Innovam, a Netherlands-based company that develops and administers innovative educational programs for the automotive sector, was facing several challenges. The changing market conditions demanded cost reductions. The company was also in the midst of a strategic change towards a 'blended learning' model combining online and traditional classroom training. This new focus on e-learning meant Innovam’s IT infrastructure was more essential to its business than ever. Yet its existing application landscape wasn’t cutting it. The company relied heavily on a monolithic enterprise resource planning system, which was ill-suited to meet its primary IT needs: planning and managing training, allocating staff, and delivering online learning through a sleek and user-friendly website. Changes in this system were sluggish and fraught with risks, making Innovam less flexible. Running it on-premises was also expensive—at a time when the company needed to cut costs.

Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company, was facing a constantly changing telecommunications landscape. The acceleration of IoT services and the pressure on water utilities and government to cut waste, digitalize, and streamline water management presented new challenges. The company saw the Internet of Things as a huge strategic opportunity and a chance to capture new network revenues and expand into new sales channels. However, to achieve this, they needed a carrier grade, secure and open IoT platform.

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) was facing the challenge of staying at the forefront of technology to reduce risk, improve capabilities, and achieve non-stop operations. They needed to retain knowledge and critical Natural application development of 20-30 years on back-end systems and implement DevOps to give developers more speed and agility. TASE needed to be able to offer digital services on par with new FinTech firms, while adhering to local and global regulations. It also needed to provide services that compete with the larger first-tier exchanges like Nasdaq®, LSE and NYSE. Its first project was to move its clearing and settlement system based on Adabas & Natural to Linux, where its trading system resides.

The Sacramento Kings, a popular U.S. basketball team, was facing the challenge of enhancing the fan experience both in the stadium and at home. They wanted to create a unique perspective of the game for fans, enhance the arena with fan-focused facilities and services, and boost online mobile ticket sales. The team was also looking to provide a personalized, immersive experience, blending physical action with digitally provided context and involvement. They wanted fans to feel a part of the game and not miss important moments.

Dubai Municipality, the government entity overseeing services and facilities in Dubai, was facing several challenges. With a population influx, the demand for municipal services was increasing. However, the Municipality was struggling to keep up with the demand, leading to processing delays in many service areas. Additionally, it lacked transparency in its business processes and had an ill-informed pricing structure. This was particularly problematic as Dubai, which has no income tax, is heavily reliant on service fees. The lack of cost transparency and institutional pressure to streamline revenue collection, combined with a push by Dubai’s government to improve customer service, called for a top-of-the-line business process management solution.

EDHEC, a leading international business school, faced a significant challenge in teaching Business Process Management (BPM) to its students. The school's professor of Information Systems, Mohamed-Hédi Charki, initially attempted to expose students to a wide variety of BPM tools. However, this approach proved to be overwhelming for students, who struggled to gain in-depth knowledge of any specific tool. The wide range of quality and access among the tools further complicated the learning process. Grading became a frustrating task as students attempted to use multiple tools to analyze the same process. The school needed a solution that would simplify the learning process, provide a consistent and high-quality tool for students, and enable effective teaching of BPM.

The bank's array of applications were divided into three separate repositories, creating a disconnected web of applications that was in danger of inflating costs, impeding compliance with new banking regulations, and leaving management ill-prepared for an industry-wide digital transformation. The bank needed a comprehensive and accurate overview of its application landscape, extensive reporting capabilities for management, risk and audit compliance purposes, and the analytics and insights to help its leaders make robust, fact-based, strategic decisions.

Fujitsu Technology Solutions, a leading European IT infrastructure provider, was experiencing rapid growth in its service business. However, the company's 20-year-old proprietary service middleware was unable to keep up with its evolving business needs. Fujitsu required a solution that would offer greater flexibility for user interfaces, facilitate improvements in its 24/7 support, enable faster on-boarding of customers, and increase cost efficiencies. The solution also needed to ensure continuous availability throughout the transition process due to demanding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and high penalties.

The Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) was faced with the challenge of improving the availability of data between federal, state, county, and local agencies as well as external partners. They needed to ensure easy interoperability between systems and applications while meeting local, state, and federal reporting and compliance requirements. The agencies were previously limited by point-to-point, hardcoded integrations, siloed systems, and manual processes that were paper-based and slow. This made it difficult for them to share information securely in real time and streamline their services to better meet citizen needs.

Physicists at CERN conduct extensive experiments using particle accelerators. A variety of process visualization and control systems is used to monitor the equipment, including the TIM system and Diagnostics and Monitoring (DIAMON). TIM monitors around 120,000 sensors in such areas as building services engineering, while DIAMON monitors some of the equipment and IT components related to the particle accelerators. Technicians and engineers at the control stations have dashboards that show the status of the systems; the dashboards are continuously updated based on the data from the monitoring systems. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to CERN to operate the monitoring platforms in the most fail-safe way possible. Because these systems play the role of a control center, unexpected occurrences, power outages and major accidents result in a large number of events. One of the requirements for the implementation was that the incoming data could be processed in less than one second. Even during the greatest peaks, the infrastructure must be stable enough to handle the large number of status messages and help the staff in the control center and engineers troubleshooting the systems.

With the prediction of 50 billion devices being connected by 2020, the Internet of Things is revolutionizing every aspect of life. Wipro Technologies, a leading systems integrator, consulting, and services company, is at the forefront of this transformation with its Looking Glass solution—an Internet of Things solution for smart, connected products. The challenge was to integrate, capture, analyze, and respond to data captured by embedded sensors in remote printers at customer sites. The company needed to understand and act immediately on real-time maintenance data to proactively increase service levels, drive down costs, and maximize asset uptime, utilization, and placement.

Since 1952, distributor Casbega has focused on the flow of Coca-Cola products in Spain. Recently, the company took a closer look at the flow of its processes—starting with accounting. Specifically, Casbega wanted to speed up invoice administration and reduce related costs. Document flow between branch offices and departments was too excessive, and email was proving inadequate in driving workflow and managing files. Every year, Casbega’s accounting department processes 40,000 invoices from other departments and regional offices. The invoice approval process varies depending on the office and department. Invoices advance to different levels of approval, enabling the delegation of tasks and the automatic generation of reminders to the responsible employees at each level. All employees who process invoices keep a copy of each invoice as a record. The process is integrated with an accounting system controlled by SAP technology.

Oriflame, a beauty company selling direct in more than 60 countries, faced several challenges. The company's average annual growth of 11 percent over the past 20 years and expansion into more than 40 countries brought many business challenges. This naturally created challenges for Oriflame’s Global Shared Services IT Group as well: to incorporate new markets, adapt requirements and manage disparate business needs. In Oriflame, the one business constant is clearly change. The primary business applications were consistent across Oriflame: the in-house sales application (Orisales), JDA® Platform for supply chain management and IFS Applications™ for ERP. However, the alignment issues were at a more fundamental level.

Alliance Healthcare, a leading pharmaceutical wholesaler in Germany, was facing high competitive pressure and a need to improve performance. The company's inventory system, Wapha, developed with Adabas & Natural, needed to be moved from the expensive mainframe environment to a more cost-effective Linux platform. The company also wanted to align its systems with IT optimizations and protect its long-term investments in its inventory system. The company's IT landscape was diverse and heterogeneous, making the rapid implementation of new requirements time- and cost-intensive. This was not acceptable in a market that is highly rebate- and sales-oriented and subject to frequent legal changes in Germany’s regulated health system.

Fraport AG, a leading international professional services organization in the aviation industry, operates more than 1,100 applications to support its employees. It was essential to maintain an overview and a working environment that’s as standardized as possible. Information relating to the processes and applications forms the foundation for the IT department’s work. Numerous business decisions are made based on it. For regulatory reasons, it is indispensable for fulfilling obligations to the works council and German data protection laws. Initially, the information was kept in an extensive Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheet, but administering it centrally was taking more and more time. A comprehensive solution for process and application management had to be found.

Avnet, a leading technology manufacturer and distributor, faced a significant challenge due to its evolving business needs and the need to integrate multiple applications running on various platforms. The company had made over seventy acquisitions in the past 20 years, which further complicated their IT infrastructure. The high-cost integration infrastructure consisted of thousands of Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) maps to stage, data to replicate, which created latency problems, as well as thousands of services to support. IT needed to become more agile and assure high-quality integration while lowering the cost of development for the business.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) started to develop its digital delivery channels during the past decade. HMRC became the first customer for the Government Gateway, a system that provides the pan-government building blocks for secure and efficient transactions. As the number of digital services and transactions at HMRC grew, it became apparent HMRC’s interface to the Government Gateway (known as DIS) needed to be more resilient and accompanied by more responsive support services.

The market communications department at Süwag Kundenservice GmbH processed more than 23 million messages in EDIFACT format in 2011 alone. The company wanted to improve process controlling with greater transparency and more detailed key performance indicators. This would enable the company to better analyze processes when disruptions occur, deadlines are set or when incoming and outgoing messages need to be checked. The solution needed to incorporate requirements from the market communications, supply management and accounts payable management departments. This would ensure all customers could be enrolled in a timely manner by the supply management department, guaranteeing the processing and handling of supplier change processes and ensuring that contract confirmations and budget billing plan notifications to Süwag Kundenservice GmbH customers are sent by defined deadlines.

GEWOFAG, a company that manages around 30,000 housing units in Munich, was faced with the decision of whether to maintain its buildings in-house or to outsource the work. The current trend in the real estate sector is to outsource maintenance services to external providers, who can perform the services more cheaply than internal staff on a case-by-case basis. GEWOFAG has its own technical workshops unit (mainly for corrective and preventative maintenance), which employs around 60 tradespeople, including garden workers to look after green spaces and parks. The company sought an objective expert opinion on the most cost-effective approach.

7-Eleven, the world's largest convenience store chain, faced a significant challenge in maintaining a supply chain and distribution network to support thousands of stores. The company had to coordinate orders with hundreds of suppliers to deliver products to stores on a daily basis. Many of its smaller suppliers did not have the infrastructure in place to support Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technologies, which 7-Eleven used to automate the exchange of orders and business documents with some of its largest partners. As a result, the company had to rely largely on manual processes with paper invoices faxed, mailed or emailed into the company, and manually keyed into back-end financial applications.

Kredi Kayıt Bürosu (KKB), Turkey’s first and only credit bureau, experienced rapid growth since its inception in 1995. The company expanded to 180 member institutions, serving over 2 million end customers. However, this success brought challenges. The company was overwhelmed by a deluge of data, both digital and on paper, and struggled to manage it efficiently. Manual processes, including updating some data by hand and manually searching documents, were time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, Turkey's strict requirement for immediate implementation and enforcement of new regulations added to the pressure. KKB needed a major change to continue its growth and handle new regulations with agility.

The U.S. Army, one of the largest military forces in the world, faced several challenges. They needed to translate strategic business vision into effective enterprise change more efficiently, guide IT investment decisions to 'to-be' environments, enhance collaboration and support of core missions like HR, logistics, acquisitions and procurement, enable continuous process improvement, and manage rising costs in a constrained budgetary environment. The Army needed a robust strategy for its transformation, considering its 17 end-to-end processes, 1,600 operational activities, 700 systems in its IT portfolio, and four major ERPs.

The company, a global clearinghouse for online and credit card payments, was facing significant losses due to fraudulent transactions. The existing fraud detection system could only handle 50 rules, but the risk management team wanted to add thousands more to enhance the accuracy of fraud detection. Additionally, the company wanted to reduce transaction time to achieve real-time fraud detection in all cases. The existing platform had an end-to-end Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 800 milliseconds, which was not met 10% of the time, resulting in either approval of the transaction or payment of a fine, costing an estimated $10 million each year.

Coca-Cola Refreshments owns and manages Coca-Cola® branded refrigerators in retail establishments. If repairs are needed, equipment may end up at the Make Ready Center. If the equipment can’t be repaired, it may be scrapped. In the past, this meant logging onto legacy systems on multiple servers to locate equipment information, record repair actions and change equipment status. The process was manual, error-prone and took up to eight hours to update information on 30-40 units. The company had no overall visibility into equipment status or maintenance history.

The company, a $70 billion healthcare giant, was facing several challenges. These included fragmented access to information, manual input and non-standard processes, newly demanding customers, lack of supply chain visibility, and scattered business process development. The healthcare market was also changing, with shrinking margins and regulations forcing strict compliance with constantly changing laws. The company's traditional way of seeking FDA approval was disjointed and required manual consolidation of paper specs. Each region had its own processes, and each framework operated independently. The company was also struggling with a major hurdle - responding to consumer queries in a timely manner. An employee would have to manually search data logged in different formats across different systems, a process that could take months.

Equens SE, one of Europe's largest providers of payment services, needed a way to provide proof of compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in payment processing to its customers. The company also wanted to utilize process measurements for internal analyses. The challenge was to monitor the SLAs without negatively impacting the operation of back-end systems. Additionally, Equens did not want to pursue a traditional data warehouse approach due to the several million transactions needing to be monitored every day.

The company, a stalwart in the U.K. financial services sector, was facing the enforcement deadlines of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The regulation required breaches to be reported to regulators within 72 hours of detection, and users must be given the ability to request their data or have it permanently deleted. Non-compliance was not an option, with staggering penalties on the line. The company was also dealing with strict regulatory oversight, rapid growth, rising costs, and manual processes and documents.

The regional subsidiary of a multinational power distributor was facing several challenges. The company needed to accommodate renewable energy on the grid, but had no visibility into medium- and low-power network issues. This resulted in high transformer maintenance costs and poor grid reliability in remote locations. The company also needed to monitor assets in locations with low or no internet connectivity. The utility had to find an economical and reliable way to reduce transformer loss and downtime, and fast!

Crédit Logement, a leading French financial institution, was facing challenges in meeting the needs of its customers, which include more than 200 banks with 7 million borrowers. The company's customer call center was struggling with an outdated green screen interface, which was not user-friendly and made it difficult for customer service personnel to quickly respond to customer requests. The company needed to replace the green screens with a modern Web user interface to optimize customer call center processing and improve the end-user experience.

The company, a global leader in imaging technology solutions and managed print services, was facing increased competition and service level agreement (SLA) compliance issues. There was a push for IoT-enablement and new device location tracking requirements. The company was also dealing with inefficient field maintenance and rising costs, and lacked real-time visibility into partner supply chains. In the case of on-site printer fleet repair and maintenance, the old way simply couldn’t cut it. Reactive failure reporting, multiple technician visits and manual parts ordering dragged down profits and aggravated customers. With tens of thousands of printers moved per week, and third-party supply chains to contend with, manual repair and maintenance led to SLA violations, billing headaches and logistical nightmares.