PHY-LO project
Information systems have become the nerve center in most companies. Without a secure, reliable information system, a company can see its activity come to an abrupt stop.
What about Haulotte?
Our ERP, M3, is the most critical application. It is our backbone from the order being placed and the operational functioning of the plants through financial management and delivery to the customer. Without M3, incoming orders stop dead and the plants can continue production for one day before they come to a halt.
This was the background against which we launched the PHY-LO project in 2021, the aim of which is to secure M3.
Why does it need to be secured?
M3 currently runs on one of the physical servers we own in a secure computer room that we share with other companies (a datacenter). Unfortunately the obsolescence of these machines means that they are no longer maintained by their manufacturer (IBM). We are finding ourselves confronted with physical breakdowns and slow speeds, and we have no possible upgrade solutions. Moreover, the version of M3 that we use is obsolete, and changing the version has become impossible… due to the hardware obsolescence. As a way of upgrading, we develop specific programs which complicate M3 and cost us money.
This situation is no longer tenable either in terms of hardware or software. Hence the PHY-LO project (PHY from “physique”, the French for physical and LO from “logiciel”, the French for software) which aims to work on both aspects.
The PHY-LO project
This two-year project started in mid-2021 and will take place in several stages.
Physical security, aiming to free us from the hardware aspect. This is what is called switching to “Iaas” mode (Infrastructure as a service). In practice, this means that instead of buying our own servers, we hire the server capacity (CPU, memory and drives) from a third-party company. This is how the web heavyweights operate (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft). The advantage is that at any moment we can very simply increase the power of these machines without any risk of obsolescence.
This stage will be completed by the end of 2022 by Frédéric Marcoux’s teams.
Securing the “software” aspect, which will happen during 2023, will aim to change the M3 version to the most recent version. The question of changing ERP was considered but not adopted, as this would be much more expensive, and even more importantly, very complicated in terms of adoption by users. We have decided to change the version, which means that only the interface will undergo a few visual changes, leaving your usage habits unchanged. This version will also enable us to adhere to the new regulatory functions.
To summarize, 2022 physical development of M3 to put our servers on the cloud and 2023 a change of M3 version to definitively secure our IS and provide you with increased performance on a daily basis.
The IT&S Infrastructure teams and our Infrastructure teams in the DSC will be fully mobilized on this subject in 2022.
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