Per Angusta optimizes procurement performance management with Scalingo

Used by the procurement teams of groups throughout the world such as LVMH, Adéo, Décathlon, Heineken, Monoprix, Accor, Transdev, Per Angusta is a SaaS solution that aims to optimise the management of purchasing performance through a high-performance and collaborative tool.

With more than 120 customers, an annual growth of +70%, and more than €4 million in funds raised, Per Angusta has quickly become a reference in terms of SaaS purchasing performance management.

To understand the nature of Per Angusta's business and to learn how Scalingo PaaS is successfully integrated into their workflow, we had the pleasure of speaking with Jean-Michel Gigault, CTO of Per Angusta, and Guillaume Briday, Lead Developer.

Through this case study, we will take a look behind the scenes of a SaaS entirely designed to meet the problems and challenges of purchasing teams, and see how Scalingo offers them an optimal solution for their use.

Per Angusta: procurement management in SaaS

Large companies and groups, if they do not outsource to a central purchasing office, typically have a department dedicated to the purchasing function.

This department is made up of a team whose mission is to know the supply market in its field, to collect purchase requests from their internal customers within the company, to carry out procurement and supplier research, as well as to negotiate rates and purchase conditions.

In short, this is a multidimensional job with a lot of constraints (deadlines, budgets, standards, etc.) that requires rigour and optimum control of the various processes.

In most purchasing teams, internal synchronization work represents a considerable part of the activity.

However, this process is not generally optimized for teamwork, and the tools used may be obsolete or unsuitable for teamwork.

Faced with these recurring problems in this field of activity, the Per Angusta team has developed a modern SaaS solution designed to optimise the performance management of purchasing teams.

Indeed, Per Angusta offers a complete and collaborative tool that allows the centralization of the entire purchasing process on a single platform.

Their solution offers numerous functionalities that allow to identify, prioritise, plan and measure the different steps of the purchasing process, all on a collaborative tool that facilitates communication and transparency within the team.

Many companies trust Per Angusta, and their clients include large and well-known groups such as LVMH, Adéo, Décathlon, Heineken, Monoprix, Accor, Transdev and many others.

Per Angusta's technical team comprises 6 developers with Guillaume as Lead Developer, and Jean-Michel as team manager.

In terms of technology, the team uses only Ruby on Rails and hosts 3 applications with about 10 instances on Scalingo.

Before Scalingo

Before moving to Scalingo, the Per Angusta team was already using the PaaS model of the American Heroku.

Guillaume explained that the PaaS model was particularly effective and that they were happy with what Heroku offered, and the majority of their customers are still hosted there.

On the other hand, for a certain share of their customers, Heroku is not an optimal choice for them, for strategic and business reasons.

For example, since Heroku uses the Amazon Web Service (AWS) infrastructure, this poses a barrier to its use. Amazon is one of their competitors, or due to a specific need for data centers located in France.

It is for these main reasons that the Per Angusta team decided to look for a PaaS that could replace Heroku without loss of quality of service, since Scalingo is compatible with Heroku, and having servers located in France governed by French and European regulations.

After studying the PaaS market in France and discovering Scalingo, Per Angusta decided to migrate a number of their customers to our platform, and the Per Angusta team has been using Scalingo on a daily basis for over 4 years now!

The transition and use of Scalingo

As mentioned above, Per Angusta hosts 3 Ruby on Rails applications with about 10 instances for 50 customers hosted on our platform.

Their team does not have DevOps and they do not consider themselves as such, their goal is to go as fast as possible, so all members interact with Scalingo on a daily basis to perform deployments. This is what Guillaume explains to us.

As for the features and benefits that the Per Angusta team appreciates most in Scalingo, Guillaume and Jean-Michel shared their experience with us, and here is what they revealed.

Review Apps

Review Apps are temporary environments built automatically or on-demand based on Pull Request GitHub (or Merge Request GitLab).

This feature allows users to test a version of their application in an environment similar to the main one, without affecting the application in production. And it is a tool that is ideal for collaborative work.

The Per Angusta team reported that they like this feature even though it is not used, but the simplicity of the idea makes it worth considering for potential future use.

Autoscaling

The autoscaling tool allows automatic optimization of containers according to their resource usage, so that allocated resources are automatically optimized according to the needs of the application.

This provides both passive cost optimization and a guarantee that the application has the resources it needs to run under heavy usage.

Per Angusta told us that he has tested this solution and is considering its potential use in the future.

The Scalingo API

Another point that the Per Angusta team mentioned was the use of the Scalingo API.

This API is used by Per Angusta to simplify the automation of many processes such as adding new customers, creating new users in the database etc...

And despite the fact that it is quite simple to use, Guillaume emphasised the completeness of the API and what can be achieved with it.

Support

Finally, one of the last points that Per Angusta mentioned to us was the technical support and the quality of the latter.

Guillaume and Jean-Michel explained to us that one of the biggest strengths of Scalingo is the technical support and the efficiency of the latter.

The integration of the chat on the dashboard and the speed of response of the support are the elements that satisfy Per Angusta the most, especially with the detailed and complete answers provided by the operators of the platform.

For Per Angusta, support is a great strength, especially since their team no longer has an in-house DevOps person and Scalingo makes the work of hosting and deploying their applications easier.

In short

Per Angusta offers a SaaS purchasing performance management solution that is used by more than 120 large customers in all types of industries such as LVMH, Adéo, Décathlon, Heineken, Monoprix, Accor, Transdev and many others.

Here are the main points that convinced Per Angusta to use Scalingo:

• The French data centers
• The ease of use of PaaS
• Reviews apps and autoscaling
• The Scalingo API
• The quality of the technical support