December 1, 2021

Context

This project was carried out for EDF, on a tracking/business application used to follow activity on critical industrial projects, including the EPR Flamanville 3 reactor and the Grand Carénage program. The tool, built on Mantis BT (PHP), is used as a shared reference for logging, following up, and closing action items across multiple project teams working in a highly regulated, safety-critical industrial context. Stack: PHP, Angular, Mantis BT.

Constraints

• A large number of distinct business instances (50+) to configure and keep consistent, each reflecting the tracking needs of a different project or site.
• Long-lived usage: the tool had to remain maintainable over time as projects such as Flamanville 3 and Grand Carénage evolved across their own multi-year timelines.
• Functional evolution driven by field and business needs, requiring changes to be integrated without disrupting instances already in active use.
• Stability and reliability expectations typical of the nuclear/energy sector, where tracking tools support activity that is itself subject to strict oversight.
• Accessibility for teams working directly on-site, which pushed the need for a mobile-friendly way to interact with the tool beyond the standard desktop interface.

Contribution

• Developed and configured more than 50 business instances of Mantis BT, each tailored to the activity-tracking needs of a specific project or organizational unit.
• Carried out technical analysis of instance-specific requirements to translate business tracking needs into consistent Mantis BT configurations.
• Worked on the underlying PHP codebase to adapt and improve the tool's behavior where standard configuration was not sufficient.
• Investigated and resolved technical issues arising from the scale and diversity of the deployed instances.
• Designed and built an Angular-based mobile version of the tool, extending its use to teams working directly in the field.

Approach

Given the number of instances involved, the priority was to keep configuration consistent and maintainable rather than treating each instance as a one-off customization — this limited the effort needed to apply fixes or functional changes across the fleet of instances. Changes to the PHP codebase were made with care for backward compatibility, since instances were already in active use on live industrial projects and could not tolerate unplanned disruption. Building the mobile layer as a separate Angular application, connected to the same underlying tracking data, allowed field usage to be addressed without altering the core Mantis BT application that project teams already relied on.

Outcome

The result was a tracking tool able to support activity monitoring across a large and varied set of industrial projects, including major EDF programs like EPR Flamanville 3 and Grand Carénage, without requiring a separate tool per project. Configuring instances consistently made ongoing maintenance and functional evolution more manageable as business needs changed. The addition of a mobile interface made the tool more accessible to teams working on-site, rather than only through desktop access.