Introduction
Corporate Express, a subdivision of Office Products Division of Buhrmann NV, is the world’s largest supplier of office supplies and graphic systems for the business market. With 3,700 employees and 14 different websites in different 12 countries, Corporate Express generates a return of around € 950 million (16% of the total Buhrmann return). More than 120,000 users of 20,000 customers generate approximately 20,000 orders per week via the websites, which comes down to 50% of the total return. Our aim is to increase this percentage of online sales to 70% in 2007.
Problems with newly developed web-ordering application require a concrete solution
It emerged that, to achieve these ambitious growth-objectives, to keep ahead of the competition and to meet the customers’ demands for new functionalities, Corporate Express was seriously in need of a new web-ordering application. After its development, it transpired during testing that a number of customers were of the opinion that the performance of this new application did not meet their expectations. Jeroen van Soelen, the Technical Infrastructure Manager explains: “People found the new application unworkable and too slow, causing too many errors to occur during login etc.
According to our software-developer, it would take many months to find the cause. After several weeks of investigating the matter, there was very little progress. We could not delay the market introduction any longer, but of course we didn’t want to be confronted with dissatisfied customers. We could have chosen to buy extra server capacity “blindly” (capacity on demand), however, apart from the fact that this would involve very high costs, it was only a treatment of the symptoms. After all, we still wouldn’t have any insight into the location of “performance killers” in the new software release and whether extra capacity would really solve this problem. Because we would rather solve the problem at the root, we quickly decided to look around on the market for an independent party who could help us with this.”
webProbe and webStress by Moniforce
Jeroen van Soelen: “Via Getronics PinkRoccade, where we host the application, we came into contact with Moniforce.” Moniforce could provide Corporate Express in the short term with the solution for all the problems using its real user monitoring tool webProbe and loadtest service webStress. Because of the hurry Corporate Express was in, Moniforce went all out in order to implement webProbe as quickly as possible. Van Soelen: “14 days after our first contact, Moniforce had already carried out a loadtest, presented the results and implemented webProbe! After another 14 days, another loadtest had been carried out and the results and analysis had already been presented.”
By carrying out a loadtest on the new application with webStress, Corporate Express gained immediate insight into its capacity and the location of the “bottlenecks”. From the test, it transpired that, among other things, the application login was a serious bottleneck, a problem that could be solved quickly by the software developer. Due to the loadtest, it became clear that no expansion of the platform capacity was needed in order to obtain a good performance, and this knowledge has saved us a lot of money.
Besides, using webProbe, for every end user, Corporate Express can now always determine exactly if and when availability & performance problems occur, so that it is possible to base decisions on facts, not being dependent on suppositions any more.
Jeroen van Soelen: “Through our collaboration with Moniforce, we were able to solve all availability and performance problems regarding our applications and we were able to put our planned software-upgrade on the market within the set times and unroll it internationally. It turned out that it wasn’t necessary to buy additional server capacity, which saved us a lot of money. We recovered the investment in webProbe and webStress within an extremely short time, and we will continue to use webProbe to monitor the performance of our applications, ensuring that our end users remain satisfied.”