Note: This article was originally published on the main Valiantys website. You may download the PDF version of this article here.
Pari Mutuel Urbain (PMU), headquartered in Paris, France, is a major player in the betting industry. It’s Europe’s leading betting authority created by French associations that organize horse races. It’s the second largest betting organization worldwide.
PMU’s turnover reached €9.8bn in 2015, encompassing horse betting, sports betting and online poker. Its international sales also increased by 11% during this time. The organization has a nationwide distribution network of 12,900 retail outlets and five million clients, making it France’s number one online gambling domain and one of the country’s leading eCommerce websites.
Continuous innovation at work
A number of years ago, PMU commenced a company-wide Services Management System program to improve and standardize processes within its IT division. Atlassian’s Jira Software and Jira Service Desk were selected as the optimal tools to support all the company’s issue and request tracking processes. Valiantys carried out the implementation.
There were a number of reasons why PMU chose Valiantys to lead its Atlassian implementation. Thierry Gourvenec, Application Support Manager at PMU, explains:
“We trusted Valiantys because of their professionalism, and because we were confident that they could deliver the project faster than anyone else,” he said.
Ensuring a smooth transition
The implementation of Jira Software and Jira Service Desk put a strong emphasis on change management, in order to ensure that all users made a smooth transition to the new Jira tools and processes. This meant that users of the tools were involved in all phases of the project, with Valiantys holding workshops with stakeholders across the business to ascertain what was required from the new system.
The implementation covered all facets of configuration and best practices
“Thanks to its simple design and ease of use, Jira Software was quickly adopted by users across PMU,” Gourvenec said. “Feedback was very positive – especially the tool’s flexible reporting capabilities.”
Jira Software has given the PMU team a clear, centralized vision of all tasks in progress. This is particularly helpful when it comes to business requests.
Today, all teams across PMU are using Jira Service Desk to manage and track their IT change requests, including business departments like marketing, customer services, sales networks and international development.
A centralized issue management system
Valiantys also provides a fully managed service to PMU. Valiantys manages all of PMU’s application support and day-to-day administration. This includes a broad spectrum of activities including changes, upgrades and user support, freeing up time for the internal team to spend on more business critical activities.
Thierry describes the relationship as a “genuine partnership.” What’s more, Valiantys’ introduction of Agile practices using Jira Software has fostered greater cooperation between the different teams working on PMU’s strategic “Network Separation” project. Around 60 members of staff are now using agile practices to track and manage the unfolding of this project.
More of Valiantys’ successful customer stories
Deciding whether to deploy Atlassian tools is a major decision – and one that should not be taken lightly. See how other organizations were able to deploy Atlassian tools and work smarter with Valiantys.
Read more about our customer case studies
