Carrier and logistics provider · Auxerre
Eight years, a thousand contracts a day, zero downtime
UPSILON · Transport and logistics
01The context
UPSILON is a transport and logistics company based in Auxerre, in Burgundy, handling a thousand transport contracts and as many logistics order lines every day. It is also the company where TALK was written, from 2001, for its own operations. TEDIES was spun out of it in 2011.
02The problem
The business ran on bespoke developments from a third-party publisher, hosted on a VAX server under OpenVMS and reached through terminal emulation. Every change went through that supplier, and was paid for. With no overall view, dispatchers extracted the data and rebuilt it in Excel; some figures were only known after the daily or monthly close.
03What was put in place
The replacement was done module by module over eight years, without ever stopping operations: first developments in 2001, charter and road in 2004, logistics and stock published online in 2005, full logistics in 2008, express freight in 2009 — the point at which the incumbent publisher could be left for good.
04The result
All the information on the same database. Volumes to handle and resources allocated are read in real time, and invoicing is under control instantly. But the most important change is not there: it is the sharing of information between departments, which made the workforce more versatile at a time of cost reduction.
Today T.A.L.K. lets me manage all the information on the same database, know in real time the volumes to be handled and the resources allocated, keep instant control of invoicing and, more generally, of the productivity of the handling teams, the drivers, the dispatchers and the administrative staff.
Going further
Why this case matters more than the others
TALK was not designed in a design office and then sold to hauliers. It was written from 2001 at a carrier and logistics provider, for its own operations, by the people who ran them. TEDIES came out of that experience in 2011, when it became clear that what worked in Auxerre would work elsewhere.
That is why TALK’s vocabulary is the vocabulary of the loading dock, and not that of a requirements document.
Eight years, and not one day of downtime
The replacement was not a big bang. It took eight years, module by module, while the company carried on handling a thousand contracts a day on the system already in place.
Charter first, then road, then logistics, then express freight. Each module ran alongside the old one until switching over no longer carried any risk. In 2009 the incumbent publisher could be left without UPSILON’s customers noticing a thing.
That is the method we apply at your site — except that we applied it at our own first, against an incumbent publisher, on a server nobody maintained any more.