Racold Thermo, a leading manufacturer of water heaters in India, was facing fierce competition in the rapidly growing water-heating industry. The company wanted to optimize its sales and distribution activities to capture a larger market share and increase profitability. However, the lack of integration between its many branches was hindering its ability to gain deep insight into sales and control over manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution operations. The company needed a solution that would provide a clear view of market demand and customer buying habits to shape its sales strategy effectively. The limitations of its existing business planning applications necessitated new tools and technologies.

Unilever Europe, a well-known consumer products giant, had expanded in a siloed fashion, by country and division. This resulted in a loose federation of business groups and geographies operating across 24 countries, all using multiple ERP systems. With so many different finance and accounting processes under three separate leadership teams, the result was a complex, inefficient organization that impeded growth. In 2005, Unilever Europe's leadership team made a strategic decision to integrate the company’s multiple business units into a single, unified Pan-European organization, but needed to implement the systems and framework to enable this goal. The diversity of cultures, policies and language across Europe further complicated the challenge, as did the varying levels of technology across the company’s business units, which ranged from advanced to outmoded paper-based systems.

Severstal, one of the world’s leading vertically integrated steel and steel-related mining companies, has built one of the largest SAP ERP environments in Russia over the past seven years. The SAP landscape is constantly evolving to meet new business requirements, such as introducing SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer for supply chain management, and SAP Mobile Platform for anytime, anywhere access to SAP applications. However, introducing these new functionalities, increasing the user-base and gaining deeper insight into operations all come at a price. The volume of data in the SAP environment was increasing rapidly, and performance was beginning to suffer. Severstal was faced with the challenge of designing a storage landscape that would scale to meet its future needs, while avoiding the expense of replacing all its existing storage systems.

Fraport AG operates Frankfurt International Airport and is involved in 12 other airports around the world. To succeed in this highly competitive industry, the company needs to keep its costs as low as possible while maintaining excellent service levels. The SAP® systems are a key component of operations at Frankfurt International Airport; but data volumes were growing rapidly, making these systems increasingly expensive to support. Due to these large data volumes – and the resultant need for additional high-speed disk storage and processing power – the cost of maintaining the SAP environment was rising rapidly. Fraport began to look for ways to improve the situation, and IBM suggested migrating from Oracle to the DB2 database platform.

TF1 Publicité, the advertising sales division of TF1, France’s largest free-to-air broadcaster, was facing challenges with its invoicing processes. The company had to handle client billing in multiple systems, which led to delays, inflexibility, and inefficiency. This prevented the agency from meeting client expectations for automated electronic invoicing. Without a single, standardized process for invoicing clients, TF1 Publicité could not optimize billing processes or meet client expectations around automation and the introduction of electronic billing. To maintain its position in the French market, the company needed to rationalize and simplify the invoice-to-cash cycle, automate its processes, and enable greater flexibility and granularity in invoicing.

The Chefs’ Warehouse, a specialty food distributor, was facing challenges in integrating new foodservice businesses rapidly and meeting the company’s high service, payment, and on-time delivery standards. The company had several ERP and best-of-breed solutions in place, but they were not sufficient to support the company's growth strategy. The company needed a solution that would provide visibility to inventory management, financial integration, process automation, and improvements for operating business units.

Shop Direct, a multi-brand online retailer, has been transitioning from a catalogue-driven business into a world-class digital retailer. With 86 percent of the company’s sales made online, it is critical for Shop Direct to ensure that the right product is available in the right place and at the right price. However, with its business growing, the group found it increasingly difficult to manage rapidly expanding numbers of products and related information. The previous approach to product management and stock planning was largely manual, with most buyers working from their own spreadsheets. This resulted in a lack of a consistent way of managing and forecasting inventory, and a limited view of products and pricing across the group.

Cablevisión, one of Argentina’s leading media and communications companies, was facing a challenge in boosting customer loyalty and minimizing churn. The company wanted to enhance service quality and customer satisfaction but lacked an effective method to identify dissatisfied customers and address their issues. Regular satisfaction surveys did not provide a comprehensive picture as many subscribers chose not to participate. Moreover, if customers did not report their problems to the helpdesk, the company often had no feedback from them at all. The company realized that it needed to diagnose and resolve connectivity problems early to retain customers. The challenge was to predict which internet subscribers were dissatisfied, regardless of whether they complained or not, by gathering data about network status from customers’ modems and comparing it with the results of satisfaction surveys.

The California Franchise Tax Board (FTB), a part of the California Government Operations Agency, was faced with a daunting task. They had a list of over three million delinquent or non-filing taxpayers and were struggling to determine where to start the collection process. The traditional methods of relying on experience and anecdotal evidence were no longer effective, and state revenue was suffering as a result. The board was grappling with a multibillion-dollar gap between the amount they collected and the amount they were owed. The challenge was to find a more efficient and effective way to prioritize nonpayment cases and increase revenue collection.

CEMEX S.A.B. de C.V., a global leader in the manufacture and distribution of cement, ready-mix concrete, aggregates, and related building materials, recognized the potential of its high-profile social business platform as a tool for employee skill development. The company, which employs over 44,000 people in more than 50 countries, saw that its employees were using the platform to share and develop their expertise. However, the challenge was to structure and accelerate this organic collaboration and content creation to fully capitalize on the information-sharing that employees had already developed. The company needed a solution that could identify areas of expertise across the organization and analyze gaps in expertise to define personalized skill development plans.

ABT Power Management, a family-owned company that provides engineered solutions for DC powered applications, was facing a significant challenge. As the company grew and took on new customers, it realized the need to increase its headcount. However, the transfer of technical knowledge to new employees, essential for delivering exceptional customer services, posed a significant hurdle. In the early days, institutional knowledge was stored in the minds of company experts, who had vast experience working in the industry. As the company expanded, it needed a new way to store and share institutional knowledge effectively with new members of its team. The challenge was to find a solution that could bridge the gap between classroom learning and professional learning, enabling new employees to get up to speed on the industry faster and more efficiently.

The automotive company, based in China, was struggling with the efficient scheduling and management of a large number of jobs within multiple software environments. The company had numerous jobs with complex dependencies running on multiple platforms. The limited capabilities of the company’s proprietary scheduling software and the largely manual processes in place for setting job schedules, monitoring job statuses and importing job attributes and dependencies within the company’s SAP ERP, database, Java and IBM InfoSphere® DataStage® software environments posed a significant challenge. The company was in dire need of an automated workload-management solution to increase operating efficiency.

BBVA, a multinational banking group, was facing a challenge in providing its trading desks with real-time, accurate insight into counterparty credit risk (CCR) and checking the limits for each trade. The bank's philosophy is that risk is a fundamental part of every business decision, and it wanted to manage risk more proactively by moving from an ex-post to an ex-ante model. This required the ability to obtain a precise valuation of CCR and other risk measures even before closing deals. However, the sophisticated CCR models that BBVA's risk team had been using could only be run in a batch process at the end of each day. For pre-deal limit checking, traders had to use a simpler “add-on” modeling approach, which did not take some important factors into account. Moreover, this model was only used in some geographies, while in others, there was no pre-deal limit checking at all.

Bengt Dahlgren AB, a civil engineering consultancy services provider, was faced with the challenge of ensuring effective collaboration among its six group companies as it prepared to give them greater autonomy for lean decision-making. The group, which specializes in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), fire safety, energy and environmental construction, and building automation, wanted to ensure that the increased autonomy did not reduce the employees’ ability to collaborate across different departments. The group had been relying on shared drives and folders to distribute information on human resources, internal processes, and best practices. However, as they transitioned to a decentralized IT management structure, they realized that this approach would become difficult to sustain. They needed a new way to collaborate across the group.

BLOM BANK, a leading Lebanese bank, was looking to expand its market share in Lebanon and the EMEA region. To achieve this, the bank recognized the need to embrace the omnichannel digital banking trend. However, this had to be done without compromising on data availability or efficiency. The bank had a solid track record of profitability and growth in Lebanon and the EMEA region, while following a conservative strategy that includes prudent risk management. The challenge was to maintain this winning approach while providing innovative products and services to customers and staying at the forefront of technology. Achieving this without compromising service quality would require the bank to find a stable technology partner, who could offer a technology mix that would enable growth, efficiency and service continuity as BLOM BANK evolves.

Broadcom, a global leader in semiconductor solutions, faced a significant challenge in managing its sales compensation. The company's compensation plans were becoming increasingly complex, and the lack of real-time visibility into compensation was causing dissatisfaction among its highly skilled sales team. The salespeople, most of whom are qualified engineers, were unable to monitor their performance and predict their compensation, which was affecting their motivation and productivity. The company's compensation reporting processes were manual, labor-intensive, and could only produce reports once per quarter. This lack of timely insight into compensation was affecting the sales team's performance and the company's ability to motivate them effectively. Furthermore, Broadcom needed to make compensation more transparent without significantly increasing the headcount in the compensation team.

BT Sport, a collection of sports channels offered by the BT Group in the UK, needed a high-speed file transfer solution to support ad hoc ingest and distribution as well as power automated data replication to an offsite data recovery center. The vision of BT Sport could only be realized with a new, state of the art broadcast facility. Timeline Television, BT Sport's technical partner, had less than six months to build out the broadcast centre from an empty shell into a 24 hour-a-day operation, including the simultaneous roll-out of a fully automated disaster recovery system. They quickly identified the need for a robust, high-speed transfer platform from a trusted vendor, to power the intense file-based production workflows and meet the project’s aggressive timescale. The platform needed to support secure high-speed transfer at multi-gigabit speeds, allow fully automated end-to-end workflows including ad hoc content ingest, review, approval and distribution, and offer reliable, secure data replication of petabytes of media from BT Sport’s main site in London’s iCITY to the disaster recovery and continuity facilities located at the iconic BT Tower.

The HR services company, an IBM client, was facing the challenge of understanding the factors underlying personal employment choices. They wanted to offer their clients unprecedented insight into what motivates employees and prospective job candidates. However, their existing systems were not capable of handling the surging data volumes collected from a wide range of different data sources. With the total volume likely to keep on growing, the firm looked for a solution that could meet current needs and scale to meet tomorrow’s demands.

K. Raheja Corp., a leading real estate brand in India, was facing challenges in managing the massive amounts of paperwork generated by its operations. With each project involving complex processes, managed across many different departments and involving multiple stakeholders, meeting deadlines and regulatory demands was a challenge. The group was generating approximately 15,000 documents every month, most of which involve multiple levels of approval. The paper-based system was causing delays in locating individual documents and moving them through various levels of approval.

La Perla Global Management S.r.l., a leading player in the luxury lingerie marketplace, designs and produces hundreds of products. Optimizing, synchronizing, and reconciling its logistics and shipping operations was a daunting task. Every day, La Perla plans more than 60,000 items and 500,000 customer orders or forecast sales plans. To gain more control of planning and shipping and to meet customer requirements, the company sought an advanced solution with technology powered by the precision of mathematics.

Mueller, Inc., a company specializing in metal buildings and roofing products, was facing a challenge. To remain competitive, it needed to be as nimble as small companies and as scalable as larger competitors. However, its existing business intelligence platform lacked the ability to derive insight from unstructured data. The company was also facing a skills gap due to its location in a small town with a limited talent pool. Mueller had to make a choice between sticking to its values and identity or moving its headquarters to a big city where it could solve its problems by hiring more people. The company chose to stay in West Texas, which meant it needed to find smarter ways to work.

Municipal Parking Services (MPS) designs, develops, manufactures and markets technologically advanced parking solutions, such as its patented Sentry Meter and SAAS software – a connected device with built-in touchscreen and cameras that capture real-time data about drivers and parking behavior. In most municipalities, parking is an under-utilized asset. Few cities have the resources to fully enforce their parking rules. As a result, it’s estimated that only 50 percent of people comply and pay in full for their parking, and only 20 percent of infringements are actually penalized, due to a lack of enforcement personnel. MPS wanted to analyze data from these meters to develop even smarter parking services, but the sheer volume of data made this difficult to achieve.

Bus companies face a significant challenge in optimizing the utilization of staff and vehicles to maximize customer satisfaction, while minimizing operational costs and carbon emissions. Events such as vehicle breakdowns, accidents, adverse weather, driver or passenger illness, construction delays, and traffic congestion can disrupt carefully planned schedules. Traditional operational planning for vehicles and crews is an offline process involving significant manual effort and does not adapt quickly or easily to changing real-world conditions. As a result, bus companies tend to maintain costly reserve vehicles and crews to fill gaps in the schedule. Optibus recognized that bus companies waste millions of dollars annually through inefficient scheduling, oversized fleets, and delays in responding to unexpected events.

PREPAR-VIE, a life assurance filial of BRED Banque Populaire, needed to be ready for the Solvency II Directive that governs insurance firms in the European Union. This directive sets quantitative requirements for the amount of capital each insurer must legally hold, known as the solvency capital requirement (SCR). However, PREPAR-VIE lacked a formal solution for asset-liability management (ALM), making it impossible to calculate the best-estimate liability for the SCR in a timely and efficient manner. Previously, the business only needed to make provisions within a one-year horizon, which their financial systems could handle. However, to perform the stochastic projections required for Solvency II, they needed a new approach.

PRO BTP is the social protection group for French building and construction professionals. It offers members (employees, retirees, craftsmen and construction companies) services in the areas of pension and health insurance (provident, health and savings). The firm had been using a processing system that was identifying unjustified health claims only after they had been paid. To reduce system abuses and better control expenses, PRO BTP needed to detect suspicious claims before the company reimbursed health professionals.

Sicoob, the largest credit union system in Brazil, was experiencing rapid business growth and an increase in the number and range of its products and services. This growth, coupled with the desire for non-stop services, created a perfect storm for Sicoob’s existing distributed infrastructure, which was running all core banking services. Moreover, each time a new credit union joined Sicoob, the organization had to integrate new systems and processes into its operations, scaling to accommodate additional users, transactions, and data. As a result, Sicoob ended up with hundreds of databases to manage, increasing complexity, inefficiency, and cost. To avoid hindering growth, the organization needed to find a smarter approach.

Skipton Building Society, the UK’s fourth largest building society, was facing a constant battle against criminals who were using ever more sophisticated techniques to defraud institutions and their customers, launder money, and commit other types of financial crime. As the fraudsters got smarter, Skipton realized that it needed to innovate and turn to technology to help detect fraud attempts, minimize losses, prevent further exposure, identify culprits, and gather evidence to help law enforcement catch and prosecute them. Prior to the implementation of a new solution, Skipton’s analysts could spend days on complex investigations – trawling through spreadsheets, using pivot tables to try to spot patterns in the data, and drawing diagrams on paper to help them visualize and understand the relationships between suspicious transactions and potential fraudsters.

Web-based publishing platform SpaceCraft found that as its client base grew, it was spending an increasing amount of time managing its databases, distracting its focus from product innovation. As its user base rapidly expanded, data volumes at SpaceCraft began to rise dramatically. Along with their main focus on maintaining and further developing a great platform for web publishing, the SpaceCraft team had the added pressure of managing the increasing quantities of data while ensuring ongoing high performance for clients.

Standard Life, a global financial services company, wanted to identify, develop, and retain talent across its global operations. To enable meaningful comparisons of employee performance, its human capital management leadership team needed an integrated talent management and compensation solution. The company was using a legacy HR solution that was not efficient in managing core business functions such as payroll. The company needed a solution that would align performance, reward, and talent management processes and provide an integrated view of the workforce across the company.

The City of Edinburgh Council aimed to put citizens at the centre of its processes, and enable a 'channel shift' to help people interact efficiently and consistently with the Council’s services – whether in person, by phone or email, or online via new digital services. The Council wanted to create a hub-and-spoke architecture, where systems would interact via a single central integration bus. This would provide a single point of control, allowing the Council to easily add, remove or replace different systems within the architecture, and orchestrate them into complex processes with a minimum of effort.