Cisco

Goldcorp is committed to responsible mining practices and maintaining maximum safety for its workers. At the same time, the firm is constantly exploring ways to improve the efficiency of its operations, extend the life of its assets, and control costs. Goldcorp needed technology that can maximize production efficiency by tracking all mining operations, keep employees safe with remote operations and monitoring of hazardous work areas and control production costs through better asset and site management.

Sub-Zero faced the largest product launch in the company’s history:It wanted to launch 60 new products as scheduled while simultaneously opening a new “greenfield” production facility, yet still adhering to stringent quality requirements and manage issues from new supply-chain partners. A the same time, it wanted to increase staff productivity time and collaboration while reducing travel and costs.

Stanley Black & Decker required transparency of real-time overall equipment effectiveness and line productivity to reduce production line change over time.The goal was to to improve production to schedule, reduce actual labor costs and understanding the effects of shift changes and resource shifts from line to line.

North West Redwater (NWR) intended to build, manage and operate a new bitumen refinery. The new refinery was being built across six square kilometers and would include over 100 contracting companies participating in the construction phase of the project. NWR wanted to provide connectivity to the 100 contracting companies over a dispersed remote area in order to simplify the contractor onboarding process, decrease operating costs, and control the project schedule.

Manufacturing plants are running at a much higher capacity utilization than ever before. Often, it is a 24 hour a day, seven days a week operation. With downtime costing plants up to US$20,000 a minute, they cannot afford disruption to their processes. In fact, a single occurrence can cost a plant upwards of US$2 million.FANUC was struggling with lack of visibility into how their customers were leveraging FANUC equipment on the factory floor. The only insight was gained after a problem had already occurred resulting in costly downtime for the customer.

Benteler Automotive is looking for a solution that can solve the following situations: - Operation of 70 plants in 29 countries with worldwide reliance on components - Identify a seamless way to connect people, process, data and things to expedite the production process

Dundee Precious Metal’s flagship mine, in Chelopech, Bulgaria, produces a gold, copper, and silver concentrate set a goal to increase production by 30%. Dundee wanted to increase production quality and output without increasing headcount and resources, improve miner safety, and minimize cost.

Today's healthcare providers face a daunting challenge: sustaining or improving patient care levels despite shortages of clinicians and nurses, increasing competition, and financial pressure.

Mazak required a common, standards-based method to securely connect and derive value from the rich, raw data in its machine tools. An advanced security system suitable for IT and operations technology (OT) was necessary to protect from both internal and external attackers. The application needed to run on the network infrastructure on the factory floor, immediately transforming process, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and sensor data. The fog application needed to support the MTConnect specification for integration with existing systems and sensors. Real-time analytics were required to process high frequency vibration, temperature, coolant, and sound inputs to inform operator action and drive business support systems.

Lordan needed a manufacturing automation system that could identify bottlenecks, reduce downtime and waste, and improve overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). Requirements included the ability to view overall throughput and track mission-critical manufacturing information in real time directly from the production floor, rather than rely on periodical assessments.

• Deliver customized vehicles for consumers, better and faster • Control costs by boosting manufacturing efficiency • Improve agility and scalability to support innovation and future production needs

As the main British Columbia electric distributor, BC Hydro provides 1.9 million residential, commercial, and industrial customers with energy. The hydro utility transformed to a digital business with Cisco connected networking, security, and smart grid solutions. • Deliver reliable, high-quality services • Enable remote automation and monitoring • Connect applications over a common networking infrastructure

Emerald worked with Cisco to shrink the time to production for its manufacturing process automation system. The leadership team sought self-deployed solutions that would drastically decrease installation time, reduce complexity, and increase security.

For many manufacturing companies today, the opportunity to connect people, process, data, and things created by the Internet of Everything (IoE) presents a new way to look at factory automation. The opportunity for digital innovation often arises when a company is expanding capacity or building a new production facility. Mahindra and Mahindra, one of India’s leading automakers, seized the opportunity to deploy a connected factory of the future at their new Chakan facility.

Inaccurate order picking and resulting loss of customer satisfaction.

By connecting thousands of sensors to an extensive network, Austria's autobahn corporation, ASFINAG, has created a smart highway designed to clear traffic jams before they happen. Through the Internet of Everything, ASFINAG gets the data needed to keep roads safe and drivers happy. Challenge: • Gain data on road, traffic, and weather conditions • Communicate accurate information to drivers

The City of Mississauga in Ontario, Canada, improved services with a private fiber network and a citywide wireless network using Cisco solutions. Key Challenges: • Provide open and accessible government • Help enable better decisions through research and analytics • Create a connected and engaged workforce • Improve services through innovation

The plant manager and safety teams needed a solution that provided near real-time visibility of gas detection and personnel location, with easy to understand visualization and alerting dashboards. This would enable them to improve productivity through decreasing the time taken to start work, optimize evacuation route planning, and to meet critical staff safety and compliance goals.

• Enhance safety for trams and passengers • Deliver an innovative passenger experience • Improve operational efficiency with better insight

Enjoy a beer on the upper Texas Gulf Coast, and you can probably thank Del Papa Distributing Company. Founded more than a century ago, the company today distributes 10 million cases of beer annually, from 30 suppliers. More than 375 employees work at headquarters in Texas City and two other distribution centers. The family-owned company has a simple aim: to be a great beer distribution company. So when Del Papa set out to build a new 27-acre headquarters, company leaders thought about how technology could contribute to its greatness. “We wanted the new distribution center to have a single, secure network we could use for physical security, communications, collaboration, and even monitoring the temperature of our inventory,” says Steve Holtsclaw, Manager of Information Systems for Del Papa. The old building, in contrast, had separate networks for voice, data, video, and physical security. Separate networks were expensive and got in the way of business. For example, personnel could only monitor video surveillance cameras from certain workstations. And Wi-Fi performance in the warehouse area wasn’t reliable enough for the voice-activated order-picking system.

VITAS sees mobile technology as the key to better connecting patients and caregivers. “Mobile technology will allow us to communicate information and route caregivers quickly and efficiently,” says Patrick Hale, senior vice-president and CIO at VITAS. “But before attempting revolutionary work, we needed to lay down the infrastructure.”Due to fast growth, the company lacked a strong, consolidated network. By standardizing on Cisco network and communication solutions, VITAS gains the stability and visibility that it needs to introduce new applications that bring together patients, families, and top-quality healthcare services.

The challenge for Cisco IT was to continue providing a global wireless LAN that could serve as a primary access medium and deliver more bandwith and coverage to more users, while satisfying the company's business requirements. The next-generation WLAN would also need to provide native support for wireless video and voice, with high levels of accessibility, availability and security to reduce service-impacting incidents. 

• Geographically dispersed campus made in-person meetings costly and inconvenient.• Distance-learning programs in Malaysia, India, and China required dependable, user-friendly online tools to maximize interaction in collaborative workspaces.• Virtual learning environment required a separate sign-in process, resulting in a significant administrative burden for IT staff and limited adoption of collaboration technology.

• Provide urgent pediatric care to children in developing countries• Connect medical teams internationally in real time• Increase access to education for surgical teams and nurses

To address the challenges of proactively monitoring the very large Cisco Unified Communications global network and to achieve reliability and service quality goals, Cisco IT turned to the Cisco Unified Communications Management Suite. The Cisco® internal Unified Communications network is a very large global deployment, having more than 85,000 IP phones spread over six continents.Being in new and uncharted territory in the initial stages, the Cisco IT team first had the challenge of defining methodologies and metrics for measuring and monitoring the key components of service quality: Availability (Can I pick up the phone and get dial tone? Does my call connect? Can I leave and retrieve voicemail?)Performance (How is the voice quality? Did I get disconnected mid-call? How does the voicemail sound? How fast is the voicemail prompt?)The team also had the additional challenge of figuring out approaches, techniques, and tests to:Detect configuration issuesReduce recovery time in the event of a service failure 

Networked applications, such as electronic medical record (EMR) or electronic health record (EHR), are vital for Cook Children’s to provide outstanding service to its patients and physicians. As its network grew in complexity, with data coming in from various wireless medical devices and wearables, as well as remote hosted applications, issues surfaced. The organization’s network manager identified a range of issues that included slow user experience, network monitoring challenges, and an inability to proactively identify application performance concerns.

Prior to purchasing Observer, Cisco Systems experienced a lack of visibility during and after network events.“I needed large data captures and a way to manipulate them,” says Eric Arnold, Service Provider Video TAC Manager for the company.Arnold states that Cisco Systems chose Observer over competitors because of the packet capture and storage capabilities.

Dorhouse, a retail provider of rental coffee machines and capsules across Italy, was facing challenges in managing its growing salesforce. The company was struggling to find the right people at the right time and follow up on lost calls and customer conversations. This resulted in lost sales and unhappy customers. Dorhouse also lacked the ability to measure customer service, such as being able to monitor calls and evaluate how employees were handling those calls to improve performance. To support business growth and improve customer satisfaction, they needed a solution that would allow customers to simply and quickly reach employees regardless of their location - whether in an office or on the road.

Office Depot, Inc. was facing challenges in delivering a consistent customer experience through their contact center due to the complex global environment and resources deployed across multiple locations around the world. With their previous applications deployed on premises, they lacked central visibility and transparency over operations. It was a challenge for headquarters to manage and control performance globally. Office Depot, Inc. had multiple contact center sites: some in-house and others at partner sites. Site, team, and agent performance management was distributed. Some sites used Office Depot, Inc. contact center systems and reported their performance through them. Others were managed independently by partner managers with their own systems and performance reporting procedures. This resulted in inconsistent performance and customer experiences from site to site.

WUN Systems, a provider of an end-to-end Workspace Management Platform, wanted to offer a highly reliable and scalable VoIP service that would easily integrate into their platform. They were looking for an enterprise-grade, solid platform that would enable their customers to communicate seamlessly, whether they were working from their HQ, regional office or a remote location. WUN Systems was looking for an innovative, reliable and experienced communications vendor.

CBTS, a subsidiary of Cincinnati Bell, was facing several challenges in its operations. The company was struggling with time-to-market issues, as new features and enhancements were only being delivered once or twice a year. This slow pace was causing them to lag behind their competitors. Additionally, every time CBTS introduced a new version of their client software, they also needed to update the branding, which was a labor-intensive process that further delayed the delivery of the latest features to customers. CBTS also lacked the internal expertise to drive mobile innovation, which was a vital aspect of communications. Lastly, the company needed to increase operational efficiencies to free up their engineering and operational teams’ time to work on more strategic projects.

The university relied on an aging PBX network to serve its medical center and the academic side of its operations. The 30-year-old equipment was no longer supported by the manufacturer and lacked the features and scalability needed to support future growth. Parts procurement had become problematic, maintenance costs were soaring, and it was clear an immediate change was needed.

Montgomery College, one of the nation’s largest and most highly regarded community colleges, faced several communication challenges. Team members working remotely across multiple campuses and course delivery sites needed access to a consistent telecommunications infrastructure. The tech-savvy student body expected to communicate and collaborate from any location over any device. The college's premise-based communications platform was comprised of disparate platforms that didn’t easily integrate with other strategic cloud investments. Officials were determined to find a way to transform communications and build a “connected campus”— able to support administrators, faculty and students wherever they work or study.

The National Laboratory was supported by a large telco-type switch built on 1980s-vintage TDM technology. The system took up an entire floor of an office building and had twice the capacity the Lab actually needed. It also required a team of about 20 engineers just to provide maintenance. The Lab’s IT team looked for a more modern and cost-effective approach to communications that could transition the campus from TDM to voice over IP, leveraging the Lab’s own supercomputing network. The solution would need to support employees and contractors campus-wide, including critical call center and help desk teams. It also would need to interoperate seamlessly with various network components and applications the Lab already owned — many of them home-grown.

MISS DIG System, Inc. was using an outdated call center telephone system for 10 years, which prevented them from achieving their vision of being a more agile organization. The old system supported taking notifications only through telephone calls. MISS DIG 811 had two 800 numbers, each with its own team of NSRs with different scripts and processes. This meant that callers were getting an inconsistent experience based on the number they dialed. With the old system, every caller was randomly sent to whomever was available to take the call at the time, regardless of the caller’s or NSR’s experience, role, or personality. Often callers dialed the wrong number or made the wrong interactive voice response (IVR) selections, and ended up in the wrong department. When these calls were transferred, there was no way to know whether the recipient was available to answer the call or whether the caller would end up in another queue or voicemail. Another challenge was the inability to integrate the old call recording system with the MISS Dig 811 CRM, Newtin, which made it extremely difficult to associate inbound notifications with call recordings. This integration was an important requirement, as a new law requires MISS DIG 811 to maintain all inbound notifications for six years. MISS DIG 811 personnel spent hours trying to match recordings with notification tickets, wasting valuable time and energy that could have been spent serving customers. The old system tracked all callers in the same way, without making a distinction between first-time residential callers needing education and repeat callers. As a result, MISS DIG 811 did not have the data to back up its intuition that first-time callers were inflating its time-on-call metrics.

The agency administrative team had been relying on 250 standalone phone systems to support remotely based personnel. However, the aging equipment had become unreliable and lacked modern-day features. Each office had its own unique dialing plan, billing process, support model, and contract, creating complex administrative challenges. The administrators were looking for a better way to support the team and to provide the advanced communications and collaboration tools needed to further the agency’s mission.