Case Studies > Manheim Scales Up to Meet Major Growth in Online and Mobile Business

Manheim Scales Up to Meet Major Growth in Online and Mobile Business

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

New Relic
Manheim.com
Simulcast Everywhere
OVE.com

Tech Stack

Linux
Phusion Passenger
Apache HTTP Server
Memcached
Ruby on Rails
MySQL
Endeca search engine
JRuby
Trinidad
Java layer on Tomcat

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries

Applicable Industries

Automotive

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing
Business Operation

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Vehicle Telematics

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services

About The Customer

Manheim is the world’s leading provider of vehicle remarketing services. In 2012, the company handled nearly 8 million used vehicles, facilitating transactions representing more than $50 billion in value. Established in 1945 as a wholesale vehicle auction in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Manheim is a global company operating 106 physical locations in 14 countries, along with a number of digital products including Manheim.com, Simulcast Everywhere and OVE.com. The company's web and mobile properties are hosted remotely for rack and power, with internal IT teams performing routine administration and management. Each of the company’s major websites runs on a unique configuration.

The Challenge

Manheim, a leading provider of vehicle remarketing services, faced challenges in maintaining high performance during a rapidly growing online and mobile app user base. The company's online presence serves as an additional buying channel for automotive industry professionals, providing them with valuable research tools to determine the current wholesale market value for any given vehicle. However, if one of their sites is not performing well, it can affect their ability to operate at maximum capacity and properly service their customers. Furthermore, as automotive professionals became accustomed to conducting much of their business on smartphones, Manheim responded with a major expansion of its mobile capabilities. This added complexity to their environment, making it challenging to diagnose problems.

The Solution

Manheim adopted New Relic, an all-in-one SaaS-based application performance management solution, to monitor its web and mobile properties. The Operations team consults a dashboard to keep an eye on performance, alerting the Development group when an issue emerges. Then engineers use the Transaction Traces feature to dig deeper into the root of a problem. New Relic gives the entire Development group unprecedented visibility into Manheim’s fast-moving online and mobile environments, providing a common set of tools and metrics that all team members know and trust. As Manheim continues to push forward into the mobile space, the IT team will use New Relic data to make sure that mobile apps keep pace with major increases in user demand.

Operational Impact

New Relic gives the entire Development group unprecedented visibility into Manheim’s fast-moving online and mobile environments, providing a common set of tools and metrics that all team members know and trust.
With more precise data available, Manheim is delivering higher levels of application availability while improving the time needed to resolve unexpected issues.
As Manheim continues to push forward into the mobile space, the IT team will use New Relic data to make sure that mobile apps keep pace with major increases in user demand.

Quantitative Benefit

Mobile visits increased by 368%, from 2 million to 6 million from 2011 to 2012.
More than 29,000 customers connect to Manheim auctions every week using their mobile devices.