USA Wholesale, a distributor of beauty products, was facing a challenge with its customer support operations. The company had been using WhatsApp to manage its support operations, with agents manually responding to every customer inquiry. This approach had worked in the company’s earlier years when it was smaller. However, as USA Wholesale began to grow its customer base, it became clear that manual support was too time-consuming and didn’t scale well with its operations. Agents had to answer common questions repeatedly, regardless of whether the lead was qualified or unqualified, which was an inefficient use of their time. The increase in demand for its products led to a rise in customer support inquiries that the team manually managed through a WhatsApp Business account. This was time-consuming and tedious for agents. USA Wholesale knew it needed a centralized system to scale more efficiently and improve its customer support.

Sharkey’s Cuts For Kids, a franchised hair salon in Odessa, TX, aimed to break the corporate grand opening record of 78 services without spending a fortune on ads. The salon, managed by a husband and wife team, wanted to maximize ad results while reducing the time spent in customer support. The challenge was to generate high-quality, cost-efficient salon bookings for the grand opening. The goal was to shatter previous franchise records and launch the largest Grand Opening in the most cost-efficient way. The challenge was to create a system that would not only attract potential clients but also assist them in booking their appointments for the Grand Opening Day.

Bosch Rexroth, a Fortune 100 company and one of the world’s largest suppliers of technology and services, has been committed to sustainability and green engineering practices for nearly half a century. The company recognizes the potential of green engineering to reduce costs, improve product performance, enhance corporate reputation, and open up new market opportunities. However, to truly be considered 'green', engineers must consider factors such as product life cycle, reusability, and the elimination of toxic chemicals. Bosch Rexroth’s engineering division faced the challenge of designing its latest Rexroth Frequency Converter Fe series to be more economical and environmentally friendly. The goal was to reduce parts, size, and power consumption, while improving reliability and stability.

Unable to deliver the production quantity in the expected time by maintaining the scheduling parameters and level the capacity parameters too.The customer should place the sales order in the first plantThe manufacturing of the products should be done in different plants (i.e. assembly of the product happens in the plant (first) and semi-finished products are produced in another plant (second)The demand from the first plant should come to the second plant, and it needs to be produced by them according to the requirementAfter manufacturing the semi-finished product, the products from the second plant stock should be shipped (stock transport order) to the assembly first plant for the assembling process

Asbury Automotive Group, a Fortune 500 company, is one of the largest automotive retailers in the U.S. with 8,000 employees spread across 108 business units in nine states. The company's thriving business often involves strategic acquisitions, which necessitates a robust and efficient hiring process. However, Asbury faced significant challenges in streamlining its hiring process. The company was also grappling with high recruitment advertising expenses, which were proving to be a financial burden. The need of the hour was to find a solution that could not only streamline the recruitment process but also cut down on the advertising expenses.

BNP PARIBAS Asset Management, the investment management arm of BNP PARIBAS, recognized the need to enhance their digital presence in response to evolving client expectations, regulatory changes, and increasing competition. Their clients demanded solutions tailored to their specific needs, which were responsive, insightful, responsible, and transparent. BNP PARIBAS aimed to improve client experience, increase operational efficiency, and develop new services by better utilizing data. To achieve these goals, they identified three critical capabilities: Natural Language Processing, Behavioral Trend Analysis, and Data Velocity. However, the challenge lay in integrating these capabilities into their existing systems and processes.

Brandwatch, a leading enterprise social suite, was facing a challenge in 2018. The company was seeking new ways to engage with and convert website visitors on a global scale. They understood that their customer base had diverse preferences when it came to engagement. Some customers preferred forms, others wanted immediate human interaction, while some favored automated chatbots. Therefore, Brandwatch needed a flexible solution that could cater to all these preferences. They were already using Intercom as an in-app help solution, but they needed a solution that was more suited to their website.

Gigamon, a network visibility and monitoring solution provider, faced a significant challenge in quickly and effectively communicating their complex services to website visitors. The company's Senior Director of Global Digital Experience, Heather Alter, noted that if visitors did not understand what Gigamon did, they would likely leave and go to a competitor. The company needed to engage in the right conversations to help people understand their services quickly. The challenge was to find a solution that would not only educate and engage buyers but also be strategic and quickly influence time to pipeline. Gigamon's sales business development team had previously used Drift at other companies and knew it was best in class, making it the top contender for their needs.

Qualtrics, a company synonymous with experience management, faced a challenge in optimizing their website for all visitors, particularly target accounts. Despite having traditional channels set up for users to interact with their brand, such as filling out a form on their website or talking to sales via phone or email, they lacked a digital aspect. The team wanted to ensure that no matter the channel, a user could get in touch with their sales team. They also aimed to build an incremental pipeline through the website and generate net-new names from website visitors. Simultaneously, they were rolling out a comprehensive account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, aiming to enhance their existing good practices.

Augury, a company dedicated to providing insights into the health and performance of manufacturing machines, was facing a challenge. The founders of Augury, graduates of the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, realized that while they could often tell when a machine was malfunctioning based on changes in sound or performance, the machines themselves lacked the ability to signal exactly what was going wrong. This led to inefficient troubleshooting methods such as manually cleaning fan airways to solve software problems. Furthermore, as Augury grew and began to handle a significant increase in enterprise customers, it needed to rebuild its IoT platform to be able to scale sufficiently. It required a stable cloud solution for IoT that could offer superior scalability, as well as a broad range of technologies and functionality.

Creative Media Works, a division of Emtek, operates the global BBM consumer messaging and social networking platform under license from BlackBerry Limited. The platform has evolved from a text and video messaging app into a social ecosystem that unifies chat, social, commerce, content, and services. However, the company faced the challenge of intense competition and changing consumer expectations, making innovation, growth, and awareness of emerging trends essential to success. The company needed to evolve the text and video messaging app into a social service spanning chat, social, commerce, games, and more. Furthermore, the company had a hosting arrangement with BlackBerry for up to two years, after which it needed to identify a vendor to support its development work and cut over to them. The company determined that a hosted cloud environment should meet its agility, speed, and cost requirements.

Cancer is a complex disease with variations in the genetic makeup of individuals and their tumors, making every patient unique. However, the majority of current medical practice treats many patients identically, leading to wide variations in response to therapy. Typically, only 25% of patients benefit from the often expensive treatment they are given, with many suffering serious side effects. The current approach to cancer drug therapy seems to be largely based on a trial and error principle. Alacris Theranostics, a Berlin-based spin-off company of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, sought to overcome this mismatch for patients and healthcare costs using computer models.

The case study revolves around an independent global asset management firm with prestigious corporate investors and banking partners. The firm is responsible for managing assets for a wide range of clients and is acutely aware of its responsibility to protect all related information. The firm had antivirus software and firewalls in place, which provided an essential first line of defense. However, if hackers or malware were to penetrate these barriers, it had no means of monitoring its IT infrastructure to detect unauthorized activity on its network. The firm also needed to ensure that there were no weaknesses in its own network that might be exploited by hackers as a means of infiltrating the networks of its many financial partners. The firm was comfortable that it complied with the IT security standards set out by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, and other similar regulatory bodies around the world, but it anticipated that these industry requirements would soon become more stringent.

Theta Tech AI, a company that builds customized artificial intelligence algorithms and front-end user interfaces for large-scale healthcare AI systems, faced several challenges in developing generalizable medical AI systems. The team had to manage thousands of experiments for large-scale parallel training workflows, which were run on GPU servers in AWS. However, they found that AWS CloudWatch Logs, their initial choice for monitoring the jobs, was inadequate for managing experiment logs. The team was unable to get experiment-relevant metrics from AWS CloudWatch Logs, debug problems with training jobs and experiments, integrate Optuna for hyperparameter optimization, and communicate the results of ML models to clients effectively.

Appen, a leading provider of high-quality training data for AI systems, was facing a significant challenge in scaling its fraud detection mechanism. The company was using a partially automated but mostly manual system to detect and prevent malicious activity on their platform. This system, which relied on SQL and Python scripts, was not efficient enough to handle the increasing volume of work. Appen was struggling to monitor more than 50 jobs per day manually and considered hiring 20+ data analysts to keep up with the platform’s growth. The company needed a solution that would allow them to scale their fraud detection, increase the efficiency of their crowd workers, and attract new enterprise clients. The existing system also posed a challenge in terms of data quality, as it was prone to human error and could not efficiently eliminate low-quality contributions.

Antic Screen Printing, based in Austin, Texas, is a company that prioritizes customer experience. To ensure a smooth experience for their customers, they needed to streamline their own internal workflows. The challenge they faced was the manual and time-consuming process of transferring leads from their website and quoting forms into their marketing funnels. This process was not only tedious but also prone to errors and inconsistencies. The company was in need of a solution that could automate this process, thereby saving time and ensuring consistency.

Chi City Legal, a small law firm based in Chicago, was facing the challenge of managing their operations with a minimal administrative staff. The firm, consisting of only two attorneys, was struggling with the administrative load that came with running a law firm. The tasks included client communication, creating proposals, documents, and forms, and managing case information. The workload was overwhelming and was taking away from the time they could spend on their clients and their cases. The challenge was to find a way to manage these tasks efficiently without having to hire additional administrative staff.

Sime Darby Industrial, a leading supplier of heavy machinery to the construction and resource industries, was facing challenges in scaling its operations due to manual processes and a lack of digitization. The company was using multiple different form solutions to capture and input data, which was not only inefficient but also increased their tech debt. Safety and compliance processes, which are critical to the company's operations, were also heavily reliant on manual paperwork. Employees had to fill out paper forms to confirm it's safe to start work, which were then manually entered into a spreadsheet. This process was time-consuming and prone to errors. The company needed a solution that could automate these processes, reduce tech debt, and allow them to scale rapidly in a fast-moving environment.

Jyske Bank, one of Denmark’s largest banks, was facing challenges in adhering to strict anti-money laundering regulations and fraud prevention practices. These regulations added pressure on banking processes and the employees who worked to ensure compliance. The bank was also striving to provide a frictionless user experience to its customers, freeing them from tedious and repetitive forms and tasks. The bank was required to perform a fraud-prevention process known as 'Know Your Customer' under the regulation of the European Banking Authority and the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority. This process created several extra steps and tasks for customers, eroding their experience while generating additional administrative work for employees.

EDEKA Northern Bavaria-Saxony-Thuringia, a regional group of the EDEKA network, was facing challenges with its legacy planning systems. The company, which supplies around 900 retail stores, was dealing with increasing data volumes and growing requirements that its existing systems could not handle. The company's Excel-based planning processes were also proving to be inadequate, with employees spending more time preparing the data than analyzing the information it contained. The company's legacy planning system was unable to handle demands such as displaying tour utilization or logistics packing densities, and performance was no longer sufficient for smooth operation. The company was also facing issues with data loading times, which could take up to 24 hours for larger amounts of data from SAP. These challenges led the company to seek a new, more powerful solution for planning, reporting, and analysis.

Cuboh, a restaurant-tech company, integrates delivery apps with point-of-sales systems and consolidates them into a single tablet. Despite processing over $1B in transactional volume, the company faced a significant challenge. They hadn't built their data structure to handle scale, leading to inefficiencies in querying their database for millions of rows. This resulted in latency in large customer reporting requests. The team sought to create an appropriate underlying dataset to streamline their ledger-based reporting. They initially opted for a Kafka-based streaming platform, but soon realized they needed a more robust solution to handle their large datasets. The ideal solution needed to be compatible with an underlying relational database, produce low latency requests, handle RESTful API requests, provide near-real-time reporting, be self-managed, and offer caching for date-based query structures.

Gadsme, an advertising platform designed for the gaming and e-sports industries, was faced with the challenge of efficiently exposing data insights to their clients. As an AdTech company, Gadsme collects millions of events every day, all of which are stored in BigQuery. The company was in need of a tool that could help them manage and expose this vast amount of data in a meaningful and efficient way. They were also looking for a solution that could help them maintain complete control of analytics costs. The challenge was further compounded by the need to keep innovating and bringing new brand experiences to the gaming and e-sports industries.

Ocean Network Express (ONE), the world’s seventh-largest container carrier, was formed following the merger of Japan’s three largest shipping lines in 2017. The merger led to a complex and disjointed process architecture, with a lack of communication between departments and systems posing a significant challenge. The accounts payable process, critical for timely vendor payments, was particularly inefficient, involving three different sub-departments within the finance team. The process was primarily decentralized, managed manually, and often involved a lengthy paper trail. The finance team used spreadsheets to keep the process on track, but it was difficult to manage and standardize. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these issues, as the shift to remote work made the process unmanageable and hindered seamless communication between the finance sub-departments and systems. The team needed a platform, system, or tool to fit all of their processes in this new reality.

First Philippine Holdings (FPH), a pioneering holdings company with a strong portfolio in clean and renewable energy, faced significant challenges in its operations due to manual processes. The approval workflows were manual, involving sifting through hundreds of emails, physical forms, and SAP data. This not only made the process time-consuming but also led to difficulties in tracking approval requests. Approval requests often got lost due to the lack of a centralized tracking tool. Furthermore, obtaining timely approvals from senior leaders was nearly impossible without a mobile workflow management application. The pandemic further highlighted the need for digitalization and minimizing the company's carbon footprint.

RENU Contracting and Restoration, a third-generation business providing contracting, restoration, and emergency response services, was facing significant challenges with their manual processes. The IT department was spending countless hours setting up special email accounts to trigger work, which was not only time-consuming but also hampered productivity. The team was struggling to manage complex processes using the existing system of emails and spreadsheets. This system was not only inefficient but also made it difficult to track and process issues. Process administrators had to manually log issues on spreadsheets and track them over hundreds of emails, which was a cumbersome and error-prone process.

The Alice Smith School, a leading international school in Malaysia, was facing significant operational challenges. The school's IT Director, Bradley Fisher, was seeking solutions to address the school's manual processes, administrative overload, and resistance to change. The school's operations were heavily reliant on paper-based processes, which were not only time-consuming but also restricted the staff's ability to perform tasks remotely. The administrative staff was overwhelmed with the burden of processing data manually on paper forms. Furthermore, the school was grappling with the challenge of convincing its employees to transition from their decades-old practices of using paper documents to a digital platform.

Rabobank, a cooperative bank with a significant international banking operation, is committed to addressing its financed emissions and carbon risks. Since 2020, the bank has been working with clients to address high-emitting supply chains in its commodity trade finance portfolio. For instance, Rabobank implemented a pilot scheme offering metal commodity traders incentives for meeting sustainability targets and a template for clients to develop a climate action plan to decarbonize their trade flows. However, Rabobank faced a significant challenge: the lack of high-quality emissions data for clients’ supply chains. The bank recognized that to strengthen its green finance schemes and set quantified targets with measurable progress, it needed to overcome this barrier. Rabobank aimed to achieve three key goals: setting emissions reduction targets, advising clients on carbon risk reduction, and reducing the carbon footprint of its trade commodity finance portfolio.

Total CSR, a lean team offering a training program for insurance onboarding, found themselves overwhelmed with menial tasks that were drawing them away from their core work. As a small team of three, they were handling an expanding workload that included tasks such as building leads in a customer relationship manager (CRM), managing accounts from lead to client, and tracking and entering payments across different platforms. These tasks were not only time-consuming but also derailed their focus from critical work. The challenge was to find a solution that could automate these tasks, allowing the team to focus on their primary responsibilities and passion.

Societe Generale - FORGE, the digital capital markets platform of the Societe Generale Group, was part of the European Investment Bank's first digital bond on a public blockchain. On 27 April 2021, the EIB launched a multi-dealer unsubordinated, unsecured 2-year bond issuance (EUR 100,000,000) on the Ethereum mainnet, for the registration and settlement of the securities, in collaboration with Goldman Sachs, Santander and Societe Generale. The payment of the issue monies from the underwriters to the EIB were represented on the Ethereum mainnet in the form of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). This transaction was part of a partnership announced in October 2020, under which terms Societe Generale - FORGE selected Consensys to provide technology and services for its ongoing CBDC pilot activities through its Codefi Payments product.

Dina Yankelewitz, a manager of data and analytics at Pearson, was facing a common challenge in the modern workplace - keeping track of meetings amidst a busy schedule. With numerous tasks and projects requiring her attention, it was easy for a meeting to be overlooked. This was especially true when she was away from her desk, on the road, or in between tasks. The traditional methods of reminders, such as Slack notifications or Google Calendar's desktop notifications, were not effective as they could easily become background noise or be missed if she was not at her computer. The challenge was to find a reliable and efficient way to receive meeting reminders that would cut through the noise and ensure she was always prepared and available for her meetings.