Sysco Corporation, a global leader in food and related products, faced a significant challenge in managing its over 300 active entities and divisions across various regions including the US, Canada, Europe, China, and South America. The company's biggest risk was keeping up-to-date with each entity's business operations and ensuring they were in good standing. Sysco's transport vehicles regularly cross state lines, and if the entities they operate from are not in good standing, they could potentially face severe fines. The company needed a system that would allow them to track not only US and Canadian companies, but also companies in Europe, China, and South America. The previous system they were using was very limited and lacked flexibility.

Kingfisher, Europe’s largest home improvement retail group, operates more than 1,000 stores in eight countries in Europe and Asia. The company has a number of boards whose ability to drive strategic decisions is critical to the success of Kingfisher’s expanding brand portfolio of DIY retailers. Members of the company’s board of directors often serve across a number of committees and require materials for several board meetings delivered with short notice. Formatting board materials, printing physical copies and adding new pages as inevitable last-minute changes arose was time-consuming work performed by the Kingfisher Company Secretarial team. The frequency of meetings and the location of board members across Europe presented a challenge when it came to compiling and delivering board materials in a timely, secure and cost-effective manner.

The Australian Red Cross was using a board portal solution, BoardLink, to manage its board papers, after moving from a paper-based system in 2008. Its previous board packs consisted of more than 500 pages of paper, and were time consuming to assemble and produce for each of the 16 board members. The objective of implementing BoardLink was to shift to an electronic system for its board packs; however, the not-for-profit struggled with user uptake. The BoardLink solution was cumbersome to use and many of the board’s long-standing members were resistant to change, resulting in a continuing reliance on paper. BoardLink also offered offshore support, making it difficult to get timely responses to issues with the system.

Gwinnett Medical Center (GMC) was relying on paper-based processes for board meetings which were time-consuming and slowed policy-making. The distribution of board materials was handled through a courier service, which delivered large amounts of paper documents to board members. This process was not only inefficient but also made it difficult for board members to digest new information in a timely manner. The board sought a solution that would help them become faster, more efficient, and more reliable when it came to policy creation.

CRICO, an insurance provider for all Harvard medical institutions and their affiliates, was facing challenges with its legacy process of compiling and disseminating board books. The process involved a combination of physical copies, encrypted PDFs, and FTP sharing. This method was not only time-consuming but also lacked a centralized information repository and fell short of frequently expanding security and compliance expectations. The company had volumes of data with varying sensitivity levels that needed to be transferred between different institutions, boards, and committees. It needed a solution that could accommodate those partnerships and maintain the strong control that their data agreements require.

Intu Properties Plc, a leading owner, manager, and developer of prime regional shopping centres, faced significant challenges in managing its Board, which holds more than 30 Board and committee meetings per year. The process of sourcing and collating Board meeting materials was time-consuming and cumbersome, often involving the printing of 600-page packs on reams of paper, which would then need to be collated and dispatched through the post. The company also faced the challenge of securely managing ultra-sensitive documents related to public company offers, ensuring that only authorized individuals had access to these documents.

General Mills' board of directors started using Diligent Boards in 2011 as a secure solution for board meeting management. Prior to using Diligent, the organization was using a paper process, which didn't offer the efficiencies or protections the corporate secretary group needed. In 2019, the board added Diligent Messenger, an integrated messaging app that centralized their board messages and ensured all communication to and from directors was encrypted. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, the Diligent solution enabled the General Mills board to respond swiftly and effectively to work at-home requirements. The corporate secretary group was able to continue operations remotely, including scheduling board and committee meetings and securely delivering regular COVID-19 updates to the board.

EDENS is a private real estate investment trust with three institutional owners: J.P. Morgan Asset Management, the New York State Teachers' Retirement System and The Blackstone Group. Therefore, the company's needs for board meetings and collaboration differ from those of a public company. Not only must the three institutional investors securely access board documents, consents and other information, but they also need to share that access with non-board members within their respective teams. Prior to adopting the Diligent platform, EDENS and its administrative staff were creating and distributing hard-copy board books for each board meeting and circulating consent documents via email, which presented a logistical and production problem.

UnitingCare, one of Australia’s largest non-profit health, aged care, disability, and community service providers, was facing a challenge of managing a massive amount of organizational data spread across various systems. With over 460 locations, the organization needed an enterprise-grade software system that would bring all their risk and assurance related data together so they could increase efficiency and leverage insights from Internal Audit while supporting Management to deliver targeted risk and assurance assessments in real-time. They needed to connect all of the major operating systems within the business—including SAP, AX9, AX12, D365, three timesheet systems, and three clinical governance systems— to aggregate all of their data in a single spot. Andrew Cooke, General Manager of Risk & Assurance at UnitingCare also wanted a way to manage the more than 400 complex child safety risk assessments across different lines of business. He wanted a way to track the status, the results, and how the risk profile changes over time.

Despite their track record of success in delivering end-to-end solutions for collecting, processing and understanding sensor data, a leading defense contractor had significant gaps in several key areas related to governance, risk and compliance (GRC). They had resorted to leveraging a manual spreadsheet process for risk assessments, which made it nearly impossible to scale coverage and to report on assessment results. The lack of automated reporting capability made it difficult for leadership to get a true picture of the status of risks being tracked, and the vulnerability management team had no mechanism to drive accountability and timely remediation of problems. They also had difficulty demonstrating how their GRC strategy incorporated into required policies, procedures and controls. Additionally, as a government contractor, they had a number of federal mandates and standards to meet—including NIST 800-171.

Con Edison, a company with an unwavering commitment to doing business ethically, was using an in-house software solution to manage conflict of interest (COI) reporting, tracking, and mitigation processes for its 15,000 employees. However, the system presented several challenges due to the high number of respondents to annual surveys and the need for streamlining and increased visibility of the information disclosed. The workflow required employees to navigate through multiple screens and did not allow them to reference past responses when completing new disclosures. These complications prompted a need for a better process for tracking reported conflicts and a clearly defined workflow.