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.

Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD) manages leases for thousands of properties, a substantial proportion of which are 'income leases' for properties that have been sublet to other companies. With the growth of the bank, the number of income leases that TD managed increased. The bank had to find a more efficient way of working or face a rise in costs. The bank decided to automate the management of its income leases using IBM® TRIRIGA®, a solution designed to help companies streamline lease administration. IBM hosts the solution in one of its data centers, and supports the test, development and production environments.

Ultra Petroleum Corp., an independent oil and gas company, was facing the challenge of meeting demanding financial reporting requirements without adding to its headcount. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires public companies like Ultra to file financial statements, including annual 10-K and quarterly 10-Q financial reports. These statements must be tagged using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), a global standard for exchanging business information. For many companies, the XBRL requirement has more than doubled their SEC reporting workload. Ultra began looking for a solution that would return control of SEC reporting to the people who knew the company’s finances best: its accounting department.

Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.

CinePostproduction, a leading postproduction facility in Germany, was faced with the challenge of speeding up the ingest of media files and the delivery of large Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) to cinemas throughout the DACH region. The transition from 35-millimeter film to digital cinema posed a significant challenge for the company. Despite the shift to digital, the most common method for distributing DCPs remained the physical shipment of specialized hard disks via courier or satellite delivery. This method was not only slow and unreliable, but also costly. The challenge was further complicated by the large volume and size of the media files: DCPs typically range from 100GB to as large as 400GB. For its TV and cinema postproduction business area, CinePostproduction needed to send data sets between 150GB to 1.5TB per feature film, which occasionally needed to be transferred globally.

Duke Energy, the largest electric power holding company in the United States, provides natural gas transmission and distribution services to approximately 500,000 customers in Ohio and Kentucky. To ensure a safe and efficient supply of gas to homes and businesses across these states, and manage complex pricing, billing and gas delivery arrangements with suppliers, Duke Energy depends on the Gas Transportation Management System (GTMS). For many years, Duke Energy has used Oracle Utilities Billing Component software to underpin the GTMS. When the company’s existing version of the Oracle solution went out of support, Duke Energy knew that it needed to act fast to upgrade to a newer version. The company faced a strict timeframe for the implementation due to operational constraints. With demand for natural gas typically reaching its peak between November and March, during the so-called ‘heating season,’ the implementation had to be completed outside of these months in order to minimize disruption to the business.

Anticipating continued growth for its flourishing global business, Edwards needed to extend its SAP environment. The company sought a flexible hosting solution with the scalability to accommodate current and future expansion, as well as rapid provisioning capabilities to support quickly changing business demands. And, with operations in 30 countries worldwide, it was critical that Edwards teamed with a hosting provider offering global resources and an extensive international reach.

Fredericia Kommune, a Danish municipality, was seeking ways to improve efficiency and maintain a high level of service to its citizens. The organization found that its employees were spending a significant amount of time managing paperwork, which detracted from more productive tasks. Additionally, with several key employees nearing retirement age, the municipality needed to ensure it was well-prepared for the future. Fredericia Kommune set a target of increasing productivity of the time spent recording data by 45 percent. A speech recognition tool that could convert dictated words into typed words presented an ideal solution to help achieve this.

GigaScience, an online open-access, open-data life sciences journal, publishes 'big-data' articles covering a wide range of biological and biomedical sciences. The journal hosts the complete data sets associated with each published article in a comprehensive public database, GigaDB. However, the data sets submitted in support of articles published in the GigaScience journal can reach multiple terabytes in size. GigaScience found that FTP was not suitable for moving large files because transfers were often exceedingly slow, and if a user encountered a network problem, the transfer would have to be restarted from the beginning. Plus, transfers over long distances were particularly time-consuming and unreliable due to the high latency on the network. On one occasion, GigaScience was presented with the challenge of uploading a 15 TB liver-cancer data set. Ruling out FTP, GigaScience had to load the data onto 8 hard drives and physically transport it from the submitter to the journal, a costly and time-intensive process.

TELUS, a leading communications provider in Canada, was facing a challenge in delivering high-quality customer experiences due to its fragmented systems environment. The company relied on multiple systems to manage its contact center processes, which made it difficult for its team members to quickly identify and act on individual customer requirements. This was affecting the company's ability to drive higher satisfaction and encourage advocacy. TELUS wanted to offer its support teams a complete view of the customer, including their previous interactions across all channels, open orders, and support tickets.

The North American airline wanted to extend its thoughtful customer service, especially during flight cancellations or delays, by sending customers personalized, rules-generated email or text messages. The company's main focus has been to provide an exceptional guest experience, whether interacting with them in person on the front lines or using technology to enhance their travels. The company goes the extra mile to promote a stress-free experience. One way it does that is with a notification system that reaches guests via a preferred channel such as email, voicemail or text. It would offer a flight reminder three days ahead of departure, an opportunity to check-in online 24 hours in advance and prompt notification of any changes, including flight cancellations or delays, gate changes or insight into the entertainment or amenities available on the aircraft.

The company, a large grocery retailer based in the United States, was facing a challenge with its data management. With operations spread out across numerous states, it was essential for the company to collect data in a timely manner from all of its stores to make informed decisions. The company’s application environment had to support the movement of a great deal of information so that more than 2,400 grocery stores could deliver information on sales and operations to a central hub on a daily basis. However, the company managed most of these communications in large batches. Each store transmitted its transaction logs to the corporate data warehouse once a day. These logs were then parsed for analysis. This batch processing method delayed analysis and hampered theft prevention efforts. The company wanted to improve the timeliness of these data transfers to improve access to accurate information for day-to-day operations such as customer service, supply chain management, and monitoring of over-the-counter drug sales.

The data capture device manufacturer was struggling with managing and automating the software development lifecycle for its mission-critical product portfolio. The development team was using email to manage change requests, which often led to lost requests and delays in addressing them. The lack of a collaborative design solution made it difficult for engineers to collaborate on design changes.

CMC Electronics, a company known for its flight management systems (FMS) in the aviation industry, was facing a challenge in developing its next-generation FMS. The company had a range of FMS products, each designed to meet the specific needs of different sectors of the aviation market. However, this approach was time-consuming and required more effort to develop and maintain separate software for each target market. For its next generation of FMS products, the company decided to build a core system that would be used by all of its FMS products, and supplement it with customizable, reusable components that could meet the specific requirements of different markets. To support this new development process, CMC needed a new set of tools that would provide a collaborative environment for software and systems design, development, and testing.

Claranet, a managed services provider, was facing a challenge due to the increasing number of alarms and events in its infrastructure. This was a result of a growing customer base and managed environment. The company needed to resolve problems rapidly to avoid impacting customers’ services. The support teams needed to quickly identify frequently occurring issues and rapidly search historical events to assist with troubleshooting and ensure issues did not develop into service-affecting problems.

Duas Rodas, a Brazil-based food additives manufacturer, aimed to achieve a sales target of USD 450 million by 2015 by expanding into international markets. However, the company's existing manufacturing assets were at their capacity limits, making it impossible to meet the increasing demand. The company's growth strategy involved significant investments in people, machinery, and technology, but a lack of standardized processes made it challenging to align manufacturing throughput with demand. The business units operated independently, and the lack of integration between client orders, inventory levels, and production planning made it difficult to achieve the necessary manufacturing output.

Itaú BBA, the wholesale, investment and institutional treasury banking division of the Itaú Unibanco group, wanted to increase developer productivity and improve traceability through more optimized and automated workflows. The company had been relying on IBM Rational ClearCase, IBM Rational ClearQuest and IBM Rational Build Forge software to support its development efforts since 2002. However, in 2010, the company decided to supplement those applications with additional tools to create a more comprehensive application lifecycle management (ALM) solution. The aim was to increase developer productivity, improve development governance through greater traceability, integration and transparency, and reduce development documentation through automation and optimization of development workflows.

Following the financial crisis, the UK banking sector was faced with a tidal wave of regulatory change. Banks suddenly found themselves in a situation where these issues needed to be addressed concurrently, and within tight deadlines. The potential size of customer payouts and regulatory fines was at a level which meant these issues were regular boardroom-level agenda items, so the stakes were high. The immediate response of most banks to such time-critical and unforeseen needs was to build pop-up operations. These were supported by spreadsheets and small databases, and employed significant numbers of temporary staff. However, the situation demanded a more strategic response to ensure the right customer outcomes, repair reputation and manage regulatory exposure.

Unisoft Infotech, a player in the highly competitive IT services industry, was facing the challenge of keeping up with changing trends and increasing customer demands. Many customers rely on Unisoft Infotech to support some of their most critical systems, including SAP applications. The company must deliver top levels of performance and availability for these enterprise applications and data—or it risks losing valuable business to competitors. In the past, Unisoft Infotech hosted core applications on in-house servers, and ran a small number of virtual environments on a hosted cloud platform. To take better advantage of the flexibility offered by the cloud model, the company wanted to move more customer workloads into the cloud. However, the high cost of its existing cloud service proved to be an obstacle.