Business and Building Management for French Government

This is a user and visitor-services portal for Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse (CNAV), France’s major pension and occupational health fund.

PROBLEM:

For several decades, automated systems have been on the rise in buildings, with the most common being access control, fire safety, CCTV, and HVAC. Business applications such as CMMS, schematics, and reservation management for rooms and vehicle reservations complete the set of software that must be understood in an organization such as CNAV.

CNAV is spread throughout France in order to offer its services as close as possible to citizens and members. It is therefore no less than 20 branches and more than 150 buildings that need to be managed. The management and handling of all these heterogeneous systems is complex and often leads to their underuse due to a lack of knowledge and access to facilities (some systems are single-user and installed in technical premises that are difficult to access).

SOLUTION:

CNAV operations managers came up with a service-oriented portal concept: Compagnon. This web system would be available to all users and visitors of the CNAV facilities and buildings.

Depending on a person’s user profile (external visitor, local user, maintenance man, etc.), the Compagnon portal offers services such as room orientation and location, availability of meeting rooms, management of mission orders, holiday requests, taxi and car reservations, HVAC management, and more.

The objective is to consolidate all the applications into a single aggregator. The major applications are:

• CMMS (Carl Master) replaced by Ignition
• Help Desk with Ignition
• Existing HVAC with Ignition since 2015; migration to Perspective
• Room reservation with Ignition (Office 365 integration with MS Graph)
• Travel Manager
• Management of mission orders
• Human Resources management (leave requests)

The following applications are operational:

• HVAC on three sites out of 20; the architecture is based on local gateways (Modbus and BACnet) that publish data in MQTT on a redundant central server (CentOs).
• Butler, an application for managing meeting room equipment (light, temperature, audio and video dispatch) controlled from an iPad available in each room.
• Help Desk, which allows a person to manage maintenance and consumable requests in self-service. Accessible from the intranet, it can manage all general service requirements with a direct link to the CMMS (automatic generation of maintenance requests).
• Inventory management, which works autonomously but is also linked to CMMS.

The next applications (2020/2021) are:

• CMMS, a complete CMMS application that will replace Carl Master.
• Electronic document management: All documents related to the operation of the buildings will be digitized and accessible whenever necessary; from the HVAC, CMMS, Help Desk, etc.
• Building Information Model: The dynamic 3D models will be integrated in Compagnon. The HVAC data will be displayed by suppressing the web visualizations in which the user will be able to move/locate.

RESULTS:

Ignition had been installed for several years and the reliability and functional richness of the platform have always been there. With the release of Ignition 8 and Perspective, the CNAV, Kinerja, and IT MATION working group was able to imagine and start building the Compagnon framework. The potential of Ignition is perfectly used here, with its unlimited licensing model, capabilities in distributed computing, and multi-tenant development.

Having a multi-service web platform greatly facilitates the appropriation of the portal by users. The web technology with Ignition is unique on the market. The native mobile application with support for smartphone sensors enables innovative applications such as location, monitoring of people in technical premises, automatic connection to supervision, and more.