Like many other state agencies trying to recover fraudulent or erroneous payments of unemployment benefits, this organization had been struggling to comply with an especially complex IRS regulation, “Tax Information Security Guidelines for Federal, State and Local Agencies”, as described in IRS Publication 1075. This agency provides workforce-development assistance to employers and job seekers, and it is involved in handling unemployment benefit payments. This operation has to be monitored for erroneous or fraudulent payments, and in those cases there are strict procedures for recovery that must be followed. That’s where IRS Pub 1075 comes in. The agency was well on its way to getting its arms around the problem because it had installed the industry-leading Splunk Enterprise analytics platform. Soon, however, the agency found that while Splunk had no problem ingesting all the distributed systems operational data, it wasn’t able to ingest native z/OS data on operations. This was a significant problem because z/OS logs held much of the information needed to ensure IRS compliance. In particular, the agency needed to get certain z/OS System Management Facility logs (SMF Records 30, 80, and 102) to meet IRS Pub 1075. Not only does the state need to recover the funds, but it needs to do so as efficiently as possible.

It was a risky proposition for one state agency in the U.S. They were looking at the wholesale conversion of their IMS data to Db2. Like other IMS shops, they knew they needed to get off IMS but they had several reasons to be wary. At one time their IT team had experimented with a manual conversion. It involved only a very small portion of their data, but it took six months to do. Meanwhile, the daily updates on the department’s client-management system, which recorded details on the activities and needs of a quarter million people, kept piling up. At some point, their IMS system could conceivably just stop working, which of course is unacceptable for any agency, especially for one in a large, high-growth state. Meanwhile, the maintenance and licensing of IMS was costing the department $800,000 annually. It was also becoming more and more unwieldy to make the legislatively mandated changes in the department’s client-management software system. “Rewriting application code is extremely difficult and extremely risky,” said one of the department’s database administrators. They knew they would eventually have to eliminate IMS altogether and consolidate onto a single Db2 system. But how? Based on that earlier experiment, they knew they would be in trouble unless they could get an unusually powerful set of specialized tools and services to make the switch without crippling their operations and busting their budget.

The risk analytics department at Covéa faced the challenge of managing increasing climate and technology-related risks impacting financial results. With the worsening of these risks and a restrictive legal framework, there was a need for an enterprise risk management culture. Location Intelligence solutions were essential to address these challenges.

Alpina Savoie faced a significant challenge in managing a backlog of 100,000 out-of-date FICO transactions and maintaining 30,000 product references in SAP. The manual data entry process was time-consuming, with each transaction taking approximately one minute, limiting a single employee to 480 transactions per day. Developing a custom program to accelerate the data upload process was considered, but the costs were prohibitive, both in terms of initial development and ongoing maintenance. The company needed a robust yet flexible solution to handle large volumes of transactions efficiently and affordably.

The insurer faced challenges with legacy systems that had grown to tens of millions of lines of source code. These systems needed to integrate with newer open systems, creating a complex environment with numerous information risk points. The insurer required a scalable solution to handle its information-intensive operations, including policy issuance, billing, cash management, and claims processing. Additionally, the insurer needed to support a segregation of duties policy with business rules designed independently of application development teams. Thousands of business rules needed to be authored and maintained, requiring a data analysis solution that was sustainable, flexible, and easy to use. The insurer also needed to quickly codify information integrity rules to match complex regulatory and business requirements, while integrating with existing data formats, platforms, systems, and applications.

At six nationwide port facilities, AMPORTS provides a wide range of services for vehicles being imported and exported by its exacting customer base, which includes Ford, Hyundai, Porsche, and Volvo. AMPORTS provides status reports to the automakers via FTP files and other methods based on the customer’s service expectations. In some cases, sophisticated customers have live input into AMPORTS’ operations. Volvo, for example, specifies cars and tasks for AMPORTS employees using VDM files exchanged directly between the two companies’ IBM systems. Employees working in AMPORTS’ vast parking lots access this information on handheld computers. Just one hour of downtime for the over-$50-million-a-year company could cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars and create major logistical problems. “Without the port tracking application, we’d be in trouble, it would essentially bring our business to a standstill,” said Leary.

As with many IBM IMS shops world-wide, IMS was working smoothly and reliably for the North American division of a global company. However, the IT department was losing its IMS skills to retirement, their IMS version was out of support from IBM, and their continuing IMS licensing and third-party support tools and services were costing millions per year. All these factors indicated that a shift to Db2 was inevitable and could not be delayed any longer. Furthermore, the company could see that there were significant opportunity costs in being able to take advantage of current technologies in Db2. The obstacle was the knowledge and confidence that a solid, affordable solution existed that would allow for a transparent migration from their existing IMS solution to Db2, with minimal to no impact on their existing application infrastructure.

The bank faced the challenge of designing a fully digitized customer communication experience for its digital-only online banking service. They needed to establish a denovo digital-first bank and integrate it with a new core system within six months. Additionally, the bank required flexibility to make changes to products, positioning, and experience while honoring customer preferences for electronic communication delivery options.

Keller Williams recognized that the rise of impersonal web technology could disadvantage home buyers and sellers, as everyone had access to the same fast search tools, intensifying competition. The company needed to provide supportive, individualized services amidst a technological revolution. In 2015, Keller Williams decided to transform into a technology company, reengineering its IT operations to empower agents and customers with data-driven decisions.

APL operates around the world and around the clock. Having applications offline for maintenance or any other reason is unacceptable at any time. In fact, users have been promised that there will be no more than four hours of downtime per month. Although its core applications were running on IBM i-based Power Systems, one of the most reliable platforms in the world, APL needed to do more to meet its demanding availability requirements. Even the most reliable systems need to be shut down for regular maintenance, such as backing up data, reorganizing databases or upgrading the operating system. These necessary planned maintenance outages can be substantial. For example, an operating system upgrade can shut a system down for 30 hours or more. APL performs nightly backups to tape, to ensure that its data will be available should a disaster strike. In a traditional environment, where backup jobs are run on the production machine, this can be a problem. Production applications often have to be stopped while the backup tapes are created. Even when a save-while-active technology is used, the high volume of system and disk resources consumed by backup jobs can slow production applications to an unacceptable level. APL needed an environment that allowed it to protect its critical data and applications and maintain exceptionally high availability, without putting an undue strain on business applications.

Conner Strong & Buckelew faced significant challenges with their existing disaster recovery solution, which relied on an asynchronous, hardware-based SAN-to-SAN mirroring technology. This solution was inadequate as it required a lengthy process to restore data, taking up to four hours, which was unacceptable for maintaining business continuity and customer satisfaction. Additionally, the technology did not provide a way to verify the integrity of the mirrored data, leading to concerns about potential data corruption. The situation worsened when the mirroring process broke, and the vendor was unable to fix or replace the unsupported technology, leaving the company with only daily file-level backups, which were insufficient for their data protection needs.

Nodak Mutual Insurance Company faced a significant challenge with its outdated disaster recovery strategy, which relied on tape-based backups and a third-party recovery site. This approach would have taken days to resume full operations after a disaster, which was unacceptable for the company. The existing strategy involved creating backup tapes and shipping them to a recovery site in Phoenix, Arizona. In the event of a disaster at the primary data center in Fargo, North Dakota, it would have taken days to allocate a system at the recovery site, configure it, load all data and applications from backup tapes, test the system, and finally make the applications available to users. This lengthy process would have made it difficult, if not impossible, to conduct business during the downtime. Additionally, the disaster recovery provider allowed only 24 hours of testing time per year, which was insufficient for Nodak to have confidence in the recovery solution's effectiveness. The company needed a disaster recovery solution that could dramatically reduce recovery times and provide peace of mind with a well-tested solution.

Ruud Jackel, Application Manager for Compass Group Netherlands, faced challenges in maintaining the region’s SAP systems, which are crucial for the catering business's back-end processes. Initially, the team used SAP ERP for Human Resources and Payroll, while a different SAP system was shared with another region for Finance and Accounting. This multi-system, cross-regional setup created governance challenges, necessitating a streamlined process. The primary challenge was automating complex SAP processes, but setting up the system for data automation was itself a hurdle. Transitioning to an updated SAP solution required migrating data from another region’s system to the new retail solution. The IT team was reluctant to use SAP’s legacy system migration workbench (LSMW) due to its cumbersome and error-prone nature.

Luxury brands are challenged to continually satisfy their highly demanding clientele, who are connected, mobile and travel extensively around the world. Providing a seamless omnichannel and global in-store experience posed a stiff challenge to one multi-brand company that manages more than 15 luxury brands. The company set out to align customer information for each of its brands globally and across channels, giving them a single customer view. To do so, the company first had to improve the quality of its customer information.

Moving to the cloud meant establishing a cloud-based Enterprise Service Bus architecture that could support distributed processing for analytics and reporting. That in turn meant integrating all existing applications and data. To get there, Crowley Maritime had to overcome many challenges. But one issue emerged as a major roadblock: Integrating mainframe data into the new distributed, cloud-based architecture. The complexity, labor time, expense, and risks of directly porting decades of data and hundreds of customized mainframe applications made that approach completely unworkable. A different path to mainframe integration had to be found. In total, Crowley Maritime’s business was being run on over 300 separate mainframe applications, most of which had been developed many years earlier and could not realistically be updated or expanded. While many of those applications were handling tracking of ship and container movements, port operations and land logistics (truck, rail, etc.) were being managed on entirely separate applications. All the associated data each application generated were also stored in separate Db2 databases. This led to many operational challenges. For example, each time a customer inquired about the status of their shipment, Crowley’s customer service agents had to query as many as 17 different systems to get the answer. Compounding the issue was the fact that none of the agents involved had full visibility to all systems.

In the compliance-heavy environment of financial services, errors can place companies at significant financial and reputational risk. This is particularly true for financial institution’s payment processing, which presents some of the biggest data quality challenges. Companies that can quickly and accurately process payments and identify potential issues have a significant competitive advantage, while those who struggle to detect and eliminate errors suffer reputational and regulatory consequences that can impact their bottom-line. Financial transaction processing involves a number of exchanges, creating the opportunity for data quality to degrade at each step. This complexity is particularly true within SWIFT, which is used by banks, brokers, treasuries and corporations to quickly transmit and route payments around the world. SWIFT payments are time-sensitive, and institutions must ensure that real-time transactional messages are correctly formatted and remain consistent and accurate through every hop of the processing flow. Swedbank utilizes the SWIFT payment system and must track SWIFT formatted payments as they move through its clearing system in real-time. During processing, the bank must ensure that transaction description fields, payment formats and values stay consistent and accurate throughout the transaction balancing process. When processing errors do occur, the bank must be able to quickly locate and resolve them, or the institution will be subject to fines.

Serving nearly 10 million members across the U.S. and in dozens of countries, with assets and transactions handled in just as many different currencies, requires a truly global presence and technological capabilities. This credit union has 22,000 employees working at its three operations centers and over 4,000 branch locations globally. And its core IT is likewise expansive and complex. So, like thousands of other global financial firms, it relies heavily upon IBM mainframe systems to run its business. While mainframe systems are unsurpassed in their ability to process millions of banking transactions at millisecond speeds, their complex and unique architecture and data formats make it extremely difficult to access and use the data they generate for business analytics, ITOM or to manage enterprise IT security in an integrated way. So too, building and running applications on mainframe to provide the kind of mobile and online services that people expect is more than challenging. The specialized skills and extremely long development and testing cycles required are just impractical and costly. So, when the credit union’s Data Governance and Management team embarked on a three-year effort to modernize its systems and services, one of their first and most urgent issues was getting past the restrictions imposed by mainframe systems in order to build truly data-driven, AI powered and cloud native operations. The higher-level objective driving that architectural transformation was to be able to run advanced analytics on huge volumes of customer data, to derive meaningful insights that could in turn guide and accelerate the creation and deployment of innovative new services.

Any downtime can be too much in a world accustomed to instant connectivity, especially for one of the world’s largest OLTP operations like British Telecom. The company was in search of significant improvements in DBMS performance for both its Db2 and CA IDMS operations. The primary focus was on enhancing CA IDMS, which is the foundation of BT’s flagship Customer Services System (CSS). The challenge was to ensure nonstop (24x7) processing and improve the efficiency and reliability of their database management systems.

A key component of BT Group's success has been the integration of location intelligence across all facets of its business, starting with the management of its extensive networks. With 17,000 field-based engineers servicing approximately 6.1 million customers each year, BT needed a unified, efficient system for deploying employees, supplies, and other resources across network sites. The existing paper-based maps and diagrams proved inefficient, and engineers required a better way to respond to customer needs. The challenge was to find a solution that could streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance customer service by providing accurate and up-to-date location data.

Techtronic Industries (TTI) faced significant challenges with their SAP operations, primarily due to the reliance on a single SAP Specialist for material master uploads. This dependency led to delays, as every data approval required manual intervention from the specialist. The manual processes were not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, where even minor mistakes during uploads could result in hours of backtracking to correct the system. The inefficiency of these processes was a major pain point, as it hindered the company's ability to manage and transform other systems effectively. The need for a more efficient and automated solution was evident to reduce reliance on IT and streamline the master data processes.

The migration to SAP S/4HANA was a significant challenge for Scientific Drilling, primarily due to the complexity of their existing ERP data spread across 30 homegrown legacy systems and ECC. The initial attempt using SAP’s LSMW migration tool was only partially successful, managing to transfer material master data from just one of their 108 manufacturing plants. With a looming go-live deadline of four months, the IT team, led by Nancy Nan, was under pressure to find a more effective solution. The SAP Data Services tool was considered but deemed inadequate for the task within the given timeframe.

Edward Scott, a Business Analyst at Halliburton, faced a significant challenge in managing the company's real estate portfolio due to the overwhelming volume of contract site data. The team was spending 90% of their time inputting data into the SAP Real Estate Module, which required entry of 180 fields for each piece of master data. This reliance on GUI scripting made the process cumbersome and prone to errors. The incoming data showed no signs of slowing down, and the team found themselves unable to analyze or clean up inconsistencies in the data. The backlog of errors continued to grow, and the team needed a creative solution to manage the data more efficiently.

Many customers had never used the TTB portal, and those who had described it as ‘OK’ but ‘basic.’ Customers were requesting increased online functionality, additional bill details, and a more consistent format. TalkTalk Business felt the need to change the environment to something scalable for all customers and partners that was in line with their Mission Statement, #EasyToDoBusinessWith. Requirements for a new portal were: Make client self-service available, decreasing the amount of client contact to the support team. A more modern portal, enabling real-time view of bills and sophisticated analytics to improve data-driven decision making for both TalkTalk Business and its customers. Enable customers to create their own hierarchies and account structures. Provide an engaging and interactive experience across all channels and make it easier to understand and interrogate information, improving customer satisfaction and increasing brand impression. Replace emails with bill PDF attachments and drive customers to the online portal for all bill PDF downloads. A direct Salesforce integration for single sign-on user interface and account access. Complete bill layout re-design & rebuild for all customer bill formats including paper/PDF and images from the portal. Improved customer satisfaction.

AAA Life Insurance faced significant challenges in modernizing its IT infrastructure, primarily due to its reliance on IBM i systems for core processing. The company's core insurance policy management system, Life Plus, operated on the IBM i platform, which, despite its computational speed and reliability, posed difficulties in migrating data to modern cloud-based systems. The unique architecture of IBM i systems made data integration complex, hindering the company's ability to leverage advanced analytics and cloud solutions. To remain competitive and meet market expectations, AAA Life needed to develop a strategic IT modernization plan that would encompass its mission-critical LifePlus data, provide a practical pathway to the cloud, and support future business requirements.

Kellogg Company faced challenges in managing vast amounts of customer data due to their reliance on an Excel-based solution. This approach led to audit and customer relationship issues, primarily caused by routing inconsistencies. The team, led by Julie Priebe, Data Integrity Manager, sought to simplify customer master data management processes and empower business users to work more efficiently. The risk of incorrect invoices being sent to customers was a significant concern, highlighting the need for a more robust solution.