How Leroy Merlin employees create vacations requests in 5 minutes

We have been cooperating with Leroy Merlin for many years. At the time of the start of the Vacation service development, the process had not been automated at all. The HR department was being buried under huge paper document flow.

Therefore, the customer wanted the new service to automate organizational processes, reduce the coordination mishaps, simplify the work of HR specialists and all employees of the company, significantly reduce -- preferably to zero -- the percentage of paper documents that are brought to the personnel department.

What can be done in the Vacation Schedule

The solution allows employees to quickly issue vacation requests. The managers can then approve or reject these requests.

The vacation planning process takes place in November. For this month, employees must plan their entire vacation for the next year. All unscheduled vacations are automatically scheduled for December of the following year.

Solution includes:

• Creating vacation schedule for all employees in Russia and Kazakhstan;
• Approving vacations and/or transferring it during the year;
• Viewing information on the colleagues plans;
• Providing employees with information on the available amount of vacation days;

Self-registration of vacation requests.

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How the project went

1. We made the first version based on Microsoft SharePoint. The foundation for the service already existed - a corporate portal for employees. It was necessary to make the vacation module itself and implement it into the portal.

Development began back in 2013, the product had little functionality, but the most necessary thing worked - an employee could plan their vacation for the next year.

2. The solution moved to microservices. The microservices trend began to gain momentum in the world of enterprise development, and Vacation Schedule changed its architecture.

The chief architect of the company and the product team figured out how to properly decompose this monolith and rebuild the module into microservices.

3. A new design developed. The design team worked out the layouts in detail for each user scenario, focusing on the general design guide.

4. The product is updated. The team worked out the goals of the updated product and formed business requirements based on these needs.

Already with ready-made requirements, well-thought-out architecture, fresh design layouts, by 2019 we sawed the Sharepoint monolith into microservices and made a new interface.

5. A new country appeared in the service. The service became universal - it now understands which HRMS to contact: BOSS-Kadrovik for Russian employees and 1S for those in Kazakhstan.

6. We regularly release new useful features. We recently moved away from limiting the vacation frequency to 7 days (previously it was necessary for internal reasons of the customer). And at the moment we are adding the ability to plan the accumulated balances of vacation days.

7. Complying with the legislation. The product correctly processes all the norms laid down by the Russian law – early mandatory leave for 14 days, transfers of holidays, processing of regional holidays, irregular working hours, special working conditions, etc.

8. Implementing autotests - more than 70%. It has unit tests that developers write in code, integration tests, and scenario tests. Unit tests are the standard of our company, all solutions are 100% covered by them, because we do not skip code without them.

The product lives and is constantly being upgraded. Leroy Merlin is growing every year and so are our numbers. So, for example, according to the results of the last vacation planning in 2021, 88% of employees have already left their applications. For comparison, in 2019 it was 70%, and in 2020 - 85%.

The whole vacation planning process takes less than 5 minutes for most employees and the same amount for managers to coordinate everything. Users cope with their tasks, highly appreciate the product and are ready to use it in the future. This is exactly the kind of information that can be collected by conducting UX research.

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