Allied Glass & Aluminum Products, a company based in Victoria, British Columbia, was facing challenges in managing its wide range of services. The company, which has been in business since 1960, provides a variety of services including installation, replacement, repair, and maintenance of commercial doors and windows. They also offer emergency repair services, making their day-to-day operations complex. The company was using a paper-based system for work orders, invoices, and other processes, which was proving to be inefficient. Technicians had to physically visit the office to receive new jobs, and coordinating different systems was a challenge due to the manual nature of the processes. The company recognized the need for an automated management system to streamline their operations.

Blom Transport, a Hamilton, Ontario-based company, was struggling with the management of its fleet operations. The company, which services the metal recycling industry and mill services for the metal-making industry, was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the paperwork associated with its operations. The company was manually managing its operations using spreadsheets, which was time-consuming and inefficient. The owner, Jukka Blom, initially thought that they couldn't afford software to streamline their operations. However, the amount of time spent on paperwork made it clear that they couldn't afford not to have it. The challenge was to find a solution that could help them manage their operations more efficiently, reduce the time spent on paperwork, and allow them to focus more on their core business.

Dennis Floyd Trucking Company, a family-run business based in Santa Rosa, California, was facing significant operational challenges due to outdated software. The company, which has been in the trucking industry for generations, was struggling with inefficient processes that were time-consuming and labor-intensive. The old software program was not only outdated but also required a lot of manual work, including looking up information, resolving past issues, and extensive filing. This resulted in a high workload for the team, leading to long working hours and a slow invoicing process. The company was also expanding its operations into Nevada, which necessitated a more efficient and streamlined system that could support remote work.

Ford Motor Company, a leading multinational automobile manufacturer, was facing challenges in managing its fleet of over 15,000 vehicles and assets, particularly with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. The management of autonomous vehicles presented unique challenges compared to traditional fleets, including the automation of dispatching and servicing. The company needed a flexible solution that could adapt to their evolving needs as they continued to learn and understand the differences between managing autonomous and traditional fleets. Additionally, Ford was looking for a partner who was willing to work closely with them, understand their specific requirements, and provide continuous support and improvements to the product.

King Jouet, a family-owned toy company with a significant presence in Europe, embarked on a project in 2019 to consolidate its data flows. The project, initiated by King Jouet’s holding company, the Prenatal Retail Group, aimed to provide all group entities with a single, modern, open, and scalable ERP solution. The company selected Microsoft Dynamics as its ERP solution in March 2020 and Avanade as the implementation partner. However, King Jouet identified the need for an integrator capable of managing all incoming and outgoing data flows. This was a significant challenge as the company had multiple software applications that needed to communicate with each other, including checkout and store management, warehouse management system (WMS), cash management, e-commerce site, the B-to-B order portal dedicated to affiliates and various other applications such as expense report management or decision-making tools.

Regional banks play a crucial role in the economic health of communities by offering greater access to funding and personalized services. However, over the last two decades, these institutions have found it increasingly difficult to compete with larger national banks due to customer demand for more convenience and digital touchpoints in banking, and their lack of IT expertise to deliver them. Large national banks have hundreds of people dedicated to software development and can make up for their lack of personal client relationships by offering sleek, easy-to-use applications. This has become particularly important in a post-COVID era, where digital convenience often overshadows the personal touch of in-person banking. Regional banks are at a crossroads – their lean IT budgets are hardly enough to develop enterprise-grade software with traditional code, and commercial-off-the-shelf solutions are typically restrictive.

Addison-HVAC, a leading DOAS manufacturer based in Orlando, Florida, faced significant challenges in managing their maintenance activities. The company employed a team of five technicians, including a maintenance supervisor, who relied on a physical paper request box and an Excel spreadsheet for managing maintenance tasks. This manual process was not only time-consuming but also messy, as technicians often had grease on their hands from working. Moreover, the team had limited Wi-Fi or internet access about 70% of the time due to spotty coverage inside the facility and remote work locations. This lack of consistent internet access posed a significant challenge to the efficient execution and recording of maintenance tasks.

Google's entry into the streaming media market was a strategic move to bring online media streaming to an unprecedented mass market. The challenge was to create a disruptive device that could be used in living rooms worldwide. Google partnered with Flex to take the Chromecast from idea to concept to worldwide production. The design and engineering challenges included creating a device that was small in size, competitively priced, had wireless capabilities, and could manage temperature effectively. The goal was to design a prototype of the Chromecast in just four weeks and speed up the time to market, beating competitors on both market entry and price.

The keyless security brand, a provider of devices for commercial real estate buildings, parking garages, and multi-family residential complexes, was facing a major challenge in its production process. The company had been working with a cost-effective Taiwanese contract manufacturer, which was capable of handling production-level volumes. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about frequent engineering design changes, which required significant oversight from the facility. The 14-hour time zone difference between the client and the manufacturer made real-time collaboration difficult. Overseas flights to facilitate on-site collaboration were considered, but these would delay production times and increase manufacturing costs. Given the uncertainty brought on by the pandemic, it was clear that this arrangement would not be sustainable.

ASK Chemicals, a leading global supplier of phenolic resins, faced significant challenges due to its outdated and fragmented data management system. The company, with over 2,000 employees worldwide and 18 production facilities, was struggling to merge data from different facilities located in various countries. Each facility had a mix of on-premise installations and best-of-breed software, which made it difficult to create a unified global operational base. The leadership team identified several issues, including poor performance, lack of scalability leading to higher costs, suboptimal cybersecurity, delayed response times, and other platform limitations that hindered innovation efforts. The company needed a solution that would not only address these challenges but also lay the foundation for a new digital business model.

Creating high-quality training data for machine learning (ML) use cases can be expensive and time-consuming, especially for specialized fields that require domain experts to review and label the data. This is particularly true in the medical field, where doctors are often required to meticulously label or review training data. This process can be arduous and costly, slowing down the development of potentially life-saving algorithms. The challenge was to find a way to create high-quality training data with less involvement from physicians, thereby reducing costs and speeding up the development process.

Ambi Robotics provides AI-powered robotic systems to customers, enabling them to scale their operations and handle increasing supply chain demand. The company's machine learning (ML) system is responsible for identifying an object and its location, and moving the robot hand to that location to grasp the object. The pick success rate, which is how often a robot successfully picks up an object, is the most important marker of success. However, Ambi Robotics faced a challenge in obtaining high-quality annotations for their data, which is crucial for improving their models. Initially, the company was managing the annotation process in-house, but this approach was not scalable for the amount of data they needed. When working with new clients and locations, Ambi Robotics would sometimes see lower pick-and-place success rates, simply because the environment looked different. The best way to improve performance was to mine data from the new location, annotate it, and then retrain their ML model. However, the company lacked the infrastructure to process this large quantity of data on a recurring basis.

Ramanujan College, a constituent college of the University of Delhi, has a computer science department that collaborates with the Indian government, industry stakeholders, and other universities to conduct research and development (R&D) projects. A significant focus area is the development of sovereign cloud platforms that can compete with today's hyperscalers while ensuring data security within India's borders. Previously, most of the R&D work was hosted in the public cloud. However, running performance-intensive applications for 5G communications, blockchain, and a learning management system for over 150,000 participants led to escalating costs.

The Southern Apennine region in Italy, which is responsible for the country's central and southern water resources, is increasingly susceptible to the impacts of climate change. Unpredictable and violent thunderstorms are affecting the hydrogeological structure of the soil, while prolonged droughts are escalating the risk of potential desertification. The intensive use of the land for agriculture and other purposes has also heightened exposure to natural disasters. The District Basin Authority, which governs the physical environment and protects its water resources, is tasked with monitoring the appropriate use of these resources, forecasting the region’s water supply, and preventing natural and human-made hazards. The Authority initiated a project to continuously monitor water quality and availability throughout the territory, aiming to build a network of remote sensors that could surveil the water system and analyze the data using various technologies, including big data analytics and data science modeling.

Genel Energy, an independent oil and gas company operating in Kurdistan, Iraq, faced a significant challenge in managing its workforce of over 2,000 people spread across multiple sites. The company was seeking a solution to enhance its workforce visibility and safety. The global pandemic in 2020 added to the existing HSE challenges, putting the sites and operations at risk. Genel needed a solution that would enable them to monitor and track the movement of their workforce across sites, improve worker safety, and manage risk more effectively.

ABS-CBN Corporation, a leading media and entertainment organization in the Philippines, was facing challenges in managing its streaming and digital media services. The Philippines, being one of the world’s biggest markets for online and digital media, has a highly competitive market that demands constant innovation and exceptional user experience. ABS-CBN was struggling with a volatile demand from event-driven spikes, such as live election coverage, which required a robust and stable tech stack. The company was using multiple tools for monitoring, error reporting, tracking resources health, and on-premise infrastructure, which created a siloed technology environment. This led to a reactive approach where problems weren’t identified until they had escalated and were impacting end-users. The engineers lacked sufficient information to pinpoint the problems.

Achievers, an award-winning platform for employee recognition and engagement, experienced significant growth over the past two years, serving more than 2,500 brands across over 150 countries. This growth brought about new and increased technical demands, including the need to support a global architecture while maintaining quality and reliability. The company needed to transition from a system of disparate Kubernetes clusters—with no communication between regions—to a single, unified system across the organization’s global footprint. The Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and developers at Achievers faced the complex task of running a multi-region Kubernetes service mesh. Scaling the platform globally and making sense of all the distributed data was a significant challenge. It was difficult to understand what data was needed and how to use this data to solve their problems.

Credit Sense, a platform that enables consumers to safely share their data and connect with services faster, was facing significant challenges in managing its cloud costs and diagnosing problems in its system. The company had developed a comprehensive data aggregation and analysis solution to solve key affordability, compliance, and risk management challenges faced by lenders when assessing customers for credit and other services. However, the company had no monitoring tools in place, which was affecting its ability to manage its Amazon Web Services (AWS) costs and quickly diagnose system issues. This was critically affecting their clients in the finance industry, who relied on Credit Sense for their customer on-boarding process.