BCS Group, a company with three production plants in Italy and a global sales and distribution operation, was concerned about the increasing prevalence of successful cyber attacks worldwide. The company wanted to understand the security exposures that existed in its network and applications and how to fix them. They were looking for a solution that could probe their network, servers, and PCs for vulnerabilities or configuration errors and try to exploit them. The goal was to identify potential risks and implement corrective procedures to improve their security posture.

POST Luxembourg, the country's largest provider of postal and telecom services, was seeking to enhance their business agility. The company wanted to unify access controls and create a single-sign-on portal for access to multiple services. This was a significant challenge as it required a comprehensive solution that could seamlessly integrate with their existing systems and provide a streamlined user experience for their customers.

The regional bank was facing a challenge with its existing managed security services provider, which had misidentified an attack as a high external network threat. This misidentification revealed the bank's need for an advanced solution that could detect insider threats. The original investigation consumed 3 hours and produced 300 alerts, 100 emails, 3 phone calls, but no resolution. The bank needed a solution that could accurately identify and resolve security threats in a timely manner.

du, a rapidly growing communications provider in the United Arab Emirates, faced a significant challenge in protecting its network resources and client data from unauthorized access. With a largely outsourced workforce, the company needed an efficient way to enhance the user experience, boost productivity, and help reduce fraud. The process of granting new users access was time-consuming, taking up to two weeks, and integrating a new application into the Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform could take up to three months. Additionally, the company was dealing with a high volume of help desk tickets related to access management.

Catalyst Investors, a private equity and venture capital firm, was challenged by the task of combing through multiple content sources to find investment opportunities. The firm differentiates itself by applying a rigorous, research-based approach to investing and by employing experienced technology analysts to proactively recognize important trends in its key sectors. However, keeping up with the constant news alerts and ever-changing information about its markets and target companies proved challenging. The amount of unstructured, digital content is growing exponentially each year, making it a painstaking process to sift through volumes of online content to find and evaluate potential business opportunities.

Intesa Sanpaolo, an Italian banking group, was facing a challenge in its risk management infrastructure. The bank's trading decisions on Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives were based on multiple modeling techniques. Traders either had to run overly conservative add-ons or call risk teams for internal model results. This process was time-consuming and resource-intensive. The bank wanted to help front- and middle-office teams work together more effectively by enabling its trading desks to access the same approved internal models for counterparty risk that its risk management team was already using. This would empower traders to gain deeper insight into the total exposure to a given counterparty much more quickly, helping them understand the limits before making a trade, and avoid the risk of breaching those limits.

Grupo Financiero Banorte, Mexico’s third-largest bank, was facing a challenge of maintaining personal connections with customers due to rapid growth, especially through acquisitions. The bank wanted to strengthen its connection with customers by infusing all of its frontline processes with deep insights into the customer to drive a more engaging multichannel experience. The goal was to deliver precise personalized customer interaction on a very large scale.

The Hershey Company in Brazil (Hershey’s Brazil) faces stiff competition from local chocolate manufacturers. To maximize sales to its customers—primarily food retailers and wholesalers—Hershey’s Brazil sought a better way to capture customer-specific data, such as profit-and-loss information and local patterns in demand, and use the insight to shape more effective sales strategies. Hershey’s Brazil wanted to better understand its customers in order to make the best business decisions and increase sales.

Historic Environment Scotland, a non-department public body with charitable status, is tasked with the responsibility of safeguarding and promoting Scotland’s heritage. The organization oversees more than 300 historic sites, including Edinburgh Castle, Stirling Castle, and Skara Brae Prehistoric Village. To help fund the conservation of these irreplaceable representations of Scotland’s built heritage, and ensure that appropriate numbers of visitors are allowed on-site at any given time, admission to many of the sites is controlled by ticketing. However, the organization was facing a challenge. It lacked visibility into its sites and the people visiting them, making it difficult to market effectively or plan personnel schedules to meet demand.

Hydrite Chemical Co., a leading US chemical producer, was facing challenges due to the rapid growth of its business. The company was finding it increasingly difficult to obtain a clear view of assets, processes, policies, and licenses across its different sites. All their sites had developed their own ways of managing assets, mainly using simple tools such as spreadsheets, calendar reminders, and small databases. Without a consistent set of systems, it was difficult to compare the same thing between two different sites. This lack of standardization and visibility was making it difficult for the company to demonstrate compliance with current laws and regulations, which involved regular audits by regulators and customers.

IFIM Business School recognized a global demand for big data and analytics capabilities, with the Indian market estimated to grow to USD1 billion by the end of the year, and a severe shortage of skilled manpower in this area. The school aimed to create a program that delivered the necessary hands-on experience to meet this demand. The challenge was to develop an intensive analytics program that would equip students with practical skills and real-world applications.

Newborn babies, especially those born prematurely or who suffer a difficult labor or a stroke, can have neurological problems that are difficult to detect. Seizures can be one symptom of neurological dysfunction, and if not treated quickly, may cause further damage to the infant’s brain. Electroencephalograms (EEGs) can help detect these problems, but there are only a limited number of neurophysiologists in the world who have the expertise to reliably interpret neonatal EEG data and use it to monitor brain activity. This is a particular problem for newborns with neurological problems, which can be relatively common in babies that are born prematurely or suffer a difficult labor or a stroke. Seizures can be one symptom of neurological dysfunction – and when not treated quickly, may cause further damage to the infant’s brain.

In India’s hyper-competitive telecommunications market, it is critical that service providers maximize revenue from their current subscribers. Idea Cellular Ltd. wanted to transform its existing manual methods into a fully automated business process. Idea sought a solution that would improve customer service by creating and executing dynamic marketing campaigns designed to generate cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and retain customers by increasing interest in the company’s products and offerings.

Ilmarinen, an insurer, needs to store vital policy documents securely for more than 50 years. However, it also needs to keep this information easily accessible for use in day-to-day business processes. The pensions and investments sector is a document-heavy business. The term of an investment might be 20 years, while the management and payment of a pension might encompass 70 years or more – and over that time, hundreds of documents, letters, emails and other correspondence may need to be recorded and managed. As insurers become more focused on winning and retaining customer loyalty, it is vital to ensure that employees are able to navigate through this mass of documentation efficiently. To gain new insight into the right actions and offers for each customer, you need to build a 360-degree view of that individual from their document history. At the same time, from a legal perspective, all these documents need to be stored securely – often for many years after the pension or investment has ceased to be active.

Irdeto, a global leader in digital platform security, was facing challenges in streamlining its sales processes. The company's sales teams were distributed worldwide, each with its own approach, incentives, and rewards. The lack of a centralized system led to inconsistencies and inefficiencies. Sales teams and managers were unable to see the approval process, who was responsible for incentives, or what compensation was based on. The company was using spreadsheets to calculate sales reps rewards and shared the file with the teams by email. Irdeto wanted to offer all international sales teams the same rewards, improve collaboration between teams, and provide clear compensation.

KLP, Norway’s largest mutual life insurance company, was facing a challenge in embedding sophisticated risk modeling technologies into its day-to-day decision-making process. The company had two existing risk modeling solutions, but they were not user-friendly and lacked flexibility in presenting results in an easily accessible or understandable way. This made it difficult for portfolio managers and risk analysts to get hold of the data they needed. KLP's senior managers decided to investigate cloud-based solutions to address this issue.

The Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry University was facing a challenge in identifying students who were at risk of dropping out or performing poorly. The university's focus on independent learning made it difficult to spot struggling students early enough to offer them the necessary support. The university wanted to intervene early to prevent such students from becoming increasingly disengaged and eventually leaving their courses. The goal was to provide more personalized learning experiences by better understanding what works best for particular students, thereby optimizing the use of student care resources and providing an exceptional experience for the students.

Knorr-Bremse, a leading manufacturer of braking systems for rail and commercial vehicles, was facing a challenge. The company was experiencing significant growth, both organically and through acquisitions. This growth was leading to an increase in data volumes, which was slowing down its analytics capabilities and increasing costs. The company was using 60 SAP systems in a fully virtualized private cloud environment, with IBM DB2 managing the underlying data. However, as data volumes increased, the company found that its SAP Business Warehouse solutions were struggling to keep up with demand. The company needed a solution that would enable it to integrate acquired companies into its SAP application landscape, deliver comprehensive performance reports more quickly, and standardize processes across the group without slowing down decision-making or disrupting manufacturing and logistics workflows.

Kruger Inc., a diversified Canadian industrial products company, embarked on a project to enhance budgeting and forecasting in its containerboard division. The company realized that analytics could also help to drive operational efficiencies for the business. For Kruger’s containerboard division, 80 percent of costs relate to the raw materials required to manufacture its products. Controlling these costs requires a highly efficient forecasting process – as well as an efficient production line. The company needed a solution that could provide deep insight into both financial and operational data to meet these challenges.

LDB Group specializes in helping its clients understand their customers’ needs and desires. One of its key offerings is investigating customer experiences and identifying areas for improvement. When a client from the automotive industry asked LDB Group to study customer satisfaction, the firm saw huge potential in offering similar services to more clients. However, the challenge was to scale processes to handle information more efficiently. The company realized that if it launched customer satisfaction surveys as a new analytics service, it could provide additional value to its existing clients and present a more valuable offering to attract new business.

Lion, a leading food and beverage company in Australia and New Zealand, aimed to transform its finance function from a business partner to a true value creator for the business. However, the company's current processes were preventing finance from effectively partnering with the business and becoming a value creator. The company's financial reporting process was particularly time-consuming and labour-intensive. The quarterly reports for its parent company, Kirin, contained 42 schedules in separate Microsoft Excel files. The figures had to be manually entered into the spreadsheets, constantly cross-checking to make sure no errors were introduced. During these reporting periods, the six-person group financial reporting team typically had to be supplemented by two additional team members, seconded from other teams. Even with this additional support, the team generally needed to work overtime to get the reports finished on time.

Nairobi, one of the world's fastest-growing cities, was struggling with managing its fleet of garbage trucks due to poor road conditions and traffic. The city had recently invested over USD3 million in new waste collection vehicles, but the expected improvements in waste management efficiency were not being realized. The city needed a cost-effective method of capturing data about road and traffic conditions that would not require the investment and maintenance costs of a traditional solution.

Car manufacturers and auto insurers are keen to understand how they are perceived in the market, so they can build on their strengths and address their weaknesses to sell products and services more effectively. However, gaining unbiased insight into customers’ opinions can be difficult and expensive. MOTOR-TALK, Europe’s largest online community for motoring enthusiasts, has a wealth of unbiased opinions from a wide range of automotive customers. However, the challenge was to transform the large volumes of unstructured data generated by the online community into valuable knowledge.

The insurer, the largest health insurer in its state, was facing inefficiencies in its project requirements formulation process. The company's business analysts, representing as many as 74 functional areas within the organization, would create new project requirements, obtain input from various stakeholders and then pass on the requirements to the project managers. The formulation of the requirements varied depending on best practices developed in each part of the company. This inconsistency led to increased project overhead, churn, and delays as project managers and others working on the project had to make sense of the diverse requirements.

Each year, more than two million people die due to food-borne illnesses, and the world discards more than USD75 billion worth of food. For food distributors such as US-based Mars, Incorporated, food recalls cost at least USD10 million each. Mars didn’t have a way to test its thousands of food ingredients, so its response to pathogens was mainly reactive.

Migros Zurich (GMZ) operates a vast network of stores, specialty markets, and food outlets, serving around 1.5 million customers. The company's reputation rests on its ability to provide high-quality goods and services at reasonable prices with clockwork efficiency. However, the company's maintenance staff needed a way to aggregate, consolidate, and analyze information from asset inventories, service requests, work orders, maintenance records, equipment service contracts, warranties, service level agreements, and service and technical documentation, much of it archived in physical form in the company's central offices. These records contained thousands of data points needed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current condition of its resources and transform its maintenance practices from reactive to proactive. In addition, to promote efficiency in the field, the company needed a mobile solution that would provide field technicians with anywhere, real-time access to the company’s asset management system.

One of NEWLOG Consulting’s clients wanted to launch a new tracking and tracing system in one month. The client wanted to grow into new markets by transforming into a fully fledged express delivery operation that offered value-added logistics services. The client wanted to bring the new solution to market as soon as possible, and set a goal to go live with an initial release in one month. With no time or budget for a traditional development approach, NEWLOG Consulting needed a platform that it could use to rapidly develop and deploy the new system.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) supports and conducts vital medical research. However, it was facing challenges in helping scientists find rapid answers to research questions and drive treatment breakthroughs. The NIH collects vast quantities of data from patients who volunteer to participate in clinical trials at the NIH Clinical Center. The insights hidden within this wealth of information could hold the key to advancing medical research and enhancing patient care, but only if researchers are able to access and analyze the data. As technological and scientific advances increase the scale and pace of medical research, NIH must work to provide scientists with even faster insight into ever-increasing data volumes. A few years ago, the NIH Clinical Center realized that the volume and complexity of data threatened to outstrip the capacity of its existing systems.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., one of the world’s largest insurance and financial services companies, needed to improve its market responsiveness. The company was highly dependent on technology and was facing a fast-paced, highly regulated industry with new products and services that needed to be delivered quickly. Ten years ago, Nationwide used primarily waterfall development methodologies to create the software products that its members, customers and agents use online. However, the gap between software requirements and product delivery with the waterfall method had caused a rift between IT and the business. Recognizing the value it could achieve by embracing lean and agile practices at scale for its enterprise, Nationwide began shifting from waterfall to agile development.

Nationwide Building Society, one of the world’s largest mutual financial institutions, wanted to offer its customers easier access to its financial advisors. However, with a limited number of advisors, many smaller branches were unable to provide full-time coverage. The Society wondered if customers would be happy to connect via a live video link. The concept proved hugely popular, but the challenge was to replicate the solution on a commercial scale. Moving from six to hundreds of branches brought a completely new set of challenges, including business process transformation and cultural change, not to mention technology deployment and scalability.