Manpower
Manpower France Improves the Lifecycle of its Applications from Development to Production
Key Benefits
Immediate return on investment
Ease of use and deployment
Rich feature set that exceeded objective
Challenge: Needed to Optimize Applications to Stay Competitive in a Fast-Moving Market
"Manpower is a company present throughout France, with thousands of remote users," said Nicolas Le Coz, a Technical Architect at Manpower. "With more than 800 agencies in the territory and a population of full-time and temporary employees, we have a very distributed enterprise reflected in our computer science. The competition for temporary works is fierce, and it's often the quickest and efficient win the battle. Manpower, therefore, needs reliable and efficient applications."
Manpower provided its agency personnel and temporary workers a portal enabling them to perform all the operations that they could previously make in the agency. "Our temporary workers can create their account directly online and then manage their files through this interface," explained Le Coz. "Side agencies can also check that the profiles of temporary workers are in line with the offers such as managing orders, or administrative aspects of HR."
To help ensure its online services were running smoothly, Manpower needed an application performance management (APM) solution. The company favored an open-source approach within its Java environment. However, it realized that applying this approach to application monitoring would require substantial time for application development and to integrate the appropriate tools. In addition, the performance metrics Manpower had in place were focused on hardware, not software, and did not give developers the necessary information to anticipate and quickly resolve problems. It looked for a comprehensive, turnkey solution that was compatible with its open architecture.
“Since its installation, developers and project managers now have the appropriate tool and can immediately identify new possible uses with all the features integrated into the tool.”
Nicolas Le CozTechnical Architect @Manpower
About Manpower
ManpowerGroup is the world’s workforce expert, creating innovative workforce solutions for more than 65 years. The company connects more than 600,000 people to meaningful work across a wide range of skills and industries every day. Through its ManpowerGroup family of brands – Manpower, Experis, Right Management and ManpowerGroup Solutions – it helps more than 400,000 clients in 78 countries and territories address their critical talent needs, providing comprehensive solutions to resource, manage and develop talent. With more than 3,600 employees, Manpower France offers recruitment and temporary employment solutions throughout France and their website receives more than 2 million visits per month and is the third most viewed jobs website in France.
Manpower wanted a monitoring solution that enabled its team to have the best possible visibility on the performance of applications and identify the relevant data upon the occurrence of an incident in its heterogeneous environment. Upon discovering AppDynamics and seeing the full set of flexible tools that were easy to deploy and use, the team looked no further.
"I knew the AppDynamics solution because it was deployed in the company where I previously worked, that is why we decided to test the tool at Manpower," said Le Coz of the AppDynamics APM solution. "Since its installation, developers and project managers now have the appropriate tool and can immediately identify new possible uses with all the features integrated into the tool."
"Once the director of information services saw the relevance of the tool, the deployment was done in less than a week at the end of 2012 on twenty applications," said Le Coz. "And the least we can say is that the return on investment was clear. The integration of the tool with the applications is so fast, unlike previous solutions."
Benefits: AppDynamics improved performance, utilized to enhance user experience
The AppDynamics APM solution allowed Manpower's development teams to streamline the transition of applications in production because it could automatically check if the hardware configuration was correct. It also helped prioritize the critical applications to monitor and facilitate capacity planning.
With the success of the AppDynamics APM solution, Manpower expanded its use of the platform to include Browser Real User Monitoring. "Now that we are moving at cruising speed, we want to go further with the solutions of AppDynamics," said Le Coz. "So we are planning now to put in place a true monitoring of the end-user experience to further improve the efficiency of our applications to better satisfy our users."
"The solutions of AppDynamics have allowed us to improve the lifecycle of our applications from development, to management, through the start of production, and have even opened new perspectives beyond the strict framework of the application performance," concluded Le Coz.
(This case study was translated from French to English)
“And the least we can say is that the return on investment was clear. The integration of the tool with the applications is so fast, unlike previous solutions.”
Nicolas Le Coz, Technical Architect, Manpower
