Air France Industries
01 Dec, 2009
Anubex, leader in enterprise application modernization, has successfully completed a migration project for Air France Industries. Air France Industries is the aircraft maintenance arm of Air France and the group took their migrated applications into production during the weekend of June 20th 2009. The US$750,000 project involved a migration from a mainframe-based system to a Windows platform with an Oracle database.
The IT team of Air France Industries started the development of the software application in the early 90s. The application has 400 users and is used by Air France Industries exclusively in the maintenance of the AWACS aircraft belonging to the French Air Force (Armée de l'Air). The development environment (Wang system and Pace database) created a growing risk for Air France Industries, due to technological obsolescence. This concern obliged Air France Industries to look for a replacement technology for this mission critical application.
“We choose Anubex”, explains Michel Le Guillevic, IT Director at Air France Industries, because through their extensive experience in migrating applications to modern platforms they were able to automate the conversion. Using their own tools and their SOAR migration methodology, they were able to guaranteeing a migration without risk and without business interruption. Consequently, Anubex delivered the migration project right on time and within budget.”
The application contains about 5000 screens and manages close to 1GB of data. Technically, the application was migrated from a Wang Pace environment to a modernized infrastructure consisting of Windows Server, an Oracle database, and web-based user interfaces. The new software will be maintained in a mixture of COBOL and Java. All character-based screens are converted to Java Swing and now fully comply with the latest standards at Air France Industries for graphical user interfaces. The enrichment of the character-based screens to native GUI components from Java was made possible by Anubex’ own Waxwing conversion tools. Now the original developers can maintain and enhance the converted screens with leading Java development tools like Eclipse.
The 20 people strong team that was responsible for the execution of the migration project consisted of developers from Air France Industries at the one hand, and migration specialists from Anubex and consultants from CSC at the other hand. While Anubex primarily concentrated on code and data migration, CSC was engaged to help Air France Industries to plan and organize the project, they assisted Air France Industries in the overall management of the project, provided technical advice on some fields and supported in the preparation and the carrying out of the tests and the IT staff from Air France Industries supported both Anubex and CSC by providing test plans and by ensuring the target environments were available on time for running the various tests. During this preparation phase of 12 months, the specialists from the three parties worked closely together to ensure that the application was migrated and ready for acceptance by the users. After the execution of the acceptance tests by the users, the migrated system went live on Monday 22nd June 2009 as planned one year earlier.
According to Louis Heymans, Managing Director at Anubex, "It was a great pleasure working together with the team at CSC and Air France Industries on this modernization project. The professional attitude and the exceptional skills of the team members made it possible to deliver the project right on time and with the expected results.”
Pascal Sokolsky, Project Director at CSC adds, “The project team succeeded to take up this technological challenge in 12 months, according to the deadlines and the budget. It was a real pleasure of working with Air France Industries and with the Anubex team, which showed its great expertise in the transformation of the information system. Finally, the modernized application offers to the users a new graphic interface of great quality and much more powerful than that of the old system. This project will remain a great achievement, as well on the human side as on the professional level.”
Michel Le Guillevic of Air France Industries continues: `During this migration project of a very specific nature, Anubex managed to bring precise solutions quickly for certain technological challenges. The contribution of CSC was also important in terms of resources with the necessary competences. This project, which proceeded in an excellent climate of trust and of human relationship, was a true success for Air France Industries”.
The person in charge of AWACS Management at Air France Industries concludes: “I thank the project team, in the name of the AWACS product, of the DGA (General Management of Air France) and the French Air Force for the quality of provided work and the respect of contractual engagements, in particular the deadlines.”
About Air France Industries
Since it was founded in 1933, Air France has always chosen to maintain its own aircraft while guaranteeing compliance with strict imperatives such as safeguarding air safety, enhanced management of aircraft operation, and cost containment.
Air France Industries is the brand under which Air France sells its aircraft maintenance services to other airlines worldwide. With 15 000 employees, Air France Industries and KLM E&M makes a turnover of close to 3 billion euros. Its technical excellence and the sheer quality of its products and services are proclaimed in its logo and in the values it reflects, including attentiveness, flexibility, operating know-how and commitment to improvement.
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