What happens when a global paper company stops treating test automation as an IT project — and starts treating it as a business capability.
Erwin Zöhrer has spent 40 years at Sappi. He comes from Lean Six Sigma. He is not, as he freely admits, a technology person. And yet he is the one standing at the front of the room explaining how his company now runs more than 700,000 automated test cases with a single dedicated resource on the business side — and has saved 36,000 hours of testing effort in eighteen months.
"Quality assurance is actually fun this way."
— Erwin Zöhrer, Sappi
The path to get there was, in his own words, "not very straight."
Why testing became a strategic problem
Sappi is a global manufacturer of paper, pulp, packaging and specialty materials, employing around 11,350 people across Europe, South Africa and beyond. For decades, the company ran regional SAP systems shaped by local requirements. Then came the strategic decision to harmonise globally — and with it, an unexpected consequence.
"We made great progress with harmonisation. But we were losing the benefits on the other side, because our business experts — the people who should be focused on developing the company — were being consumed by testing."
— Erwin Zöhrer
Every change to a globally harmonised SAP system touches everything. Regression testing volumes grew faster than the business could absorb. Something had to change.
The first attempt that failed
Sappi's initial approach was entirely reasonable: purchase a test automation tool, run training sessions, hand it to the business. It failed.
The problem wasn't the technology. It was ownership — and, underneath that, fear. Employees who had spent years doing manual testing worried about what automation meant for their roles. Without someone fully accountable for driving the topic, the tool went unused.
"Training people and believing it becomes self-sustaining — I can speak from our own experience: it didn't work."
— Erwin Zöhrer
The decision that made the difference
The turning point was a single hire — or more precisely, a reassignment. One employee was given the full mandate to own test automation end-to-end. No prior SAP experience. No prior suxxesso knowledge. What they had was attitude.
"I don't hire employees for their knowledge — I hire for attitude. This person came in with essentially zero knowledge of the tool and zero knowledge of SAP. And if you see where we are now, more than half a year later, we have made enormous strides."
— Erwin Zöhrer
Working closely with suxxesso, that one dedicated champion trained approximately 25 business users globally and built a programme that now runs continuously — including every night, automatically.
What the numbers show
The clearest stress test came with Sappi's SAP Upgrade and RISE migration — a project involving 740 changes and 1,709 transports. Over 57 consecutive days, suxxesso ran approximately 2,000 hours of automated tests across four virtual machines, around 24 hours per day. The result at go-live: 100% of test scenarios completed, zero open testing issues.
The comparison with the parallel manual testing stream was striking. The automated track used 8 testers for spot checks across 46 scenarios — the equivalent workload of roughly 3 FTEs. The system stabilised after one week. The manual track required 17 testers across 51 scenarios and took two weeks to stabilise.
Beyond the migration itself, the value of running tests in the live environment became unmistakable. When Sappi deployed a new global Price Maintenance Tool, the company needed to validate 30,000 repriced orders. Manual testing would have sampled a handful. With suxxesso running across the live system, every order was checked automatically. Approximately 8% would have been incorrectly priced. Not one reached a customer.
"I believe this is an image that shows — if you use this tool correctly, the advantages are unbeatable. And that is why I believe it should not only be used in the test environment, but wherever the application fits — including the live system."
— Erwin Zöhrer
A new standard for quality
Eighteen months on, Sappi has logged over 700,000 test runs and redirected 36,000 hours of testing effort — sustained by one person on the business side with very limited IT support. The next step is extending the platform beyond SAP into the MES layer, to test genuinely end-to-end processes across the full operational stack.
"More efficient, absolutely. More complete — certainly not yet, because we still have too many blind spots. But what we can now say is that when a test runs, it was tested. When it's successful, it was successful. When it errors, I know exactly where the errors happening. With manual testing, you could never really be sure."
— Erwin Zöhrer
That shift — from assumed quality to provable quality — may be the deepest benefit of all.
Stefan Steinbauer is Marketing Manager at suxxesso GmbH, specialists in SAP test automation. suxxesso works exclusively within the SAP ecosystem, serving manufacturing and process industries in the DACH region and worldwide. suxxesso.com
