Asahi Beverages, a leading beverage company in Australia and New Zealand, faced a significant challenge when it acquired several Australian beverage businesses. The enlarged group needed to streamline and optimize operations even as further acquisitions joined the family. The company relied heavily on SAP solutions to manage its extended non-alcohol business processes, from manufacturing through to sales and distribution. However, with several new companies joining the group over the past few years, the Asahi Beverages team was keen to reduce system administration effort and maintenance costs. They wanted to use the savings to invest in new business applications and services. The challenge was to cut the number of IT incidents, accelerate the time for resolution of those incidents, and release valuable time for the technical teams to focus on innovation and business development.

To succeed in the fiercely competitive LCD manufacturing industry, CSOT must deliver high-quality products within a tight time frame, but time-consuming product inspections have hampered its agility. Quality inspectors had to inspect each LCD screen individually to check for flaws. This takes quite a bit of time.

The Dow Chemical Company, a USD60 billion enterprise composed of a worldwide network of 13 business units, faced challenges in setting and achieving enterprise-wide goals due to its decentralized business structure. The company needed to meet the differing facility needs of its various businesses while also increasing office and lab space capacity use to 90 percent and improving capital planning, real estate lease management, operations, maintenance, and energy consumption on a global basis. The Lab and Office Facilities Management (LOFM) group at Dow, which provides facilities management services and solutions that support more than 20 million square feet of lab and administrative office space worldwide, was tasked with driving these initiatives. However, reporting in all of these areas was manual, disconnected, and spreadsheet-driven, making it difficult to leverage data effectively.

AUDI AG, a leading global car manufacturer, was facing stiff competition from low-cost manufacturers developing their own brands. To stay ahead, Audi aimed to create super-efficient business processes. The company had implemented SAP® ERP to manage various aspects of its business operations, from human resources and cost control to supply chain and plant maintenance. Over time, the SAP environment had expanded to around 100 separate systems, running on 12 HP servers with Oracle databases and an additional 24 HP blades. Audi wanted to improve its IT efficiency to reduce capital and operational costs and create a greener infrastructure, aligning with the company’s sustainability strategy. The company also aimed to increase the availability and performance of its SAP systems, making them more scalable and flexible. The IT Services Department at Audi was tasked with helping the company face several broad business challenges, including increasing demands from employees, customers, and suppliers; the need to support new technologies; rising cost pressures; and growing competition.

Ashurst, a leading international law firm, faced a significant challenge after a major merger that almost doubled its size. The firm's HR function aimed to transform its operations to support the ongoing strategic growth objectives. The merger presented challenges in managing talent, developing skills, and rewarding performance across the global business. Each part of the business had its own systems and processes for managing absences, tracking performance, and rewarding success. This led to increased manual effort and cost, reduced ability to ensure globally consistent definitions of human capital management metrics, and difficulty in generating comprehensive reports. The firm also faced challenges in answering important questions related to employee skillsets, retention, and compensation policies across the organization.

Allstate Insurance Company was facing challenges with its existing human resources applications. The extensive customization of the software had resulted in powerful functionality, but it was not user-friendly and introducing new functionality was time-consuming and often cost-prohibitive. The company wanted to enable the newest talent management solutions, at a more rapid pace, and keep operational costs low. The challenge was to deploy a new solution successfully and gain all the benefits of cloud-based solutions while ensuring that Allstate continued to retain a single integrated system of record.

The cancer treatment and research center was facing a significant challenge in managing and accessing its vast volumes of patient data, which were primarily in paper format. The institution's unique approach to treating patients as a whole, rather than a series of isolated maladies, resulted in extensive patient medical records. The sheer volume of these paper records often made it difficult for clinicians and researchers to rapidly and reliably access the information they required. This situation was negatively impacting productivity and causing delays. Furthermore, the practice of 'checking out' medical records for research purposes often left clinical teams without immediate access to these records, especially in cases of unexpected patient visits. The center needed a more effective way to work with patient information that would enhance the delivery of prompt diagnosis and treatment, and accelerate the progress of vital research work.

Advent Health Partners, part of the Powered Health group, was facing a significant challenge due to rapid changes in healthcare regulations in the United States. The re-introduction of the Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) program and the move to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) had left many hospitals struggling to keep pace. This resulted in inefficiencies in the healthcare revenue cycle, with billions of dollars tied up in insurance claims denials. The situation was further complicated by the fact that hospital data, both structured and non-structured, was generally stored in siloes, with a lack of communication between different departments. Some processes were still heavily reliant on paper records. With claims-related data scattered across different locations and stored in multiple formats, it was very difficult for analysts to bring together all the information required to review a denied claim and decide whether there was a case for appealing the decision.

YAZAKI Europe, a leading automotive supplier specializing in the production of customized wiring harnesses for car manufacturers, was facing challenges in meeting the automotive industry’s demand for same-day delivery. The company's continuous growth was impacting its ability to analyze performance and complete its end-of-month consolidation and reporting processes for its headquarters in Japan. The company needed to eliminate delays and manual processing in its logistics to ensure extremely efficient operations. The company also needed to boost its data analytics capabilities for its finance and controlling departments to accelerate the delivery of complex financial reports.

Chamberlain Group, Inc., a leading connected products company, recognized a gap in the market where consumers wanted to use their smartphones to control and monitor their garage doors from anywhere in the world. The company developed an innovative solution, the MyQ smartphone app, which quickly gained popularity with a monthly growth rate in user numbers hitting 15 percent. However, the existing system architecture was not robust enough to withstand the pressure of this growth rate for long, and the risk of impact on performance and availability was constantly rising. The company needed to ensure that the app was highly reliable and responsive for consumers, especially when it controls something as important as the security of peoples’ homes. The challenge was to make the existing architecture more robust and scalable, so that it could support future peaks of up to one million concurrent consumer actions.

AMC Networks, a leading cable television network, was facing the challenge of understanding customer behavior in a rapidly evolving multi-channel world. Despite its success with critically acclaimed shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, the company recognized the need to appeal to a new generation of millennials who consume content in very different ways. The traditional reliance on ratings data and third-party analytics providers was proving insufficient. The company needed to take ownership of its data to get a richer picture of who their viewers are, what they want, and how to keep their attention in an increasingly crowded entertainment marketplace. The challenge was the sheer volume of information available – hundreds of billions of rows of data from various sources such as Nielsen, comScore, AMC’s TV Everywhere live web streaming and video on demand service, retail partners like iTunes and Amazon, and third-party online video services like Netflix and Hulu.

Royal Canin, a leading global supplier of pet food, was looking to improve customer service and launch a digital transformation for online sales channels. However, a series of mergers and acquisitions had left the company with disparate IT systems and business processes, making it difficult to launch new initiatives quickly across its global market. The company was facing delays in implementing major changes across its worldwide network due to the need to incorporate each new process in a multitude of IT systems. This was compromising their ability to react rapidly to changes in the market, threatening to dull their competitive edge.

CarrefourSA, a leading multinational retail group, set an ambitious revenue goal of USD 2.7 billion by 2016 in Turkey. To achieve this, the company aimed to more than double its retail footprint by opening at least one new store every day for an entire year. However, the existing processes and systems meant it took an entire month to set up a new store. The company faced the challenge of expanding its store landscape rapidly to connect with prospects ahead of its competitors. The process of making a new retail store operational involved onboarding new employees, installing and connecting the point-of-sale systems, adding new delivery points to the stock distribution network, and more. The company relied on multiple different business systems to manage these business processes, which were complex and time-consuming due to limited integration between the systems.

Avnet, a global technology solutions provider, was facing a challenge in delivering rapid and reliable data analysis and reporting to its clients. The company's managed services clients relied on Avnet and its partners to convert their enterprise data into actionable intelligence. However, the existing hosted environment used for data warehousing and business intelligence applications was not meeting the desired performance levels. Avnet had experienced issues with their previous cloud provider, which led them to re-evaluate their hosting arrangement. The company realized that they could provide their customers with better performance and more flexibility at a more attractive price by making some changes.

DLF Ltd., one of India's largest commercial real estate developers, wanted to enhance the mobile shopping app of the DLF Promenade mall to deliver insights about customers that retailers could use both to enrich the shopping experience and to influence customer behavior. The mall, located in an upscale community of over 100,000 residents in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) of India, occupies more than 4.6 million square feet of real estate and features many high-end international brands. The challenge was to help retailers develop a higher conversion ratio of visitors to buyers by providing them with valuable insights about customer behavior.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is tasked with managing an enormous data archive of 100 petabytes, a volume that nearly doubles as 13 large data centers worldwide receive partial copies of the data. The data is generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, which is used to reconstruct the first moments of the universe to gain a better understanding of physical laws. The LHC generates more than 25 petabytes of data in the four main LHC experiments, even with drastic data filtering protocols in place. CERN does not have the computing capacity required to analyze the data, so it relies on a distributed environment consisting of 160 different computer centers located in 45 countries to distribute data to its scientists. The biggest challenge is the constant influx of data, more than a gigabyte per second, which needs to be stored, preserved in the long term, and made accessible to several thousand physicists worldwide.

Christian Brothers Services, a nonprofit service provider to Catholic and faith-based institutions, faced a challenge with its increasingly dispersed workforce. The company needed to enhance employee access to collaboration and social networking tools. The company's field employees frequently traveled within and outside the country, and many of their customer service agents worked from home full time. The company had been relying on IBM collaboration solutions to keep its workforce connected. However, the existing system of electronic teamrooms was proving to be inefficient. If an employee was involved in multiple projects, a meeting affecting all those projects appeared on each project’s team room calendar instead of as a single entry on the person’s Notes calendar. This led to a lack of centralized information and increased difficulty in managing multiple projects.

AMB Sports and Entertainment Group (AMBSE), a subsidiary of AMB Group LLC, is responsible for managing the Atlanta Falcons Football Club, the New Atlanta Stadium project, and a future Atlanta Major League Soccer team. The group faced a significant challenge in attracting fans to the stadium, as they had to compete with high-tech, at-home, and other viewing experiences. The group needed to deploy technology that could enhance the traffic and parking experience, provide faster food and beverage service, and offer equal or better Wi-Fi connectivity than at home. The ultimate goal was to create an immersive, one-of-a-kind stadium experience that would draw fans away from their screens at home and into the stadium seats.

American Eagle Outfitters (AEO), a leading global specialty retailer, was facing challenges in delivering high-quality shopping experiences across all its digital channels. The company relied on limited information from customer feedback forms to understand digital customer experiences. This approach resulted in incomplete information, making it difficult to replicate the exact circumstances that prevented customers from successfully completing their purchases. Consequently, it was challenging to identify 'sticking points' on the online and mobile journey that frustrated customers. The company was also struggling with low conversion rates due to issues such as a corrupted shopping cart and incorrect discount codes. Additionally, AEO was facing difficulties in understanding customer interactions on the mobile channel due to the complexity of multiple mobile devices, browsers, and screen sizes.

Banco Galicia, one of Argentina's top three private banks, faced a significant challenge in improving the time-to-market for new financial products and services. The bank's legacy IT applications and systems were unable to support the rapid changes required to stay competitive in the market. The bank's existing software, which had been in place for over 20 years, was largely developed in-house and designed to meet past banking needs. However, the proposed new services required a customer-focused approach, and the older software could not be extended or adapted rapidly enough to provide the necessary capabilities. The bank serves a large client base, from individuals to large corporations, each with specific requirements. The existing IT systems were not flexible enough to differentiate the bank's approach to each client. The challenge was to modernize the IT infrastructure to meet the requirements of a 21st-century bank and compete with the world's major banking corporations.

Bonnie Plants, a national plant wholesaler based in Alabama, was grappling with the challenges of manual data processing which made them vulnerable to human errors and long delays. The company was using IBM Sterling's Gentran:Director® for EDI and Sterling Collaboration NetworkSM for their VAN services since 1994. However, the sales data took up to three days to process, leading to a feeling of being overwhelmed with data. The processing of sales orders could take an entire day and was subject to human error. After pulling information across a dial-up modem, Bonnie often discovered the data was incomplete. The company was continuously facing the challenges of trading electronically with little visibility. Moreover, 70 percent of their business occurred between the months of March and May, which required a scalable solution that could handle a large influx of data during a short period of time.

Brazil’s Ministry of Justice, specifically the Department of Assets Recovery and International Legal Cooperation, was tasked with the challenge of identifying and investigating the illicit proceeds of criminal activities such as corruption, organized crime, drug trafficking, and money laundering. The department created the Technology Laboratory Against Money Laundering (LAB-LD) to support complex investigations into corruption and money laundering. As of 2014, there are 43 laboratories across Brazil, which make up the Federal Laboratory Network Against Money Laundering (REDE-LAB). These laboratories analyze a vast amount of data to uncover and freeze illicit assets. However, the process of analyzing the data was complex and time-consuming, often taking months and thousands of person-hours. The challenge was further compounded by the fact that 60 percent of the data came from structured sources such as databases and spreadsheets, and the remaining 40 percent from unstructured sources, such as social media and email.

Cathay United Bank (CUB), a subsidiary of Cathay Financial Holding Co., is a major player in Taiwan's banking sector, with a significant portion of its revenue coming from the consumer credit loan business. In 2013, the bank's total loan amount exceeded TWD1 trillion (USD32.25 billion), and its total assets reached nearly TWD2 trillion (USD64.51 billion). However, to maintain its competitive edge, CUB needed to expedite its loan approval and disbursement processes. The bank was facing challenges in responding efficiently to market dynamics and enhancing customer satisfaction. The existing system was not agile enough to meet the changing demands of the market and the expectations of the customers. The bank needed a solution that could streamline its loan origination and servicing processes, improve its response time, and increase its market agility.

Banco Cooperativo de Puerto Rico (BanCoop) is a financial service provider for approximately 115 credit unions across Puerto Rico, processing nearly 28,000 checks and 35,000 Automated Clearing House (ACH) transactions daily. The company was facing a significant challenge in improving security protections across its web channels. The primary concern was the potential for malware and phishing threats on customer endpoints, particularly as most of the company's internet exposure came from its web applications. The IT Manager, Abey Márquez, was not only concerned about BanCoop's security but also about the security of each credit union it served. Despite having several systems and processes in place to protect its infrastructure, BanCoop needed a solution that could effectively identify and block these threats.

Infosys, a global leader in consulting, technology, and outsourcing solutions, was facing significant challenges in application development and maintenance due to its distributed teams, changing business priorities and the need to stay in alignment with customer needs. The company used a mix of open source, home-grown and third-party applications to support application development projects. However, challenges resulting from distributed teams using manual processes increased as the company grew. It became more and more important for Infosys to execute its projects efficiently, so they could improve quality, reduce defects and minimize delays.

Canadian National Railway Company (CN), a major economic player transporting over CAD250 billion worth of goods annually, faced a significant challenge in its financial reporting process. The company's accounting team was burdened with increasingly complex accounting standards and internal demands, making financial reporting labor-intensive. The team was responsible for generating a variety of reports, including quarterly and annual regulatory reports, internal monthly statements, and executive analysis. However, many of these processes were spreadsheet-based and had reached their limits. The team was spending more time on low-value activities such as data collection and performing repetitive tasks, which was inefficient and took away from more value-added tasks like analysis.

Allianz Managed Operations & Services SE (AMOS), the shared service provider for Allianz Group, was faced with the challenge of facilitating compliance by rolling out new, standardized processes to accelerate reporting workflows and streamline quarter- and year-end closing processes. The company was seeking a more robust and efficient way to provide accurate reports in a timely manner. The aim was to build a best-practice approach that could meet the current reporting requirements and deliver the scalability to support future business growth. The challenge was to replace multiple processes with a single, integrated solution that could connect more than 80 source systems to the local SAP ERP and SAP Business Warehouse applications.

Bharti Infratel Ltd., a leading communications passive infrastructure provider, was facing a significant challenge in managing and maintaining its over 30,000 communication towers across India. The cost of tower infrastructure management and maintenance was consuming 60 to 70 percent of the operating budget for communications service providers. To keep rates low and expand service into more areas, providers sold off their passive infrastructure to third-party companies that now rent tower space back for a much lower rate. However, Bharti Infratel needed to keep their operating costs low as well. The company wanted to apply business analytics to spot inefficiencies, but with 16 TB of data and growing, it needed a solution that could handle high volumes and still run smoothly. Furthermore, the company had no way to identify how many low-tenancy towers it had overall due to business analytics systems being in silos across the business.

Big Fish Games, a leading producer and distributor of casual games, faced a significant challenge in the highly competitive mobile and online gaming industry. The company needed to identify loyal clients and reduce customer churn to maintain its market position. The transition from a PC-centric to a mobile-centric gaming company brought about a change in strategy. With millions of games available to mobile users and new releases emerging rapidly, the window of opportunity to capture and keep the attention of a player was shrinking. The key to success for Big Fish Games was understanding customers’ changing tastes to deliver the optimal balance between challenging and satisfying gameplay. However, the company struggled to manage escalating volumes of data from tens of millions of players from around the world each day. The large data sets made it difficult to conduct effective analytical exercises without hitting dead ends.

Gabriel India Ltd operates six main manufacturing sites across the country, and plans to open additional plants in northern India. To streamline operations and support growth, the company wanted to move to a single central enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that would support manufacturing processes as well as finance and distribution. Its existing architecture – Intel processor-based HP Proliant machines running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases – was struggling to deliver adequate performance even for SAP Business One, and the predicted resource requirements for SAP ERP were far higher.