The retail pharmacy company, a global enterprise with nearly half a million employees and operations in numerous countries, was facing challenges due to heightened competition from digital disrupters like Amazon, increasing healthcare costs and changing regulations, growing customer choices and expectations, and a boom in IoT healthcare devices. One of the biggest changes in the company’s history was the recent merger of two major companies that created it. This massive undertaking brought together two iconic brands with complementary footprints, but very different IT architectures. The newly formed company was dealing with a very complex environment—and many different technologies across the enterprise. It needed a solution to standardize global operations—a “cook once, serve many” solution.

The bank, one of the largest in the U.S. and the world, is facing new market dynamics born of the digital age. Digitally savvy customers today expect more, like omni-channel banking, and they have more choices in banks like FinTechs. This is forcing traditional banks to rethink how they compete and operate. The bank is also facing regulatory challenges. As regulatory requirements expand, the bank needs insights into operations. Regulations like Dodd-Frank demand it. Without full visibility into its 4,000+ applications, the bank was in the gunsights of such penalties.

The Israeli Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs and Social Services was struggling with a slow, manual process for handling tens of thousands of requests for assistance each year. The process involved paper forms being passed between municipalities and the Ministry, often requiring multiple signatures and taking up to six months to process. Some cases were even lost in the shuffle. The Ministry was using a 20+ year-old, legacy green-screen mainframe technology that could not be opened up to the municipalities using the internet.

Exltech, a solutions integrator and telecommunications data distribution expert, identified a gap in the Australian IoT and big data market. While there were plenty of sensor vendors, IoT platforms, big data solutions, and apps, there was no single company that could integrate them all. Customers were seeking end-to-end industry-vertical IoT and big data solutions and needed help solving business problems with their data. They wanted solution partners that deliver a case study driven IoT and big data approach. Exltech aimed to fill this gap by building an ecosystem of reliable, secure, and case study driven sensors and data platforms for its customers.

Malaysia’s leading electricity utility is facing rising operating costs and the future risk of market deregulation. The utility generates, transmits and distributes electricity to 9.2 million residential, industrial and commercial customers. However, the rising cost of coal, which accounts for 55% of its power, is eating up the budget. Coupled with unrelenting growth in demand, driving internal cost efficiencies are now critical to business. Furthermore, the utility needs to accelerate service improvements as it faces a second, potentially greater threat: Market deregulation. The utility turned these challenges into an opportunity to flip the switch on for digital business transformation. But where to start? Like many companies, the utility’s view into its IT environment was via nothing more than a few Excel spreadsheets.

Nationwide, a British mutual financial institution, was looking to make business information more accessible to non-process experts. The company wanted to derive value from new ARIS capabilities closer to their release and needed an innovative end-to-end process to support cloud deployment and upgrade. The initial upgrade and move to the Cloud went smoothly, but at the first upgrade, there were major problems. The project was on the verge of failure but Software AG and Nationwide took an all-hands-on-deck approach to find a solution. A new end-to-end Release process was developed and agreed by both Nationwide and Software AG which was then tested at the next release, with small tweaks made along the way.

The company, a leading agency in the digital revolution of media and marketing, was facing the challenge of continued disruption of the digital media environment by predictive models yielding actionable campaign results faster than ever before. They needed data fast, accurately, and in an easy to understand format. The company needed to carefully tailor their marketing campaigns to specific audiences based on segment-specific attributes and deliver these messages to customers where they are, when they are receptive, and perfectly optimized for the right device or medium. They also needed a set of analytic techniques that incorporated probability, statistics, algorithmic modeling, data mining, and machine learning. The volumes of data, computational resources, and technical knowhow required for this were tremendous.

ASPINA, a century-old manufacturer, was looking to embrace the data revolution and the Internet-of-Things era. The company had a new business development unit based in California, which was investigating ways to package hardware and software together. The company was considering building a homegrown IoT solution and was looking for a partner to power this intelligent transformation. They needed a solution that could provide fast visibility over remote assets, was cost-competitive, and offered edge computation. The company was also looking to target customers whose future products would live or die through connectivity, particularly companies developing IoT-enabled medical devices.

The insurance company, with customers in 18 different countries, wanted to provide a seamless, integrated real-time experience to its customers, agents and partners, but had a lot of legacy that it needed to deal with. It was not a straightforward journey given some of its 20- to 30-year-old systems. The company knew that this meant, ultimately, the experience it was providing customers was not necessarily reflective of its mission. It needed real-time integration to provide the right experience. It was also considering things like cloud usage, improving data security and using more analytics, but realized that although some of its markets were very digitally savvy, there were many that were not. It had to look at not just technology, but also its people and organization.

The Delaware Judiciary was facing several challenges. They needed to provide a better citizen/customer experience and give judges and attorneys access to up-to-date case information. However, they lacked the ability to quickly change or update data in databases. They also wanted to keep their original programs running on the reliable IBM Z platform while enabling web services. The courts were handcuffed by legacy IT systems. It was taking days to sync the data manually. Clerks in one court would send the data to be uploaded by another clerk in another court. Data on many topics and from many sources, including attorneys and judges assigned to the cases, arrests by police and fines by other courts, has to flow through the system continually. This was not happening in Delaware.

The county’s IT systems were outdated with applications used by 26 departments connected to a mainframe ERP of 1980s vintage. The county’s four organs of justice— the Sheriff's Office, District Attorney’s Office, Probation Department and Superior Court— maintained siloed operations and carried out many critical processes on paper. This led to inefficiencies such as delays in court dates, inmate transfers and the accessing of arrest data. The county needed a system where all departments could adopt best-of-breed applications and still be dialed into a common data source, one with a unified query and reporting system that was fast, easy to use and secure.

SMC, a leading expert in pneumatics, noticed that their customers were seeking more information from their machines but were unsure of how to obtain it. There was also concern that large investments in technology might not guarantee a return on investment. SMC decided to extend its product lines with smart networking and decentralized intelligence through the Internet of Things (IoT). However, while most SMC components were fitted with sensors, there was no way for customers to see, decide, and act on the data detected by these sensors. SMC needed a solution that could integrate with any 'thing' and the IoT data could further integrate with any cloud service, core system, or application.

The public utility company, which provides water and electricity to 250,000 customers including a major U.S. city, airport, and resorts, was facing challenges in customer service due to ad-hoc 'spaghetti' integrations. The company needed to connect its advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to internal systems to leverage customer data. The goal was to use technology to become the most reliable and customer-centric utility in the U.S. The utility company was also looking to offer innovative customer service options, such as real-time payment recognition and prepaid metering, which required a reliable integration platform.

During a $90 million renovation to the team’s State Farm Arena in 2017-2018, the Hawks wanted enhancements that would provide a unique and inclusive customer experience. With more than 2 million guests per year, traffic and queues were unmanageable. Fans demanded more personalization and elite-level service. Also, there was plenty of competing entertainment in town to turn to, especially if fans were not getting the experience they wanted at the arena. In fact, Hawks games rank 11th in preference of local entertainment. The team wanted mobile apps to simplify ticket sales. The Hawks also wanted to better manage its data. They already had a lot of it but could not process or understand it in order to enhance the customer experience.

With the Internet of Things (IoT) expected to connect 50 billion devices by 2020, the way products are used and interacted with is changing. More products are being embedded with sensors that provide real-time data on how customers are using them. This presents a challenge for businesses to adapt dynamically and understand their connected customers better. One of the most overlooked topics in IoT is security. The platform allows you to give access to your distributors and customers using an advanced mapping authorization engine. The endpoint security technologies are customized specifically to the machine world of the IoT, offering tighter security control than networked VPN solutions.

The bank was facing several challenges due to the rapid growth in mobile banking, disparate process modeling standards and tools, regulatory compliance risks, rising costs, and the market impacts from AI. The bank needed to tackle these challenges to continue its growth and maintain its position as a leader in the banking industry. The bank also wanted to leverage the advances in computational power and machine learning algorithms to disrupt the banking industry with AI. However, the bank needed a solution that could handle the skyrocketing uptake in mobile and online banking, growing inefficiencies due to disparate process modeling standards and tools, and rapidly rising costs.

The multinational luxury fashion company, which started from humble beginnings, has grown into an international powerhouse through several major acquisitions worth more than $3 billion. These acquisitions posed a risky prospect in the luxury fashion business, where competition is fierce. The company's IT leadership team wanted the Information Systems (IS) teams to have visibility into their portfolios to develop project plans and future IT strategies to support the company's ambitious business transformation goals. The existing process involved manual updates to a Microsoft® Access® database, visualization in the Visio® modeling tool, and PowerPoint® for presentations. This process was updated twice a year, which was not sufficient for the rapid decision-making required in the company's dynamic environment. The company needed a centralized platform for IS and Enterprise Architecture (EA) to collaboratively collect the information necessary for planning IT support for business goals and strategies.

SOKA-BAU, a service provider for the construction industry, was relying on a series of legacy systems that had grown over time to manage its tasks. Although this environment could still meet demands, it was not able to provide fast and cost-effective IT support for new service offerings over the long term. Even small adjustments already took a great deal of effort. Furthermore, the IT infrastructure did not offer centralized data storage, so massive amounts of data needed to be stored and managed redundantly—also consuming major time and effort. For that reason, SOKA-BAU decided on a fundamental modernization to build its IT on a futureproof, scalable basis.

In the digital age, banks are looking to present personalized offers to online customers as soon as they log in at a response time of two seconds or less. Offers must stay active for 30 minutes for tracking and processing reasons—all while millions of other customers may be accessing the same applications at the same time. The challenge was to develop a real-time personalized marketing promotion system for a leading retail/corporate bank that provides an optimal, secured, feasible, reliable and robust mechanism for presenting eligible marketing offers based on the user/visitor, channel and situation.

The Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality (EMM) unified 20 cities, townships and local councils in the East Rand region of Gauteng into a single municipality. However, services were not unified across the municipality—each of the 20 Customer Care Areas (CCAs) and various departments had their own processes and procedures. The lack of transparency and standardization led to duplications, information silos, uncoordinated efforts, months-long approval times and hampered city planning. Part of EMM’s challenge to solve was that service processes were mostly manual and paper-based, handwritten forms were physically sent from one department to another. Manual entry of the same information in multiple systems cost time, effort and increased errors. Forms could be lost and it was difficult to determine where a particular application was in the process flow.

Swisscom, a leading telecommunications and IT company in Switzerland, faced several challenges. The industry-wide move to digitalization, a rapidly expanding B2B market, and growing demand for increased system flexibility were among the key issues. The old way of managing transactions, which involved manual input and piles of paper, was inefficient and costly. The company needed a solution that would not compromise data security while improving speed and efficiency. Swisscom also wanted to reduce the number of steps in some processes by half to cut costs and improve turnaround time and quality.

Swisscom, the leading telecommunications provider in Switzerland, was facing challenges with its order process reporting. The company was unable to proactively monitor orders, and the analysis of existing data was either extremely difficult or impossible. This led to frequent, time-consuming internal queries, often triggered by customer inquiries. The lack of transparency and efficiency in the process led to high frustration levels both internally and externally, damaging the company's reputation and resulting in lower sales. Swisscom needed a solution that would allow for the monitoring of all processes with problem alerts, transparent and fast reporting, easy measurement and display of KPIs, direct access to process information for various departments, and comprehensive project documentation.

Boehringer Ingelheim operates in a highly competitive market, which requires significant agility to react to changing market demands and compliance with a multitude of regulatory demands. This leads to a complex set of business processes that need to be supported by a flexible and agile IT. The specific challenge was to ensure the consistency of changes across all four architectural dimensions. The company needed to introduce a state-of-the-art EA framework including a unified tool-based EA repository in order to actively manage the portfolio of enterprise standards. They also needed to define a comprehensive multi-dimensional long-term planning process to ensure that IS/IT applications and services are aligned with the business strategies.

The Army of the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence was facing challenges with accurate equipment demand forecasting and costed activity planning due to disparate systems, a myriad of spreadsheets and information from different sources. This led to wrong stock levels, poor equipment utilization, conflicting requests for resources, unsighted but avoidable costs and expensive waste. It took an inordinate amount of time to collect and aggregate data for business use. Activities were often delayed, rearranged, re-scoped or cancelled when resources were already committed. The challenge was getting the right information at the right time.

The Automated Regional Justice Information System (ARJIS) mainframe is relied upon by over 11,000 law enforcement officers, adjudicators, investigators, and analysts at 81 agencies. However, the public safety committee of the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) wanted ARJIS to improve how information was integrated, shared, and re-purposed. The mainframe-based system was costly and hard-coded, making it difficult to adapt to the dynamic needs of law enforcement. The challenge was to move off the mainframe to a service-oriented, process-centric Web-based solution that could increase information accuracy, timeliness, and availability at less cost.

Fast-growing Costa Crociere wanted to improve its booking process to handle more service options and more reservations than ever before. Travel agents and customers needed to be able to make a reservation through any channel. Behind the scenes, corporate systems needed to be integrated into the booking process. With such a large number of travelers to serve, the group’s booking system is equivalent to the ordering system of a large manufacturer. Costa’s ERP system must guarantee efficient functionality to reduce the time it takes to manage bookings, and it must constantly adapt to new business developments. The system stores and manages all the essential information about the cruise holidays chosen by customers: the itinerary, cabin type, personal details and additional services, such as flights, transfers and hotels. The job of managing this huge amount of information is further complicated by the fact that the booking system also offers options for purchasing cruises and associated ser- vices that are open for varying periods, prior to booking confirmation. If a booking is not confirmed, all cabins and other options must be made available in real-time to other potential customers.

Over the years, Dean Foods acquired several new businesses which operate as independent business units. This resulted in inconsistent data across its business units for the same products and a lengthy process to find and validate the data that customers needed. Tracking product formulas for all flavors within business units created inaccuracies and complexity that slowed the item maintenance process. As a result of company acquisitions, Dean Foods acquired a challenging number of new and inconsistent SKUs and UPC codes. There was inconsistent data between business units for the same products and a lengthy process to find and validate the data that customers needed. Dean also needed to simplify and homogenize complex product information. There were multiple levels of descriptions for the same product, and tracking product formulas for all flavors within business units created inaccuracies and complexity that slowed the item maintenance process.

After the sale of Findus to EQT Scandinavia, the company realized that a common business and IT platform was required. The IT environment was focused on local operations rather than European operations. Each country worked in a different way. There was a lack of policies and procedures and lack of coordination between different sites – there was no overall IT business model. A platform that could adjust to the constant change the company experienced was needed.

Landsbond der Christelijke Mutualiteiten (LCM) needed to quickly process an ever-growing volume of information they receive from the many stakeholders involved in health care provision. Managing and monitoring these transactions from start to finish was becoming increasingly complex and started to pose issues for LCM’s development capacities. LCM was looking for a high-performance integrated solution for exchanging B2B information on a flexible SOA foundation. A significant increase in data exchange volumes and rates, as well as the diversification of types and file formats posed several challenges for LCM, because this brought them increased workload and complexity, greater risk of being unable to meet deadlines and more time-critical data to manage.

Solaire Resort & Casino, a leading gaming industry player in the Philippines, was facing increasing competition from new resort and casino properties. The company needed to integrate its customer-related applications and provide a real-time customer experience. However, the customer data was stuck in siloed programs, making it costly to access, slow to analyze, and difficult to use. To differentiate itself and provide a truly personalized visitor experience, Solaire needed to digitalize all customer-facing operations from touchpoints to back-office processes.