Maarch Courrier and the digital transition at the French Development Agency

The Agence française de développement (AFD), is a public financial institution that implements France’s development policy, acting to combat poverty and promote sustainable development.

Present in 115 countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, and French overseas territories, this public institution finances and supports projects that improve people’s living conditions, foster economic growth, and protect the planet.

AFD’s teams are involved in more than 4,000 of these high-impact social and environmental projects. They thereby contribute to France’s and the French people’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Supporting the digital transition

Among the missions of the projects led by AFD is that of supporting technological and digital transition — a mission it applies to itself as well, notably through the deployment of an electronic signing platform for approving and signing internal memos.

AFD’s need was to set up a tool to optimize approval and validation workflows for correspondence. The goal was to reduce document approval times and avoid documents being lost within departments.

Initially, only internal memos (information, decision, etc.) were concerned. The need quickly expanded to the finance function for managing purchase requests.

To meet this need, AFD turned to Maarch for its electronic correspondence management product, Maarch Courrier. In particular, it was the signing platform built into Maarch Courrier and its open-source licensing model that won over the project team.

The expected tool is named “paraf”; it must be accessible to all AFD staff so they can process internal memos:

• Digitally record an internal memo
• Start an approval workflow
• Approve the memo
• Distribute the memo to the relevant departments
• Review the memo

Tool adaptation and MCO: Maarch’s response

As the project started in September 2018, it was version 18.10 of Maarch Courrier that was deployed. To meet the needs of the internal memo, Maarch’s integration team made a few adaptations to fully support the management of internal memos.

We have in fact incorporated the developments made on this project into the 20.03 and then 20.10 roadmap.

The paraf tool is also connected to AFD’s SSO, using CAS technology to carry out this integration.

To ensure ongoing monitoring and support of the platform, we signed an MCO (operational maintenance) contract with AFD. This gives them access to a dedicated project manager and an allotment of days for product configuration / customization / skills transfer to AFD’s internal teams.

A migration is planned for the end of 2020, which will allow AFD to move to a standard version of the product, targeting 20.10, where we will carry over the latest specific requests from the paraf project.

2,000 daily users

The paraf tool is widely deployed within AFD; it is used daily by more than 2,000 users to manage internal memos, and is being progressively rolled out across AFD’s various departments and agencies for managing internal memos and purchase requests.

It will have required more than 80 days of services since the start of the project, along with strong involvement from the IT department’s “New Digital Services and Architecture” (SNA) and “Support and Applications” (SAP) divisions.

Testimonial

We turned to the Maarch Courrier solution as part of digital initiatives, in a context of digitalizing our signing platforms.

Our interactions with the Maarch team were very smooth. They were able to support us in configuring the application and adapting it to our specific business processes, before rolling out vendor updates.

Most of our users’ specific needs were able to be addressed through configuration.

Today, Paraf allows us to manage 6 types of internal memos with their specific features, around ten user profiles, and around thirty queues. 3,500 memos have gone through a validation workflow in PARAF. We know at all times who the next approver/signatory is!

Feedback from our users has been positive regarding how easy the tool is to learn, and we in fact have several new topics under consideration.

— Gaëlle Chauvel

Application Support Manager
Agence Française de Développement