EasyMonneret – ready, steady, custom!
Read about the biggest motorcycle school in France and learn why they chose to migrate from Magento 1 to Sylius.
Easy Monneret is a motorcycle school that provides over 10,000 trainees per year with the best training adapted to their needs, with more than a hundred motorcycles.
The Monneret brand is a family brand with over 90 years of motorcycle passion, one of the largest French families of motorcycle riders with more than 600 race victories, 30 French championship titles, over 250 world records and 1,000+ podiums.
The previous school’s website was built on a highly personalized, 4-years old Magento 1, which unfortunately was maintained quite poorly. Because of that, a significant technical debt has been stacked up on the platform, particularly in terms of security.
Additionally, a Flash planning tool was completely separated from the architecture, and the customer’s wish was to integrate it into the main platform itself to minimize unnecessary means of support.
Therefore, the need to move on to another platform rose and soon came to light very obviously as a big pain point, particularly for security reasons – those were becoming quite critical very fast.
Monsieur Biz, one of Sylius’ most experienced French Premium Partners who has been in contact with Easy Monneret, quickly proposed Sylius as a new platform. In contrast, other agencies suggested Magento 2, a solution the customer soon after refused to consider.
The main challenge for realizing the project was the management of the school motorcycle’s internal planning. The complexity of data recovery was truly immense; it included more than a hundred motorcycles in constant operation to manage, which had to be in sync with the planning requirements of teachers and students and the available circuit places. Therefore, the project’s biggest challenge was implementing an easy planning calendar managed by students in their customer account.
Another big obstacle to overcome was performance-related. The client needed the product pages to be responsive in real-time as the latter considers the schedule to show the students available time slots.
The fact that Sylius is 100% Symfony-based makes it easier to learn and allows a more efficient production capability. The project’s delivery time has been a lot lower on Sylius than the estimated time of Magento 2 for a project of that kind. The documentation has also been deemed of better quality to Sylius’ advantage, and the extremely customizable back office made it possible to tailor the platform exactly to customer’s needs.
The platform is now easier to use, and we are happy with the new custom functions which were made by Monsieur Biz. We used to get numerous security problems on the old Magento platform, which put the website at risk and needed constant monitoring from the agency. With Sylius we are still waiting to see any security-related issue, and that’s great! The fact that the new platform is usable from all kinds of devices is a relief too.
An interesting fact is that the customer still has recurrent security updates and with Sylius it’s done within a few hours whereas it’d take a bunch of days on Magento to update the platform.
From Easy Monneret’s point of view, it was time and cost that tipped the scales in Sylius’ favor. With the technical constraints of the project, the other solutions were not able to compete.
The project took less than six months of development on Sylius.
For the purpose of dynamic content management, Monsieur Biz has developed an excellent Rich Editor Plugin which enables easy content blocks and type selection.
The hosting used for the project was Scaleway. It was chosen because a dedicated server was needed; Scaleway servers are stable plus Monsieur Biz knows the solution well.
On the Easy Monneret project, there was nothing in Sylius that was lacking. An industry-driven code was only added; besides that, Sylius met the project constraints perfectly.
Custom projects on Sylius are way simpler and more stable than with other platforms, with a lower risk of problems, especially when it comes to the platform update thanks to Sylius’ stable release cycle.
Since the last Sylius update (1.8), we are really fond of the dashboard, which is more readable and ergonomic. We asked for a custom sales report (auto-generated) which was created by the agency, and the result is great as well.
The customer insists on the fact that the fusion between the two old systems (Magento for eCommerce and a developed app for planning lessons) with Sylius is a life changer. The ability to reassign clients to another teacher or another time slot is greatly used.
The client acknowledges that the Sylius platform is fast and it’s a fact that before replatforming, the ratio between the courses bought from the web (60%) and the courses bought from the physical agencies (40%) has changed the dynamic by 20% (80% through web and only 20% offline).
Analytics data are hard to compare due to the covid-19 crisis, which has completely changed the level of research for motorcycle lessons. Still, if we take a small period (two summer month without lockdown) we may see this kind of numbers evolution:
