A major Japanese technology enterprise engaged SHIFT Group for comprehensive quality assurance support during a complete rebuild of its core B2B order management system. This ERP platform, crucial for managing business transactions and coordinating with partners, was being redeveloped from the ground up.

As the project expanded in scale and complexity, involving multiple external development vendors and internal business units, the client began experiencing significant quality management issues, missed delivery targets, and increasing operational inefficiencies.

Client Challenges

The client’s primary goal was to modernize its order management modules to align with new business requirements and enhance system scalability. However, the introduction of multiple vendors without a unified quality governance framework led to several issues:

• Fragmented Development Pipeline: The independent work of numerous vendors resulted in misaligned updates and undocumented changes that frequently clashed during deployment.
• Unstable Release Quality: The system followed an aggressive release schedule with two daily deployments, leaving minimal time for structured regression testing. This led to frequent production incidents and an increase in rework.
• Poor User Feedback Loop: Business users and partners, such as channel resellers, reported an increase in returns and system inconsistencies, indicating that essential test scenarios were being overlooked or inadequately validated.

These challenges prompted the client to seek comprehensive QA consulting and operational support from SHIFT Group, including a specialized task force from SHIFT ASIA.

SHIFT ASIA’s Role and Solution

SHIFT ASIA was brought in to provide manual QA support and third-party regression testing to establish a consistent testing baseline across various vendor deliverables.

• Building a Structured Regression Testing Base: Our engineers designed and maintained reusable test cases targeting core business flows and high-risk components prone to defects due to overlapping vendor changes.
• Daily Release Verification: With multiple releases each day, the team adopted a flexible testing approach that combined structured regression testing with rapid, ad hoc validation based on the nature and urgency of updates.
• Third-Party Validation: Acting as an independent QA group, SHIFT ASIA assessed release quality from an unbiased user perspective, a task that internal teams and vendor-aligned testers could not easily achieve.
• Issue Detection and Reporting: Enhanced reporting formats and categorization enabled stakeholders to identify root causes more efficiently and initiate corrective actions more quickly.

SHIFT ASIA collaborated closely with both SHIFT Japan and the client’s internal QA and PMO teams to ensure information was consolidated and escalations were addressed promptly.

Results & Business Impact

Despite ongoing challenges from overlapping vendor work and incomplete documentation, the initiative delivered clear and measurable outcomes:

• An improvement in weekly defect detection, particularly in areas previously overlooked by vendor teams.
• A reduction in return cases and escalations from key business partners, indicating better production stability.
• Increased testing coverage and enhanced risk visibility across the system’s core functions.
• A solid baseline was established for future automation efforts, even though the implementation was only partially completed due to system complexity and inconsistent development practices.

Although the broader project remained turbulent, the client ultimately decided to restructure its vendor management approach and recognized SHIFT ASIA’s contribution as a stabilizing force during a critical development phase.

Why SHIFT ASIA?

The client had previously worked with the SHIFT Group and acknowledged their expertise in software quality transformation. Facing increasing quality failures and a lack of a QA strategy, the client chose SHIFT ASIA for its hands-on engineering support, structured testing methodology, and ability to navigate complex, multi-stakeholder environments with precision.