TotalEnergies consolidates MFT in a big way with Axway

Digital transformation projects come in all sizes, but the Axway MFT modernization and consolidation at TotalEnergies is on an extensive scale. The new, centralized MFT system extends into almost every part of an international energy giant that does business in 130 countries.

Teddy Goral, IT Program Manager at TotalEnergies, explains in the following video how his company works with Axway to consolidate MFT across a vast global enterprise. (Video is in French, turn on captions for English subtitles.)

“We use the Axway MFT solution to carry out over 2 million file transfers per month,” says Teddy Goral, TotalEnergies IT program manager. “With something like 10,000 configured flows. And about 1,000 internal and external partners.”

MFT figures in many of the company’s most critical processes, Goral explains. They include:

• Financial flows for headquarters near Paris, France and subsidiaries around the world
• Logistics for a global network of warehouses and refineries
• Credit card purchases, transactions, and prices at service stations across Europe
• HR transfers supporting payroll, expense reporting, and more for 100,000 employees

Migration with a focus on consolidation

For a “supermajor” company like TotalEnergies, one of the main challenges of MFT modernization was to consolidate the systems of widely distributed and newly acquired subsidiaries.

They had an ambitious goal: migrate these diverse solutions to a centralized system that could scale with market changes and be managed in efficient and agile ways.

“TotalEnergies had file transfers running on many different platforms with legacy solutions from the aggregation of different companies,” says Nicholas Faivre, IT Consultant, MALT for TotalEnergies.

“Each of the subsidiaries had its own, different solution with a dedicated monitoring capability as part of each solution. This required a huge number of customizations.”

Standardizing on a modern MFT solution

To create a more efficient and adaptable system, TotalEnergies needed a modern MFT solution that could manage all their critical data transfers in a centralized way.

Axway’s API-driven solution fit the requirement, giving Total Energies centralized control of its vast MFT ecosystem via a single administration console.

The Axway solution also offered:

• Self-service capabilities, empowering TotalEnergies business users and partners to draw on a catalog of services to create file transfer services, subscribe partners, and manage file transfers.
• Centralized administration, reducing complexity, improving governance, and ensuring security across the entire MFT ecosystem.
• Operational intelligence and predictive analytics to prevent errors and ensure business quality.
• Versatility and flexibility to handle diverse file transfer use cases regardless of initiator, recipient, protocol, format, or schema.
• Unlimited scalability to meet the current and future data transfer needs of what today is the world’s 21^st largest public company.

Partnering on deployment

TotalEnergies also chose Axway Professional Services to help guide them through the migration process.

This includes analysis of the existing MFT solutions and flows, followed by the configuration work needed to migrate them to the Axway target solution.

“We rely on their skills… to prepare the configurations on the new platform and optimally prepare the migrations,” says Faivre. “Together, we really take charge of the project — from the start right through to the end of the migration.”

Looking toward the cloud

In their next step in MFT modernization, TotalEnergies plans to work with Axway to extend the migrations already put in place on-premises to the cloud. That includes migrating systems to Microsoft Azure and AWS, where TotalEnergies now deploys many business applications.

Axway MFT solutions support this goal, giving Total Energies managed services, on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud options.

“It’s a big challenge for us, but we’re putting the building blocks in place,” says Goyal. “We need to continue along this path, and we’ll need Axway’s help in the future.”