Playtika, a leading Game-Entertainment company, faced significant challenges in scaling the production of real-time machine learning. With over 10 million daily active users, 10 billion daily events, and over 9TB of daily processed data, the company's existing batch and web services deployment methods were unable to scale to meet their needs or produce predictions in real-time. The REST APIs in their ML Pipelines led to service exhaustion, client starvation, handling failures and retries, and performance tuning of bulk size for batch partitioning. Playtika’s event-driven ecosystem required a solution that could support real-time streaming of their production models and scale without downtime. They also needed a solution that could integrate with various processes including Airflow and Spark, and handle bursts, peaks, and fast creation of new ML Pipelines.

Body & Fit, a leading sports nutrition and dietary product business, was facing challenges with its existing ecommerce platform. The company, which processes almost two million orders a year and offers more than 3,000 items, was planning a strategy of rapid growth, aiming to double its presence from seven to twelve countries. However, scalability was a challenge on its existing ecommerce platform, and weak integration between components made it difficult to track customer journeys across touchpoints. The company needed a solution that could deliver excellent customer experience, potential for global expansion, continuous optimization, and personalized content. Furthermore, Body & Fit wanted to create a unified customer journey by combining data from multiple sources, including its ERP, ecommerce solution, event-stream processing, frontend interfaces, online marketing, customer service solution, and analytics.

Bonnier Publications, a Copenhagen-based media company, was facing the challenge of transitioning from a print to a digital multi-format business model in an ever-changing media environment. The global magazine industry was shrinking every year, and Bonnier knew that this digital transformation was critical for its survival and growth. The company set a six-month deadline to achieve this goal, with the challenge being a complete overhaul of its customer data and the way it engaged with customers online to maximize ecommerce conversion rates. The initial target was to gain 25,000 new subscriptions. Bonnier's success largely depended on its reader base, with B2C business accounting for 75% of its revenue. Therefore, it was crucial for the company to understand its readers and their preferences.

Book Creator, a self-publishing tool, aimed to shift its focus towards serving the K-12 market and enhance student engagement by unlocking their creativity. The company wanted to provide a platform where students and teachers could collaboratively create and publish ebooks and learning materials. However, with a small team of 13, they faced the challenge of reaching millions of students and handling high-variability workloads. Additionally, they needed to comply with strict data access management requirements including GDPR in the European Union and FERPA/COPPA in the U.S. The company also wanted to rapidly develop new features while reducing the complexities of storing data and scaling access to it.

Boxed, a leading digital wholesaler, was founded in 2013 with the aim of making bulk shopping easy, convenient, and accessible for consumers. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., Boxed experienced a significant increase in traffic and demand on its platform. The shift towards online grocery shopping, which had been gradual, suddenly accelerated, and Boxed needed to scale up its infrastructure and data processing to keep up with the flood of orders that nearly doubled during the pandemic. With the large increase in concurrent users on the site, Boxed’s database was hit with thousands of read/write operations per second, specifically for operations like creating new user accounts, adding/removing items to cart, and checking out. These actions required writes to its database, and Boxed had to scale up the resources available to its database to handle this increase in operations per second.

Icebreaker, a clothing brand that uses merino wool from New Zealand, faced a significant challenge in managing and deciphering thousands of customer feedback forms. The company used Wufoo, a tool for creating customized forms, to collect feedback from customers about their shopping experience. However, the process of extracting, formatting, filtering, organizing, and sometimes translating the information from these forms was time-consuming and inefficient. As a result, the customer's voice was only being heard about once a month. The team needed a way to automate this process to ensure that customer feedback was promptly and efficiently addressed.

The County Court of Victoria, which hears about 12,000 cases a year, was struggling with an overwhelming amount of paperwork. The existing legacy case management system was not comprehensive and was difficult to use. The court needed to modernize its high-volume paperwork management but was unsure of where to start or which technology to use. The first process that needed attention was the directions correspondence workflow, which generated hundreds of pieces of correspondence that had to be individually printed and assigned. The next challenge was the convoluted manual process of auditing and compliance, which required pulling files from different locations and was difficult to manage due to lack of a top-down view of all activities. Lastly, the court faced the challenge of collecting information for cases that had a plea or trial which may not be recorded in the case management system. The existing method was antiquated and fragmented, requiring hard copy questionnaires to be transposed and typed into spreadsheets.

The Dow Chemical Company, a USD60 billion enterprise composed of a worldwide network of 13 business units, faced challenges in setting and achieving enterprise-wide goals due to its decentralized business structure. The company needed to meet the differing facility needs of its various businesses while also increasing office and lab space capacity use to 90 percent and improving capital planning, real estate lease management, operations, maintenance, and energy consumption on a global basis. The Lab and Office Facilities Management (LOFM) group at Dow, which provides facilities management services and solutions that support more than 20 million square feet of lab and administrative office space worldwide, was tasked with driving these initiatives. However, reporting in all of these areas was manual, disconnected, and spreadsheet-driven, making it difficult to leverage data effectively.

Anorbank, the first fully digital bank in Uzbekistan, faced the challenge of implementing a comprehensive digital banking system during the pandemic. The bank needed to provide services without requiring customers to visit physical offices, aligning with the modern lifestyle of increased mobility and preference for digital technologies. The bank's strategy required a unique platform that could process requests quickly while maintaining an individual approach to each client and guaranteeing data security. The bank's team, 70% of which consisted of IT employees, was tasked with the continuous development of this platform. The challenge was not just to describe procedures in Word documents, but to create complete digital processes. This required integration with various IT systems, making the project complex due to the number of users, different groups of bank users, and the large number of required integrations.

The Perk, a local coffee shop in Winter Park, Colorado, faced a significant challenge when the state instructed restaurants to switch to pick-up orders only due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Perk was not just a coffee shop but a gathering place for the community, offering a range of products from coffee beverages to whole beans and local Colorado craft beers. The sudden shift in the business model due to the pandemic restrictions posed a significant challenge to the coffee shop. They needed to quickly adapt to the new situation and find a way to continue serving their customers while adhering to the new regulations. The challenge was to set up an efficient online ordering system that would allow them to continue their operations and serve their customers without any physical interaction.

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative®, the largest enterprise-level blockchain consortium in the risk management and insurance industry, identified a significant challenge in the surety industry. The industry is characterized by multi-party data verifications and exchanges between the principal, obligee, and surety, which often leads to inefficiencies and complexities. The Surety Bonds Power of Attorney use case was identified as a starting point to address these issues. However, the process of enabling real-time bond signature and verification, which is crucial to the overall solution, was fraught with difficulties, including high costs, time consumption, and risk.

The Seattle Seahawks and Sounders FC, two teams with the same ownership group, are known for their passionate and vocal fan base. The management team of these teams wanted to ensure that they were effectively capturing and responding to fan feedback. However, the challenge was to manage and analyze the massive amount of feedback received from the fans, which was not limited to the game day but was a continuous process. The management team needed a system that could collect, organize, and summarize the feedback in a way that was easy to understand and actionable. The feedback was crucial for the teams as it played a significant role in their decision-making process, including team name selection and the potential removal of the general manager.

BNP Paribas, a leading bank, recognized the urgent need to address the environmental impact of human activities, particularly the carbon footprint of individuals. The bank understood that without a significant reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the global surface temperature could rise by 2°C to 3.5°C by 2100, leading to an increase in extreme weather events and negative consequences for human health and development. The bank also acknowledged the Paris Agreement's commitment to limit CO2 emissions to keep global warming below 2°C. However, the average carbon footprint of a French person in 2018 was 11.2 t CO2eq per year, significantly higher than the target of about 2 tonnes of CO2 per year per capita. BNP Paribas realized that in addition to structural changes in production patterns, individual commitment to decarbonizing consumption and lifestyle was crucial to achieving these reduction targets.

In June 2015, Adidas Football embarked on a mission to identify the world's best game changers and playmakers. The search began at The Base, Berlin, during the UEFA Champions League Final. The challenge was to expand this initiative globally and engage football enthusiasts in a unique and exciting way. Adidas aimed to create a buzz around the brand and its association with football, particularly in Asia. The company wanted to launch 2v2 football tournaments across three main cities – Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta. The challenge was not only to organize these tournaments but also to ensure significant participation and generate substantial PR coverage.

Bentley Motors, a globally recognized luxury car brand, was facing a significant challenge in the wake of the automotive industry's unprecedented changes. The company, known for its bespoke luxury cars, realized the need for a transformation to ensure its long-term success. This transformation was not only about switching to an all-electric portfolio of vehicles by 2030 but also about implementing effective digital transformation throughout the company. The goal was to streamline operations, improve customer service, and solidify Bentley's position as a global automotive leader. The company also aimed to enhance its customer experiences, which are a key hallmark of Bentley, through a more data-driven approach. However, the challenge was to find a solution that could help them achieve these goals.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) faced several challenges with its legacy systems. For the BBC iPlayer, the legacy system was slowing productivity, innovation, and content delivery. The growing content required massive scalability and faster response times. For the BBC Sport website, the challenges were the integration of diverse data, such as statistics and videos, rapid application development to meet game deadlines, scalability to support tens of thousands of transactions per second, and the utilization of open standards for mobile delivery. The BBC needed to upgrade the iPlayer to support a growing user base, deliver content that could be viewed on multiple devices, and personalize that content. The BBC also wanted to deliver real-time, customizable, and interactive online content for the Summer Olympics.

AkzoNobel, a Dutch paint and coatings company, has been at the forefront of color matching for two centuries. However, the company faced challenges in keeping up with the rapidly evolving color trends in industries like automotive and interior decor. The traditional method of color prediction, which involved complex mathematical models, was no longer efficient or innovative. The paint industry was under immense pressure as new colors emerged daily, and manufacturers constantly sought new finishes to gain a competitive edge. AkzoNobel's color prediction process, which involved deciphering multiple physical elements influencing color, was complex and time-consuming. The company needed to innovate and adapt to meet the modern demands and expectations of its customers.

A global automotive component manufacturer was facing a significant challenge in maintaining high First Pass Yield (FPY) rates in their production lines. Despite having real-time monitoring displays and an in-house analytical tool, the company was struggling with functional test failures that led to FPY rates dropping below 90%. The company spent approximately six months trying to identify the root cause of the issue, which turned out to be a faulty fixture in the functional test systems. This lengthy process involved extensive manual data aggregation and transformation, and required the production line to be shut down for troubleshooting. Even after identifying the issue, the company had to perform monthly maintenance on all fixtures in the functional tester lines to mitigate the FPY loss.