The Méridionale

Founded in 1931, the Compagnie Méridionale de Navigation has continually evolved to become La Méridionale. 

La Méridionale operates a daily freight and passenger transport service between Corsica and the mainland, thus ensuring Territorial Continuity as part of its Public Service mission. In 2020, the shipping company opened a regular Marseille–Tangier Med line. It provides 4 crossings a week to Morocco, increasing to up to 6 during the summer season. La Méridionale entrusted the maintenance of three Symfony business applications to the agency bluedrop.fr.

In May 2020, La Méridionale entrusted bluedrop.fr with urgently taking over the maintenance of a Symfony application with several thousand lines of code. This extranet covers all aspects of the freight business:

• Commercial activity – Prospecting, booking, printing tickets, customer and contract management;
• Transport management – Management of crossings, vehicle passage history, issuing driver tickets, handling constraints related to vehicle lengths, load codes, incidents, damages;
• Accounting operations – Tax calculations, invoicing, fuel pricing;
• Connectors to the Company’s internal systems – Connectors necessary for boarding at the quay, accounting entries, customs registration, etc.

Upgrade of the Freight extranet from Symfony 2.8.52 to Symfony 4.4
The maintenance takeover began while the Symfony version in use was no longer supported (2.8). The technical team was tasked with upgrading to Symfony 4.4. This upgrade kept the team busy for 6 months. We are now continuing to maintain the extranet on version 4.4 and are able to reassure the operations teams.

September 2021 – Freight extranet upgrade to include international transport constraints
Following the opening of a new route linking Marseille and Tangier, La Méridionale tasked our team, responsible for maintenance, with upgrading the freight management extranet to include the constraints of international transport. This upgrade involves the integration of new features related to regulations regarding police, customs, and invoicing. These new processes also require the development of a new connector to the Company's international transport management system.
Development is ongoing. Production rollout is scheduled for February 2022.

Alongside organizing the maintenance of the freight extranet, La Méridionale also entrusted us with the maintenance and some enhancements to a Symfony application for passenger check-in at the dock. This application operates on a portable device connected to a portable thermal printer and enables printing of boarding passes at the dock.

The development team took charge of resolving a few bugs following changes to the operating environment. We also:

• Upgraded Symfony (to version 4.4);
• Modified the connector to the crossing management API after a change of provider.