How Kellanova achieved data validation and reduced errors for a global data lake migration

For more than a century, Kellanova has been a household name in global snacking, international cereals and noodles, and North American frozen foods. With iconic brands like Pringles®, Cheez-It®, Pop-Tarts®, and Special K®, the company operates across four major regions — North America, Latin America, Europe, and EMEA — each with its own data lake and digital ecosystem.

Digital transformation plays a critical role in keeping Kellanova’s global operations running smoothly. But when the company set out to modernize with a large-scale migration from Amazon Redshift to Snowflake, its team faced several major challenges: ensuring data validation, overcoming the complexity of migrating data lakes across regions, and meeting performance standards.

To deliver on its mission, the Kellanova IT organization turned to Tricentis — using a platform-led approach to achieve the speed, accuracy, and scalability required for a migration of this size.

Tackling a data migration to deliver on a digital mission

Venu Cherukuri, Global Senior Manager, Quality Engineering & DevOps CoE at Kellanova, said the IT organization builds on the company’s mission with a software-focused approach: differentiate, drive, and deliver with digital.

As the team embarked on the global data migration, it quickly became clear that manual testing wouldn’t meet the demands of the project. The initial manual approach proved to be error-prone, lacked sufficient coverage, and could not be delivered within a suitable time frame — especially given the complexity of multiple regional data lakes.

“We proposed Tricentis Data Integrity as a solution,” Cherukuri said. “Using Data Integrity, we automated the entire end-to-end validations.”

Improving delivery speed with less errors with Data Integrity

With the help of Tricentis Data Integrity, Cherukuri says his team was able to test faster, more comprehensively and with fewer errors, citing an 85% quantified reduction in the time taken to test, a 35% increase in coverage and an error rate that dropped from about 15% to just over 1%.

“So significant value was delivered using Tosca Data Integrity,” Cherukuri said. “Not only improving the speed of delivery, which is through automation, but also increasing the coverage and also reducing the potential issues in production.”

“We also want to expand further into a broader data analytics ecosystem, given the success that we got from the Redshift to Snowflake migration. We just want to expand it broadly across the data analytics space.”

Tricentis Tosca scales test automation

As Kellanova advanced its overall quality strategy, the company also turned its attention to test automation as a whole — seeking a unified way to scale automation across its technology landscape.

Since different parts of the company were using various automation solutions, Cherukuri’s first step was to take a platform approach. Cherukuri’s team standardized onto one platform – Tricentis Tosca.

“Tosca has made our life so much easier with its model-based testing. We are able to build the automation quickly. It’s robust but also self-healing,” Cherukuri said.

When looking at test automation, Cherukuri said organizations should “think platforms, not projects.” Kellanova has a term called “frictionless pipelines” which is continuous end-to-end testing enabled by Tosca. Cherukuri has the goal to embed test automation into Kellanova’s CI/CD pipelines.

“You need to identify a test automation platform that is robust and scalable and that is comprehensive enough. It’s what worked for us really well,” Cherukuri said. “Tosca has breadth of its coverage, the types of applications that it would support, and also its ability to scale toward enterprise demands. I think it’s a game changer.”

Achieving broad quality efficiency gains with a platform approach

Kellanova’s expansion of the Tricentis platform builds on its long-standing relationship with the company.

Kellanova has been a Tricentis customer for several years, using Tricentis LiveCompare for more than a decade. In 2024, Kellanova moved from LoadRunner to Tricentis NeoLoad as its performance testing tool. Cherukuri has plans to embed LiveCompare into the SAP change process for change impact analysis, to identify what has been impacted, and what needs to be tested.

“We started seeing a lot of adoption and success in the recent past, partly thanks to the kind of support and advisory services that we were getting from Tricentis, which helped us directly engage with our stakeholders and across the globe and start identifying some use cases,” Cherukuri said.

Results

• Tricentis Data Integrity resulted in an 85% quantified reduction in the time to test.
• Kellanova achieved a 35% increase in coverage.
• The error rate was significantly reduced to 1% from 14% to 15% after automation.