Alliance Tech, a provider of event technology solutions, was seeking to enhance the scope and timeliness of its event reporting and analytics solutions. The company wanted to exceed the expectations of its customers, who are primarily event organizers. Alliance Tech's solutions integrate analytics and marketing automation tools to provide actionable and insightful leads from data gathered about attendees as they journey through an event. The company was the first to offer RFID badge readers and online schedules to track attendee interests and preferences at conferences. However, Alliance Tech wanted to make the insights gathered from these tools available to its business customers each night so they could take action based on attendees’ behavior that day.

Apria Healthcare, a leading provider of home respiratory services and medical equipment in the United States, was looking to expand its high-quality care services into new markets. However, the company faced challenges in identifying cost centers due to its manual forecasting system. The company's spreadsheet-driven forecasting system made it difficult to understand the true cost of operations, which was crucial for a healthcare organization of their size. The company gathered a lot of data about the market for their specialist products, but the inconsistent and inaccurate data capturing and usage made it difficult to focus on the most promising opportunities. The company needed a solution that would help them understand their true operational costs, increase efficiencies, control costs, and build more competitive pricing models for their services.

ARTESP, the São Paulo State Transport Agency, was facing challenges in managing its vast road network, which spans over 6,400 kilometers and serves more than 20 million people across 271 cities. The agency was struggling with a lack of clear visibility into traffic and road conditions, which made it difficult to prioritize highway maintenance and management activities. This lack of clarity could potentially cause delays to inspection activities. Furthermore, the inconsistency in data reports and responses to problems by the private contractors responsible for day-to-day road maintenance, toll collection, and responding to traffic accidents, hindered ARTESP’s capacity to manage the contracts proactively and risked jeopardizing road quality. The manual effort of identifying road hazards through physical inspections and correlating service issues with accidents was increasingly time-consuming and prone to human error.

Baldor Electric Company, a global manufacturer of industrial electric motors, mechanical power transmission products, drives, and generators, faced a significant challenge when it acquired a major competitor. The acquisition brought with it approximately 200 heterogeneous stand-alone servers, running various operating systems and applications. This increase in server numbers and system complexity threatened to considerably increase IT costs. Baldor, which continually aims to reduce IT costs as a proportion of sales revenue, needed to integrate the two organizations as rapidly and cost-effectively as possible. The company also wanted to continue driving down operational costs in its virtualized SAP Business Suite software environment.

Baseline Telematics, a leading global provider of technology solutions to the insurance industry, was faced with the challenge of delivering its innovative usage-based platforms to insurance organizations worldwide. As the company grew, it realized that each customer required its own dedicated private cloud, making security audits complicated in a multi-tenant environment. Additionally, to serve a global customer base, Baseline needed a cloud hosting platform that was scalable, had private, dedicated resources, and offered international data center presence. The company did not want to have to search for a reliable provider in each country it operated in.

Bassett Healthcare Network, a healthcare organization serving a 5,600 square mile region in upstate New York, was facing the complex transition from volume to value-based reimbursement. The organization recognized that its primary care network was a critical point in its strategy. Bassett Medical Group, consisting of over 400 physicians and clinicians, had experienced rapid growth with 43 clinicians hired over the past two years and physical expansion of six clinics. The organization aimed to drive volume to utilize existing capacity, support the pursuit of NCQA Patient-Centered Medical Home renewal recognition, foster overall population health management, and support clinical quality improvement initiatives. However, they needed the 'right volume', not just more. This meant targeting gaps in care, focusing on chronic needs in primary care, pediatrics, and women’s health such as depression, immunizations, and diabetes. Bassett knew that effective patient outreach and engagement was critical to achieve these goals.

The Automotive Group of Continental AG, a leading global automotive supplier, had inherited two separate SAP application suites due to corporate acquisitions. This increased support and development expenses. The company wanted to consolidate to a single global SAP ERP instance with multi-language support, but its existing software versions did not support the required Unicode character set. The company’s expansion into new markets has been fueled by a continuous corporate acquisition program across many countries. The integration of two business units (Continental Automotive Systems and Siemens VDO) resulted in the company inheriting two separate SAP application suites, neither of which was able to support multi-language operations. With global ambitions, it was essential to provide an integrated system for all Continental Automotive business units, regardless of their location and language.

Santos Ltd., one of the leading oil and gas producers in the Asia-Pacific region, operates one of the largest exploration and production businesses in Australia. Its extensive operations rely on a huge and highly complex network of assets, including thousands of kilometers of pipeline, wells, pumps, compressors and other equipment. Keeping this specialist infrastructure in working order is a key priority for the company, as any downtime can interrupt production and limit profitability. The company had been leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as SCADA to collect information from thousands of sensors across its asset network for many years. The challenge was to harvest and sift through this data, recognize the patterns that indicate a high likelihood of asset failure, identify the most urgent issues, and get the right information to its engineers with enough lead time for them to take effective action.

VKB Group, Germany’s largest public insurer, was facing challenges in optimizing its software testing. The company's software development teams were experiencing slow test runs when evaluating new features for their mission-critical core insurance applications. The large volumes of data used for testing often resulted in incomplete test runs that had to be restarted, causing delays in productivity and potentially delaying the release of new functionalities. VKB Group aimed to streamline its internal workflows and enable software development teams to test new features and fixes with a smaller set of standardized data, helping to speed up cycle times and improve the agility of development processes.

Textron, a multi-industry company, needed to plan for disaster recovery and business continuity. The company needed to understand how much resiliency it needed for any business continuity or crisis scenario. This required engaging business leaders and asking tough questions about worst-case scenarios. The company needed to consider all aspects of recovery, beginning with a roadmap of critical assets and obscure dependencies. The company also needed to assess the hardware and software required to restore those applications and test recovery plans to validate that recovery goals could be met.

COPROB, one of Italy’s largest sugar beet processors, was facing challenges in managing its large network of farms and expanding into new areas such as biomass energy. The company's existing systems and approaches were largely untouched by technology, with many processes being manual or overly reliant on department-specific expertise. This lack of technological integration was hindering the company's growth and ability to manage its operations effectively. The company needed a solution that could streamline its workflows, reduce complexity, and provide faster and more mobile access to detailed enterprise-wide information.

Community Health Network, a leading not-for-profit health system with five hospitals and more than 200 sites of care across central Indiana, was facing the challenge of attracting, retaining, and developing talent across its organization. The organization recognized that employee engagement was a key enabler of organizational performance. The more committed their people were to their vision, mission, and strategy, the more inspired they would be to deliver the highest quality of care to their patients. However, due to the scale of its organization, talent management posed complex challenges.

Getin Noble Bank S.A. experienced several years of rapid growth, at twice the pace of the rest of the Polish banking sector. As the market became saturated, customers demanded a higher level of service. To create tailored product offers to meet their needs, the bank needed a more efficient and automated method of customer segmentation. It also wanted to develop effective campaigns with repeatable and predictable results.

Engine Informática, a Brazil-based company specializing in the implementation of SAP ERP solutions, identified a gap in the market for small and medium-sized companies. The company realized that the fixed infrastructure investment needed to run SAP 24/7, such as data centers, hardware, and support, meant that the per-user cost could be perceived as too high for smaller companies. The challenge was to reduce or eliminate the capital expenditures and implementation costs as much as possible to help reduce the barriers to entry for these smaller companies.

Canon Marketing Japan Inc., a subsidiary of the Canon Group, was grappling with the challenge of improving employee productivity and satisfaction by enhancing response times for crucial information systems. The company's IT headquarters, responsible for managing and operating mission-critical business applications used daily by approximately 4,000 of the 18,000 employees across various Canon Group companies, was facing increasing wait times due to the concentration of large volumes of transactions. The company had created a mechanism to utilize mission-critical systems as data warehouses, but the processing of data extracted through SQL queries was time-consuming, especially for complex commands. The system load gradually increased from January to December, with the last three months of the year experiencing particularly severe deterioration in response times. Despite regular system upgrades, the response times during peak periods started to deteriorate sooner than expected due to data and transaction volumes far exceeding estimates.

CenterGrid, a full-stack IT hosting and support services provider, identified a gap in the market for mid-market firms seeking data protection solutions. These firms found themselves caught between public cloud backup services, which were limited in scope, scalability, and performance, and on-premises solutions that were costly and oversized. Mass market cloud backup solutions were too limited and did not scale cost-effectively to their needs. On the other hand, on-premises enterprise solutions for backup and recovery were often oversized for their requirements, requiring costly investments in both infrastructure and highly skilled specialist personnel. These mid-size organizations were storing increasing volumes of business-critical data but lacked the internal IT resources to properly manage backup, recovery, archive, and retention policies.

China Minsheng Banking Corp., Ltd. (CMBC), one of China's leading retail banks, was faced with the challenge of meeting rising customer expectations for 24/7 banking services while keeping costs under control. In an increasingly 24/7 world, customers expect online and telephone banking services to be available whenever they need them. Banks that fail to provide seamless customer service risk losing market share to competitors. CMBC wanted to outperform its competitors by ensuring that its business-critical systems were online and available to customers at all times. Specifically, CMBC wanted to ensure non-stop availability of the mission-critical system it relies on to calculate the fees it charges for each transaction, as any delays or interruptions could have far-reaching consequences for customer satisfaction and the bank's reputation. The system supports billing and accumulation for CMBC's front-office operations, arrearage and inquiry statistics for the back office, and periodical and protocol billing for the entire bank, making 2.5 million calculations each day.

1-800-GOT-JUNK?, a full-service junk removal company, was facing a challenge in personalizing its communications to increase customer loyalty and revenue. The company's email program was primarily composed of batch and blast messages, lacking a strategic approach, segmentation, or customer experience consideration. The company aimed to transition to more automated, cross-channel programs that would convert first-time buyers into loyal customers and significantly drive revenue. The company also wanted to implement a customer loyalty program and a call center program to boost customer engagement.

Afrostream, a subscription-based Video on Demand (VOD) platform, needed to efficiently and reliably transfer African and African American content from major film studios and content producers around the globe to the IBM SoftLayer® data center in San Jose. The company faced a logistical challenge due to its globally dispersed team and content providers. Afrostream's main office is located in California, the technical team is in Nantes, France, its IBM SoftLayer storage server is housed in IBM’s data center in San Jose, California, and Afrostream’s content providers and viewers are globally dispersed. Afrostream needed to ensure content could be reliably and efficiently moved across continents. This process was further complicated by the large volume and size of files that needed to be transferred, with digital files typically varying between 10 gigabytes to 1 terabyte each. Traditional transfer methods such as FTP were too slow and unreliable due to technical limitations, resulting in poor performance and susceptibility to network interruptions and latency over the WAN.

athenahealth, a leading provider of support services for doctors and healthcare providers across the United States, was facing a challenge in its internal approach to data analysis. Following a period of rapid growth and multiple acquisitions, the company's existing analytics and reporting solution was falling short of its needs. The company relied on data from multiple sources, including financial and operational data from its own systems and external data. However, the process of gathering data was laborious and technical, leaving little time for actual analysis. The company's analysts were spending too much time manually gathering data, and business leaders had to wait for analysts to generate reports on their behalf. The company needed a more flexible approach that could help it respond faster to changes in rules, regulations, and demands from its customers.

The case study revolves around the challenge of managing high-volume Service Parts Management (SPM) requirements in a competitive environment that demands greater efficiencies. Companies with complex SPM requirements are under pressure to integrate their manufacturing, inventory, and logistics systems more effectively to achieve significant cost savings. The challenge is further compounded by the need for a solution that can adapt to a dynamic, constantly changing environment, provide worldwide accessibility and visibility of information, and support operations ranging from small to very large service parts. The case study also highlights a specific request from a major German automotive manufacturer with a critical load requirement for order fulfillment.

Avea, Turkey’s youngest and fastest-growing mobile operator, was facing a significant challenge in managing its rapidly growing subscriber base and the associated data volumes. The company was finding it increasingly difficult to deliver prompt service and meet service-level agreements due to the growing volumes of subscriber data. The existing content management systems were struggling to keep up with the increased volumes of data, causing long delays in accessing information. This delay was affecting the company's ability to respond to customers promptly, risking customer satisfaction, potential loss of business to competitors, and non-compliance with government regulations. The company needed to process all mobile number portability requests within 48 hours and send out invoices at least seven days before the payment due date, which was becoming a challenge with the existing systems.

Aviation Technical Services (ATS), a leading provider of maintenance, repair, and overhaul services for commercial and military aircraft, faced a significant challenge in managing labor costs and maintaining profitability. The company operates in a highly competitive industry where clients demand the best service at the lowest price. The challenge for ATS was to balance the need for highly skilled labor, which comes at a high cost, with the need to keep labor costs as low as possible. The company was also struggling with a complex, manual, spreadsheet-based forecasting process that was holding back its finance team. The challenge was to find a more efficient way to allocate resources, manage aircraft maintenance projects more cost-effectively, and gain deeper insight into labor costs.

Blue Shield of California, a not-for-profit health plan provider, was facing an increasingly competitive health insurance marketplace following the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The company needed to better support its members and boost competitiveness by accelerating the provisioning of new systems and improving IT agility to get new offerings to market quickly. The challenge was to adjust their offerings as the needs of their members changed, and to deliver a modern customer experience, including access from mobile devices and tablets. The company was also struggling with a lack of automation in provisioning the networking, hardware, and software.

BRD-Groupe Société Générale (BRD), the second largest bank in Romania, identified the need to enhance security protections at the customer endpoint, which was considered the weak link in banking security. Despite not having experienced fraud losses through its online banking channel, the bank's Chief Information Security Officer, Mihai Andries, and his team believed it was crucial to proactively address this increasingly vulnerable area. The bank recognized that the client endpoint was more susceptible to attacks than the bank’s infrastructure due to significant browser and operating system vulnerabilities that could be exploited by criminals to intercept traffic, inject fake pages, and steal credentials. The bank sought an efficient solution that could rapidly detect malware and phishing attacks, and remove any infections.

A business outsourcing company that provides human capital management solutions, including HR, payroll, talent management, tax and benefits administration solutions, was faced with the challenge of modernizing its mainframe applications. One of the company’s groups, responsible for maintaining a complex payroll application, was tasked with providing web services for its front-end systems, which are written in Java. The payroll application runs on mainframe servers and processes payroll requests in large batches. The group, consisting of developers, testers, quality assurance staff and statutory research analysts, needed to find a development application that would facilitate this modernization effort.

IGT partners with lotteries and their retailers to maximize lottery sales in a responsible way. Their goal was to be able to better compare retailer performance and understand the factors driving sales. Lotteries are big business, bringing in USD75 billion in the U.S. alone, with the proceeds benefiting a variety of good causes. IGT—a company that works with lotteries and retailers worldwide to responsibly grow lottery sales—saw an opportunity to drive sales even higher. Matthew Whalen, Senior VP and CTO, Lottery at IGT, says: “We realized that we were in a unique position: huge amounts of lottery sales data from our client base are at our fingertips.

Milgard Manufacturing, Inc., a leading producer of windows and patio doors, operates on a demand-driven manufacturing model to avoid overstocking issues. This approach requires the company to predict sales extremely accurately to ensure it has the resources needed to fill incoming customer orders quickly. Sales of windows are influenced by various factors, including housing market fluctuations and regional preferences. Therefore, Milgard needs to ensure that its annual budgets and forecasts accurately reflect the impact of these factors. The company's inflexible approach to planning threatened to hamper business agility, prompting it to seek a better solution.

Oncor Electric Delivery Company LLC, the largest regulated electric distribution and transmission company in Texas, aimed to modernize its operations to proactively manage outages and meet more sophisticated energy needs. The company wanted to develop an interactive power grid that records energy usage data from homes and businesses every 15 minutes and transforms that data into actionable decision-making intelligence for energy providers and consumers alike. The goal was to be able to accurately respond to outages and restore services without requiring any contact from the customer. In many cases, outages occur during the middle of a workday, when nobody’s home. Oncor would experience a significant spike in customer calls and service orders after working hours, which meant customers would unnecessarily end up in a long queue waiting for service.

Outokumpu, a leading manufacturer of steel products, realized that by moving from reactive to proactive maintenance for its production line machines, it could improve availability, efficiency, quality and safety at its Avesta steel mill. The mill is known for the special grades of stainless steel it produces for the offshore oil and gas industry. Delivering a product that can withstand corrosive saltwater and extreme weather conditions requires very precise control of production processes. At the same time, production needs to be efficient and uninterrupted to meet the expectations of demanding clients, whose multi-million dollar offshore construction projects depend on Outokumpu’s ability to deliver the right materials at the right time. The company's top priority is always to keep all its employees safe while they work in the mill.