The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative™, in partnership with Nationwide, Prudential Financial, and Securian Financial, faced the challenge of efficiently processing death benefits and claims. The existing process was inefficient and manual, requiring comprehensive decedent information for verification and validation of death claims. However, no single source had emerged to fill this need. The challenge was further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made the timely closure of life insurance and annuity claims more critical than ever. The lack of a centralized, secure, and transparent system for sharing decedent information among insurance carriers posed a significant challenge.

Cargo, an NFT creation, management, and monetization tool, was facing a significant challenge with its batch minting approach. This approach, which uses the newer ERC-2309 standard, allows creators, developers, and businesses to create an unlimited number of NFTs in one transaction at a similar price-point to creating just one NFT on other platforms. However, batch minting requires a lot of bandwidth. Initially, Cargo connected to the blockchain via another node provider. However, Layer 2 solutions are new chain types and not every provider has the ability to quickly increase capacity. Consequently, Cargo hit rate limits using that service, which slowed requests and at times resulted in not being able to access the Matic / Polygon blockchain. Furthermore, node outages dramatically impacted the platform and its users. If users were in the process of minting NFTs and Cargo suffered a node outage, those NFTs might not show up for users, or might show up blank. This led to increases in support tickets, and decreases in overall customer sentiment.

Before the inception of Dune Analytics in 2018, there was a significant challenge in the Ethereum community regarding the analysis of Ethereum activity data. There were limited resources to answer arbitrary questions about Ethereum activity with data or to track how that data evolved over time. A few sites reported specific metrics, but they lacked transparency and flexibility to interact with the metrics and data provided. This lack of comprehensive and interactive data made it difficult to benchmark metrics across different dApps in a meaningful way. Consequently, community discussions and product decisions were often based on inconsistent comparisons or made without considering data at all.

The case study revolves around a leading private hospital in London, UK, founded in 1982, that was grappling with the challenge of safeguarding large volumes of sensitive and private patient data. The hospital, like all healthcare institutions, had to manage and maintain a wide range of specialist systems, including life-saving medical equipment. Ensuring these systems were always operational and that patient data could be accessed and shared across the network instantaneously was crucial. At the same time, the hospital had a strict duty to prevent this sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands. The hospital also had to comply with the requirements of the GDPR, NIS Directive, and Care Quality Commission (CQC), which mandate that personal data is suitably protected and breaches are promptly detected, responded to, and reported. Despite having firewalls and antivirus software, the hospital sought to improve visibility of events inside its network to detect advanced threats capable of evading these controls. The hospital's IT department, a team of six, lacked the resources to manage the technologies required for 24/7 security monitoring.

Marmon Holdings, a global industrial organization with over 100 autonomous manufacturing and service businesses, was facing a challenge in optimizing its manufacturing appliances at the McKenzie Valve Plant. The company sought to integrate a Computer Vision (CV) solution to analyze and enhance the use of its machines. The primary goal was to gain more visibility into the run versus idle time of the machines, thereby eliminating production bottlenecks and improving return on investment (ROI). The challenge was to achieve this while ensuring low implementation costs.

Grokability, a company founded by Alison Gianotto, was facing a significant challenge. Alison needed a quick and efficient way to evaluate her business performance. However, she was overwhelmed with other tasks and didn't have the time to dig deep for answers. As the company grew, time management became less of an issue, but a new problem arose - recovering payments. Alison was managing the help desk, working on installations, and writing software code all by herself. She was strapped for time and needed a solution that would allow her to easily visualize company metrics and glean company insights, without having to build her own tool from scratch.

Cardone Ventures was facing a number of challenges that were affecting their return on investment (ROI) and overall efficiency. The sales team was spending an excessive amount of time pursuing unqualified leads, which diverted their focus from motivated prospects. This not only wasted valuable resources but also reduced the potential for successful conversions. Additionally, the company lacked 24/7 coverage for inbound leads. This meant that any leads that came in during off hours were not contacted until business hours resumed, leading to potential missed opportunities. Furthermore, the company was struggling with slow lead response times. With leads coming in around the clock, it was not feasible to drop everything to respond immediately, leading to delays and potential loss of interest from the leads.

Audiobooks.com, a leading audiobook publishing company, faced a significant challenge in improving the Cost-per-Circulation (CPC) for digital content and audiobook titles on their platform. The company aimed to predict customer churn using AI to drive more value for their clients and solidify their bottom line. As a subscription-based business, customer retention was crucial for Audiobooks.com. The company operates in a competitive market where customers can easily switch to alternative providers. Any negative experience could prompt a customer to abandon the brand, resulting in a loss of revenue, affecting customer lifetime value (LTV), and increasing the cost of acquiring new customers. The company's goal was to minimize the churn rate to lower CPC, which is calculated as the total cost of their licensing fees vs. the total number of book checkouts. High customer churn negatively impacts book checkouts and makes it difficult for distributors to get government funding. The executive team set a bold goal to track the habits of problem users and proactively make personalized offers to minimize attrition by predicting churn while increasing checkouts.

BuildASign.com, a company specializing in custom signage, was facing a significant challenge in managing their growing number of leads and contacts. The marketing team was constantly requesting assistance from the company's developers to connect apps that lacked native integrations or to build custom reports and search tools. However, the developers were often unavailable as they were shared resources with the support and sales teams. The marketing team had to manually move leads and contacts from the generator to a customer relationship manager (CRM) or ActiveCampaign, which was a time-consuming and menial task. The workload was becoming overwhelming and was diverting resources away from more important tasks.

The case study revolves around the challenges faced by the founders of Carlypso, a tech startup that sold cars 100% online. The company was founded in 2013 and sold to Carvana in 2017. The primary challenge was the limited engineering resources, which were spread thin due to competing priorities and a constantly changing roadmap. The founders felt that they were distracting their engineers with requests to integrate off-the-shelf apps, which was hindering them from focusing on building technology products that could differentiate them from their competitors. Another significant challenge was the manual tasks that prevented the company from scaling quickly. These tasks involved moving data from one system to another, which was time-consuming and inefficient.

Julie Stoian, a digital marketing consultant and tech coach at ClickFunnels and owner of Create Your Laptop Life (CYLL), was facing a significant challenge in managing her businesses. The manual steps involved in running her course and coaching business were time-consuming and detracted from her ability to focus on her clients and business growth. The manual work meant that Julie either had to spend less time on her clients and businesses or hire additional staff to manage tasks, which would increase costs. The challenge was to find a way to automate these tasks, keep costs low, and allow Julie to focus on more critical aspects of her business.

Caren Kelleher, a music enthusiast and former Google employee, identified a significant gap in the music industry. She noticed a high demand for vinyl records, particularly from independent artists, but a lack of capacity in factories worldwide to meet this demand. This challenge was compounded by the difficulty of getting the records pressed and into the hands of fans. Caren founded Gold Rush Vinyl, a high-quality record-pressing company, to address this issue. However, she faced another challenge: scaling the business on a budget. She knew that automation would be key to achieving this, but struggled to find a solution that was flexible enough to fit her team's unique needs.

Tom Sagi, who joined his family's construction business in 2008, faced significant challenges in tracking employee time and wages as the company transitioned from using subcontractors to hiring their own employees. The existing time tracking platforms required an email address, which many of his employees did not have. Even with the adoption of mobile time tracking, importing the team's hours into payroll was a cumbersome process. This led to inefficiencies, with significant time spent on payroll processing instead of productive tasks. As the company grew, Sagi also faced challenges in streamlining other aspects of the business, such as client onboarding. With a lean team and limited resources, it was crucial to automate non-core functions to allow the team to focus on improving the platform.

HubSpot's INBOUND conference, a week-long marketing, sales, and customer service event, has seen a significant increase in attendance over the years. However, the registration process was not always seamless. The event technology used was outdated and relied on archaic infrastructures, making the transfer of information from the event management app into HubSpot's CRM tool and marketing automation a manual and laborious process. This led to a clunky sign-up process, which could potentially affect customer confidence and attendance numbers. The process was also costly and resource-intensive, involving an outsourced team to manage the integration and keep it running throughout the year. This was neither sustainable nor cost-effective.

La De Da! is a gift store in suburban Chicago known for its personalized customer service. The owner, Jill Carlisle, is renowned for her ability to recommend the perfect gift for customers. However, with the advent of social distancing measures, the store was forced to close, posing a significant challenge to its business model which relied heavily on face-to-face interactions. The store's website was basic, with no eCommerce functionality, as Jill had always preferred to sell in-person. The challenge was to create an 'eCommerce-light' solution that was easy to manage and could replicate the in-person customer experience that La De Da! was known for.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rhiannon Menn, a concerned citizen, was looking for ways to support struggling families in her community while adhering to stay-at-home orders. She started by making and delivering meals to families in need, a gesture that quickly gained traction and evolved into a national grassroots movement known as Lasagna Love. The initiative grew organically, attracting over 2,000 volunteers across the country within a few months. However, the rapid growth presented a challenge. Rhiannon was manually onboarding new volunteers, a process that involved sending out links and welcome emails, and entering information into their database. This manual process was time-consuming and inefficient, hindering the initiative's ability to scale and reach more families in need.

Staples Inc., the world's largest supplier of office products, promises to make buying products easy, including making customer deliveries the very next day whenever required. When Staples experienced an increase in delivery volume, the company needed an integration solution that could be implemented rapidly and scaled easily. The company had recently acquired Corporate Express and was seeking ways to maximize synergy and reduce costs across the business. They identified an opportunity to integrate transportation networks for a potential multi-million-dollar cost savings. However, the supply chain platform they had selected couldn't scale to handle the massive transaction volume. Staples was committed to finding a solution that did not slow down integration efforts with Corporate Express.

Lockheed Martin, a leading aerospace and defense manufacturer, was grappling with the complexity of its supply chain. The company's products are intricate, and its demand is highly variable. To keep costs low, Lockheed Martin's planners needed accurate forecasts on the impacts of changes across deep bills of material with multiple tiers of suppliers. However, before switching to Kinaxis RapidResponse, Lockheed Martin had limited visibility into its suppliers up and down the supply chain. This lack of transparency left its planners to make decisions with limited information, which could potentially lead to inefficiencies and increased costs.