Nationwide Building Society, the world’s largest building society and the UK’s second-largest savings provider and third-largest mortgage provider, recognized the importance of continuous innovation to achieve its growth objectives. The society wanted to provide a consistent and integrated multi-channel experience across mobile, internet, call centres and in-branch services. However, it faced challenges in coordinating a large pipeline of ongoing change across projects and business lines. The society needed a delivery capability that would be able to stay aligned with rapidly evolving requirements from customers, the business and from regulators. Additionally, it wanted to be able to achieve more efficient control of the development of its software assets across multiple channels.

Nissan Australia, a company that imports, markets, and sells Nissan vehicles, was facing a complex challenge of coordinating the importation of thousands of vehicles in hundreds of different models, grades, colors, and configurations to meet varying customer demands in different regions. The company's car flow planning process revolved around a legacy planning tool, supplemented by spreadsheets. The use of spreadsheets made version control difficult, which was a particular problem because the company’s car flow is constantly evolving. The company needed a more sophisticated business planning platform to upgrade its car flow forecasting process.

The Poole College of Management at NC State University wanted a platform to help students turn big data into knowledge for better decision making. The school integrates teaching, research and active engagement with businesses to give students real-world experience in uncovering new business opportunities. As the Poole College of Management evaluated big data platforms that its students could use when working with local businesses, staff looked for a solution that could efficiently handle an extremely large volume and variety of structured and unstructured data.

North Pacific Bank Ltd., a major financial institution in Japan, was created through the merger of three major banks. The bank faced a significant challenge in integrating and identifying customer data from each of its previous business entities. This lack of visibility into client behaviors across business channel expansions meant that the bank could not implement an effective customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, which was hindering its marketing efforts.

Every year, nearly 2 million patients in the US contract healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), despite the fact that proper hand washing can easily prevent these infections. OhioHealth, a nonprofit, faith-based system of hospitals and healthcare providers serving 40 counties around Columbus, needed a systematic way to monitor, analyze, and improve compliance with hand-washing and sanitizing procedures. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide real-time monitoring and analytics to spot noncompliance patterns quickly and implement remedial action to lower the risk of HAIs.

Orbico Group, a leading distributor in Europe, was facing challenges due to its rapid expansion across the continent. The company was struggling to manage the increasing volumes of data related to finance, sales, receivables, and inventory across different countries. The main challenge was to provide the best service to their suppliers, customers, and financial institutions by gaining as much insight from their data as possible. The rapid growth led to a situation where they were operating more than 20 companies in 15 different markets across Europe, making data management a struggle. To bring greater consistency and accuracy to group-wide reporting, Orbico realized that it needed to adopt a more robust approach.

Penn Pharma, a PCI company, recognized the need for a maintenance and calibration planning system to increase availability and service levels at its new contained manufacturing facility. The company wanted to develop a proactive, predictive approach to maintenance planning. The company realized that an enterprise-class maintenance management system could also help meet the stringent regulations that apply to pharmaceutical manufacturing, and the growing expectations of its safety-conscious clients.

Phact, a telecommunications service provider, needed to accelerate its big data analytics capabilities to support its telco clients serving millions of customers in a highly performance-sensitive industry. The company was previously replicating its main IBM DB2 database running on Linux to a separate Microsoft SQL Server database to enable analytics. However, this replication could take up to one minute to make operational data available for analytical processing—an unacceptable delay in telecoms terms, where every second counts. In addition to introducing this delay, this approach also offered limited performance when executing complex queries.

Premier Farnell, a leading global distributor of electronics components, was facing a challenge with its business data being trapped in silos, making it difficult to gain insights into customer purchasing behavior. The company needed a way to integrate and govern data across its diverse business to understand purchasing behavior, market trends, and new demands. This would enable them to present each customer with the right product at the right time, sparking sales growth. The company set out to establish a strategy around the management and governance of its business data in order to derive the maximum possible value for the organization and keep costs down.

Quintillion, a hedge fund administration company, wanted to keep its business on track for profitable growth without compromising on the high-quality, personalized service that its clients have come to expect. For each of their funds, there is a large volume of related documentation that needs to be processed and accessed on an ongoing basis, such as emails, application forms, financial statements and more. Their teams need instant access to this content in order to serve clients effectively—they can’t afford to waste time sifting through their systems to locate a particular piece of information.

RadPad, a start-up aimed at streamlining the mobile rental experience, was looking to optimize the performance and efficiency of its underlying database. The company initially used PostgreSQL, then adopted MongoDB to make its listing data easier to serve to apps or web users. However, MongoDB had limitations in handling large amounts of data, and some searches on larger data sets were timing out, potentially leading to user dissatisfaction. As RadPad prepared to launch a new iteration of its map-based search service, it needed a solution that could offer high availability, elasticity, and reach of the cloud.

RunKeeper, a fitness startup, was facing scalability issues with its existing PostgreSQL database as the company expanded. The database was unable to keep up with the pace of growth, threatening to halt the company's progress. RunKeeper wanted to eliminate performance bottlenecks and reduce the time and effort spent on database administration. This would allow the company to focus its resources on developing new data-driven features and applications, and help users to access and analyze their data faster and more reliably.

Logistics leader SDV faces unique challenges with each customer relationship, requiring new processes, personnel, and warehouse and freight capacity for each new contract. This adds financial and operational complexity to the business. The company needed to ensure it had the right people and assets in place to provide flawless service to new and existing clients, while keeping costs under control and maintaining profitability for its 10,000 customer relationships. The complexity of SDV’s business is increased by the multiple dimensions that need to be taken into account for prudent decision-making, including client, types of services, shipment routes, and local legal requirements and regulations in different countries.

SONIC Drive-In, a leading quick-service restaurant chain in the United States, was facing a significant challenge due to the increasing complexity of new global lease accounting standards. The company manages approximately 1,500 leases across the business, and even small changes to its real estate spend can have a significant impact on its bottom line. The new FASB regulations would apply to almost their entire lease portfolio, and the company was keen to reduce the cost and complexity of complying with the new regulations. Their existing reporting systems were vital for delivering the information needed to satisfy regulators and make informed decisions about opening new stores and negotiating new leases. However, the use of spreadsheets and legacy systems was creating challenges.

SRG Global, a leading manufacturer of high value coatings on plastic, aims to capitalize on opportunities by increasing the efficiency of its manufacturing operations. The company was looking for innovative ways to drive efficiencies to make it more competitive in the marketplace. The challenge was to track the effectiveness of its people and processes on the shop floor. The company was using spreadsheets to track its production processes, which was a labor-intensive process. The data had to be manually collated and shared within the organization for further analysis.

SilverHook Powerboats, a company that designs and races powerboats, faced a challenge in making use of the vast amount of telemetry data generated by sensors on their racing boats. The data was crucial for making strategic and safety decisions during races, but it was difficult for the team to keep track of and analyze the information in real-time. Additionally, the company wanted to enhance the fan experience by providing a real-time representation of the race, but faced challenges with camera equipment in the harsh marine environment. The company aimed to debut a solution at the World Powerboat Championship, which was only a few months away, imposing a tight deadline on the project.

SmarterData, a company based in San Ramon, California, wanted to help its clients navigate the uncertainties of the digital-age retail industry. The company aimed to find new ways to provide relevant, actionable, data-driven insights into consumer behavior. As the online retail sector continues to grow, many traditional retailers find themselves struggling to keep pace. In today’s digital economy, companies of all shapes and sizes must both manage and exploit digital transformation in order to survive. SmarterData offers a range of predictive and prescriptive analytics services – including innovative mobile apps that help consumers find products, and retailers gain real-time insight into store operations.

SolutionInc, a global leader in managing public Internet access in various public venues, realized that the data collected from its Wi-Fi network could provide valuable insights into user engagement. This data could help its clients make better design decisions, improve marketing, optimize staffing, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. However, to extract value from this data, SolutionInc needed a new analytics capability. The company needed to find new ways to identify patterns and spot trends in the massive amount of network activity data collected by its access points. To maximize the benefits, SolutionInc decided to harness next-generation big data technology.

Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) was facing a challenge in attracting and retaining students. The university had previously run studies investigating student retention and graduation trends over time, but these studies focused on a very limited profile of each student. SCSU suspected that it was missing out on crucial information. The university wanted to challenge the established wisdom and look at the bigger picture when it came to understanding why students were not performing to their full potential. It also wanted to evaluate the different ways it can support students who are not thriving either academically or developmentally, and identify the intervention activities that actually work.

SOSCIP aimed to develop an attractive ecosystem that would help to keep research talent and startups in Ontario. The goal was to connect leading academic institutions with small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to provide a competitive edge by accelerating research. SOSCIP and its partners wanted to develop intellectual property such as patents, and support the commercialization of research results through collaborative projects. As the SOSCIP consortium was forming, the organization sought a lead industrial partner to establish the computing technologies and collaborative research and development model upon which the consortium was founded.

As one of the leading multiple sclerosis (MS) research centers in the world, researchers at University at Buffalo wanted to identify and understand environmental factors that may contribute to MS. However, gene-environmental research presented researchers with enormous volumes of data for which they needed high-performance processing power and speed to make meaningful, publishable discoveries. A major challenge in gene interaction research is analyzing the explosions of immense data sets at a speed that will help save lives.

The State of North Dakota Department of Human Services (DHS) was facing a challenge in balancing manual and time-consuming administration and data analysis tasks with their primary role of helping those in need. The services provided by DHS require a significant amount of funds, which need to be accurately allocated to deliver the best outcome for each client. DHS wanted to cut administration time, accelerate reports and analyze data more effectively, allowing caseworkers to make better decisions and spend more time helping clients.

Following a corporate divestiture, one of Tech Mahindra’s clients – a specialty chemical company with several thousand employees and production facilities on four continents – needed to separate all of its IT systems from its former parent’s infrastructure as quickly as possible. The client’s previous IBM Cognos Business Intelligence environment had been installed on-premise at the former parent company’s data center. However, Tech Mahindra realized that moving to a cloud deployment could have significant advantages. The challenge was to deploy a new analytics environment as quickly as possible.

Tejon Ranch, with its 270,000 acres of California real estate, operates on a grand scale. The size of the property unlocks opportunities that smaller companies can only dream about – and at the same time, the scope of the challenge created by those opportunities can also be vast. The company knew that its ability to build the communities of the future would depend on its ability to harness technology – and in particular, its ability to gather, analyze and understand data. It also realized that analytics could not only help it to design and build its new developments, but could also help it to transform its traditional business lines, such as its hunting and farming operations.

The Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) was faced with the challenge of improving highway safety and reducing accident rates without increasing staff levels. The THP aimed to anticipate and prevent accidents by identifying road accident hotspots, prosecute drunk drivers, enforce the use of seatbelts more effectively, and respond to incidents with the most appropriate resources. The THP sought to enable a new data-driven approach to traffic safety that would look for meaningful patterns in the past and apply them to current conditions to predict future events.

Thames Water Utilities Ltd. in the United Kingdom needed to understand the relationship between flooding and pollution incidents in the utility holes in its wastewater network. The company aimed to create a cleaner environment and avoid costly leakages, unsavory publicity, and dissatisfied customers. The challenge was to identify the utility holes that are most likely to flood and cause pollution problems, especially holes with a history of flooding or located near watercourses.

TimkenSteel, a leading manufacturer of high-quality steel bars and seamless mechanical steel tubing, needed to ensure that its production lines are operational at all times. Effective maintenance was therefore a top priority. However, the company sought to enhance its maintenance strategy by gaining greater visibility of parts and equipment costs. The challenge was to bring corporate-wide procurement into a single system that would allow for better collaboration between the maintenance and procurement teams to analyze and control costs.

United Rentals, a company that supports major construction, industrial, and government projects, faced a significant challenge when a merger doubled the size of its sales team overnight. The company needed a more efficient way to calculate and communicate commission on sales. The sales force had recently doubled in size as the result of a merger, and calculating the commission for all of the reps was becoming a major challenge. The company wanted to find a way to encourage positive sales behaviors, and one of the keys to this was compensation management.

The College of the Environment at the University of Washington collaborates with many external companies and agencies, including a US state government department that manages approximately 2.1 million acres of working forest on state trust lands. The department also manages upwards of 15,000 miles of forest roads statewide, which are essential to enable machinery and people to reach remote areas of the forest for timber harvesting, maintenance or recreation purposes. The College is tasked with researching the best, most sustainable ways to support the department in its complex mission to maintain the forest road network and help timber companies optimize their harvesting processes – while keeping costs and environmental impact to a minimum.

The bank's training operations were misaligned with company goals, leading it to transform its learning to better support the business, gain credibility and align workforce capabilities with objectives. The bank's globally fragmented learning model was not keeping pace with the greater business’s strategic imperatives, which included regional growth, core banking capabilities and a superior customer experience. With little concrete direction and no governance program in place, the firm’s learning program had unclear objectives, was inconsistent, involved duplicative processes and was costly. In addition to impeding the ability to drive business outcomes, these operational issues had combined with a lack of transparency to lower the learning organization’s credibility with the bank’s senior leadership.