Extensive Testing Is The Key To Success

VF Corp. chose i2 Technologies Inc.'s demand-fulfillment suite because it included an order-management module that was hefty enough to handle the large volumes of data associated with apparel manufacturing. In VF's case, there are more than a half-million stock-keeping units in a given year that classify the company's multiple clothing lines. To date, there are more than 81 terabytes of data on everything from customer lists to point-of-sale data to financial info housed in VF's data center, and that number continues to grow with millions of records coming nightly.

VF has been able to eliminate obsolete and erroneous data in its supply chain by creating audits within the i2 software that can catch any new data that doesn't add up, says Bruce Wiley, director of forecast and production planning for VF's mass-market male brands in the Jeanswear coalition.

But it would be foolhardy to think a company dealing with so much data could just switch overnight to a new system like this. Indeed, VF has stringent testing requirements and spends millions of dollars running multiple test scripts numerous times against every new implementation to ensure that the software won't impair operations.

"There are huge costs associated with doing this," says Ellen Martin, VP of supply-chain services at VF. "But what's the cost of not doing it?"

To test a system in production without actually going live, VF builds an exact replica--including all the programs, libraries, jcls, and data--of the production system by mirroring and then partitioning it. It then uses that copy as the test system and loads the new software onto the copy.

Scenarios that depict actual business events are turned into scripts and run weekly, then measured against the real results. For example, Martin says, "We want to make sure we got the same answer production actually got last week." Tests are run until everything's running smoothly, and that can be an exhaustive phase. For instance, before going live with the i2 software in VF's Jansport line, VF ran as many as 18 cycles of test.

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