.”

Laboratory image for Cencora quote

OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering empowers us to look under the hood of every system and really understand the performance issues.

Josh Bloomer
Director of Shared Services, Performance, Cencora

Solution

To enable fast and effective performance testing and resolve issues as early as possible in the lifecycle, Cencora deployed OpenText™ Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) to enable collaborative testing across numerous protocols.

Products deployed

Managing complex technology stacks

With OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering, Cencora has a comprehensive solution for testing the performance of new releases of all its software, whether created in-house or from a third party.

“We chose OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering specifically because it would support all of our business needs across a heterogeneous set of technologies and stacks,” said Josh Bloomer.

Cencora uses the OpenText solution to manage performance testing for more than 30 applications across a complex mix of technologies, from SAP® ERP and Salesforce® to homegrown SaaS and PaaS environments.

Prior to investing in OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering, Cencora was running several smaller instances of LoadRunner Professional. The company consolidated those into a single large enterprise instance, unlocking licensing savings and simplifying the management of the solution.

“Over the years, the OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering family has given us the solid foundation we need to grow and ensure stability,” added Bloomer. “The solution is always ahead of the curve.”

Supporting diverse protocols

Out of the box, OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering supports more than 40 protocols, making it fast and easy for Cencora to introduce performance testing for newly acquired or newly built solutions.

"The breadth and depth of the protocols OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering can support is the number one feature for me,” said Bloomer. “Almost any business partner can come to me with a request for performance testing, and I can almost unequivocally say, ‘yes, we can support you.’ That's one of the great beauties of the tool.”

Cencora also values the ability to programmatically build scripts that use the testing protocols in OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering. Bloomer continued, “Whether you prefer C or Java, you can programmatically attack a very complex set of problems and solve it creatively.”

Enabling flexibility and growth

Since the deployment of OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering at Cencora, the performance team has grown from 5 to 27 people. Finding new team members has been relatively simple. Bloomer confirmed, “OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering is by far the most well-known tool in the industry, so hiring staff that have already mastered the solution is much easier than for any of the other tools.”

The automation built into OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering has also helped Cencora to remain flexible and agile even as demands have grown on the performance testing team. “It’s the amount of automation and intelligence built into the tool that helps my team deliver at extreme velocities under very tight timelines,” said Bloomer.

cencora quotes 2

Every significant and critical defect we're able to catch before it goes to production is potentially tens of thousands of dollars saved in managing or dealing with a major incident.

Josh Bloomer
Director of Shared Services, Performance, Cencora

Results

With OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering handling all performance testing across a diverse portfolio of platforms and technologies, Cencora benefits from speed and ease of management in testing. The end result is more stable, higher-performing software.

Increased performance by more than 98%

In one case, using OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering enabled the team at Cencora to identify and resolve issues that led to a greater than 98 percent improvement in application performance.

Josh Bloomer said, “OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering empowers us to look under the hood of every system and really understand the performance issues. Armed with this intelligence, we can then work with the developers and the infrastructure teams to optimize the performance.”

Saved money and optimized service

By enabling Cencora to identify and resolve potential performance issues earlier in the software lifecycle, OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering helps the company save significant time and money.

“Every significant and critical defect we're able to catch before it goes to production is potentially tens of thousands of dollars saved in managing or dealing with a major incident,” explained Bloomer.

In the bigger picture, fixing performance issues in applications ensures a higher quality of service and contributes to a more positive experience for Cencora’s clients, ultimately helping to prevent churn.

Gained peace of mind around software quality

The central benefit of using OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering is to ensure that the platforms released by Cencora works to help clients achieve their business objectives. “If our systems don't work as expected, patients' lives are impacted and people don't get the drugs they need,” said Bloomer. “OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering helps us have confidence that we can optimize our applications before release.”

“The flexibility and breadth of the solution also helps us ensure compliance with federal guidelines, which is huge,” Bloomer reflected.

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