LNE, NATIONAL LABORATORY FOR METROLOGY AND TESTING

In 2018, le Laboratoire National de Métrologie et d’Essais (the National Laboratory for Metrology and Testing in English. Hereinafter referred to as LNA) opted for the GoFAST cross-functional DMS solution.

Deployment is divided into several phases, with a 20-year project start-up.

Main requirements of the project

• to promote collaborative work
• to optimize the document development and validation process
• to unify communication between remote sites

Be certified and certify…

LNE has developed three quality systems:

• the "Tests and Calibrations" quality system, based on the ISO 17025 standard
• the "Certification" quality system, based on ISO 17021 and ISO 17065
• the "ISO 9001" quality system, for support services

The purpose of these systems is to ensure and improve good professional practices and the quality of services to meet customer requirements as well as regulatory, legal requirements and requirements applying to third party organizations.

The GoFAST collaborative DMS platform contributes to the Laboratory's certifications, allowing it the cross-functional management of documentation in compliance with internal documentary processes. Indeed, the definition of processes is a key first phase, but it is now essential to offer civil servants tools capable of digitizing these processes, in order to guarantee their compliance from the first stage until validation, then the final publication.

Secure access to the documentary base, designed to avoid the "Snowden effect" and therefore managed by business managers, ensures data confidentiality. Especially since LNE's activity involves carrying out tests for their customers, with the guarantee that their innovations and the specific features of their products are only accessible to authorized employees, with audit trails (it is therefore no question of sending anything by email / attachment).

Beyond its own certification, LNE optimizes the management of their customers' certifications on GoFAST:

• Cross-functional management and sharing of the "quality manual", including the templates of the certification documents, developed by the quality department through a process which allows employees to have the right templates, up to date and without any version / duplicate errors,
• Collaborative work, including simultaneous co-editing of Office files which avoids having to wait for each other to write,
• Centralization of the exchanges that are attached to the document, for no loss of information and in order to reduce emails,
• Sharing of documents in the form of secure links and via the "multi-location" function (= the same file shared in several locations, without any duplicates) to never send attachments again and therefore maintain control of the sharing as well internally and externally,
• Processes for development and validation of final documents
• The automatic provision of certain documents managed on the GoFAST platform, on the LNE intranet, in order to make them accessible but without creating "double storage".

The need for OnPremise

It goes without saying that security is paramount and in this sense, the platform is hosted in LNE's infrastructure. Thus, LNE has total access control to the Collaborative DMS platform (eg: in HTTPS, via a VPN, etc.), being on their internal network. It is getting more and more complicated and costly for the large "traditional"software publishers who push their customers towards the Cloud SaaS model regardless of constraints, and not always with sovereign hosting.

The choice of the GoFAST Collaborative DMS platform allows LNE to avoid the deployment of certain GAFAM proprietary solutions, thus protecting themselves from the Cloud Act, which, as a reminder, does not only concern "US persons".

Finally, it seems rather well acquired now, but it is always good to remember that Open Source is interesting not for the "free" aspect (it is not in itself a criterion, nor an objective of the CIOs), but above all for independence from sofrware publishers, the aibility to aud the source code and the very large communities of developers who contribute every day to improving and securing solutions.

Eventually, LNE plans to replace the file servers with GoFAST, which represents a migration of several data terabytes.