CONTRIBUTOR
Since the start of the pandemic, many businesses have had to regroup and rethink how best to keep calm and carry on in these tumultuous times. In the food industry especially, consumers are buying differently and tastes are evolving, thus changes are necessary to keep abreast of developing trends. However, any changes must continue to both build trust and provide a quality user experience.
Dawn Foods, based in Jackson, Michigan, is a company that began life as a family-owned business in the Midwest in 1920. Since then, it has successfully evolved into a multinational business and is a one-stop resource delivering on partnerships, insights, innovations, products and bakery expertise to more than 40,000 food service professionals and leaders, artisanal bakers and manufacturers globally.
Digital Transformation While Retaining Crucial Relationships
Seeking a sustainable foundation for new digital transformation that would both transform customer experience and maintain those crucial relationships, Gireesh Sahukar, VP of digital at Dawn Foods, who oversees all of Dawn’s digital initiatives and its Boston-based Digital Innovation Hub, led a small team to create an entirely new e-commerce storefront.
What were the requirements? To create a self-service e-commerce solution for customers that simplified ordering for bakery supplies around the country. This would allow Dawn Foods to expand its product line and keep up with new trends, such as the current plant-based explosion and ever-increasing taste for vegan goods.
Gireesh’s list of requirements included:
- To streamline the process of product ordering
- For customers to have full access to the online product catalog
- To ensure humans didn’t always have to perform QA
Intelligent Test Automation
The new digital journey required a solid foundation on which to grow, so entered mabl, the intelligent test automation company, to provide the smooth and seamless transition to low-code, team-wide automated testing. The building blocks of that foundation were set, in order to build and progress to a sustainable, high-velocity digital journey into Dawn Foods’ new growth.
At the beginning of the transition, manual testing still made up 75% of the QA work, and Gireesh moved the team along with deployed agile sprints. Since the 2020 launch, the team has flipped its automated-to-manual percentages to around 60% in favor of automated, so breaking the QA DevOps bottleneck.
Quality is Not an Afterthought
The result? The perfect recipe. The impact of automations means that Dawn Foods’ customers can enjoy a quality trust-building user experience, even while adjusting to a new e-commerce platform. Quality is not an afterthought. Izzy Azeri, co-founder at mabl, explains, “B2B and B2C customers are increasingly evaluating brands primarily on the digital customer experience. If quality isn’t a priority, companies will see the impact on their bottom line.“
The mabl dashboard provides fail rates and insights, like auto healing, so customers don’t have to deal with a faulty site, and as Gireesh says, “In eCommerce, your competitor is one tab away. All your customer has to do is open a new tab, and they’re gone. So, if there’s friction anywhere in your journey, the customer doesn’t sit there and wait for that friction to take its course.”
Improved Reliability
Low-code test automation software uses machine-learning, so tests evolve with application. Improved reliability and reduced maintenance are the results of mabl’s self-healing functionality that dynamically adapts tests to match any changes you make.
Now, as well as having the provision of auto healing, the team also looks at code coverage, test design and page performance/user journeys to determine which are worth testing.
Gireesh says, “It takes all of that to get to a good place with quality engineering. It’s not just one piece. There’s performance, security, all the other issues you have to deal with. And then you have to be able to respond to those things.”
Izzy Azeri has the last word, stating, “Dawn Foods is a textbook example of how organizations can embrace digital transformation for the long-term. With test automation, they’ve made it possible to maintain a modern e-commerce brand that builds customer loyalty. Dawn Foods’ experience with Gireesh leading their transformation reflects a broader industry trend where technology leaders are turning to automation to enable new products. When routine work is automated, the entire team has more time to build new features and demonstrate value to customers.”
