Improving AFCEN's partnership portral with XWiki

AFCEN, established in 1978, is an Association that covers setting up rules concerning the design, construction, and inspection of different components that are used in nuclear facilities. Their main mission is to establish technical rules based on on-the-ground practices, feedback from the industry, as well as the latest knowledge in order to guarantee the highest quality level and the safety needed for operating nuclear reactors. These objectives are also the values that guide the technical work of AFCEN's strong editorial groups, counting today over 500 experts.

Initially founded by the electric utility EDF and the nuclear steam supply system manufacturer Framatome (now AREVA), AFCEN is often associated with the RCC-M construction code for its mechanical components and has considerably broadened its activities.

In 2015, AFCEN was counting over 50 members (operators, manufacturers, equipment vendors, organizations and companies specialized in training, consulting, etc.) that were representing the industrial nuclear sector in France and internationally.

The manufacturers, under the aegis of AFCEN, have proven through their membership, their fondness and their engagement in making collectively progress the quality, the safety and the competitiveness of their projects and of the nuclear facilities.

Since 2010, AFCEN had been firmly focused on internationalization and openness beyond its founding members. Thus, the design of the technical rules has been continuously reviewed, updated and aligned to the current industrial context by experts.

On the internal side, an intranet that had to offer experts the possibility to work in a more collaborative effective manner, having a healthy database.

On the external side, a website that had to serve the improvement of the promotion and sales activity of AFCEN's publications (both on paper and in digital format).

The association started by doing a market research, studying different companies, while relying for the consultancy regarding the information system and for the change management part, on one of its closest partners, Oxand. Already a client of XWiki SAS, they were the ones to actually recommend the XWiki software to AFCEN.

Based on this recommendation, AFCEN took the decision to start a collaboration with XWiki SAS for the overhaul of its system and, particularly for its intranet, in order to obtain a qualitative and rich database/documentation.

An important factor in AFCEN choosing XWiki SAS and its tool XCS (XWiki Collaboration Suite) was the excellent relation price / quality. The platform was priced at 100,000 € and it included a diversity of services such as project management, the implementation and configuration of the tool, as well as hosting.

The first use case of AFCEN's CORE platform was gathering all information needed for the quality management system and processes. The main purpose was to centralize all the information used worldwide by experts, then offer dedicated workspaces and divide them among different work groups, also serving on the operational side.

Each workspace has allowed experts to obtain access to relevant information and functionalities:

Deployment process

Before the actual implementation, the preparation phase included discussions and exchanges to identify the specific needs.

AFCEN worked together with XWiki SAS to find the best possible configuration within the set budget and to meet the needs of the collaborators as close as possible. Based on the agreed outcome, the specifications were defined together accordingly.

Afterward, the company organized trainings in a tutorial form, facilitating the takeover of AFCEN CORE. The feedback from the users was quick and very positive: simple, intuitive and easy to use.