• Contact me
• Show me your BPM Solution

• Read the latest issue
• Subscribe

Palaiseau, October 7th, 2005

W4 helps the Cogema La Hague nuclear plant to automate the management processes of its business applications

COGEMA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the AREVA group, is the world leader of the nuclear fuel cycle industry. Unique in France, the COGEMA La Hague plant, located on the western tip of Normandy and employing 6000 people, reprocesses spent power reactor fuel to recycle reusable energy materials-uranium and plutonium-and to condition the waste into a suitable final form.

Faced with a large number of applications and increasingly heterogeneous data, the Cogema la Hague plant chose W4 Suite back in 2002 in order to automate and rationalize the management of its business applications and make information more accessible. Its goal was to reduce paper processes and better control application changes and flows, while ensuring optimum quality.

“We have chosen W4 because the technology is reliable and fast to deploy” explained Laurent Fauvel, the workflow project leader at COGEMA, “In addition, W4 Suite enables us to completely control the management cycle of our business applications from request through to version follow-up, testing and production. Using workflow as a federator of applications and an integration tool was an innovative approach and we have exceeded our objectives thanks to W4 Suite’s structuring dimension”

Cogema La Hague now has end-to-end process control of its business applications and has successfully consolidated its application infrastructure. W4 Suite’s methodological framework has also helped create a more dynamic and collaborative environment and enable the sharing of best practices.

The first application - "Request for IT Services" - has been in production since 2002 and is used by 3200 COGEMA La Hague agents and 1900 associates. It encompasses 8 business procedures including the management of business application access requests, the creation of user accounts and the management of requests for access to shared storage space across the network.

Based on the success of this project, Cogema La Hague has added a further five business applications enabling users to: track requests for site visits, requests for assistance for application testing and validation of the calorific loads of buildings, as well as to manage authorizations for driving heavy vehicles and to control internal transport.

The benefits for Cogema La Hague are numerous: increased quality of service, better visibility of requests, reduced processing time and improved communications between departments. As a result COGEMA La Hague is now working on additional projects such as using W4 workflow for tracking equipment controls and the production of specific parts.