Precisely

The telecommunications company, offering a wide range of services including broadband Internet, fixed telephone and mobile device services, and television and on-demand entertainment, was faced with the challenge of updating its core legacy systems for billing and operations. The company needed to migrate data from its legacy billing support system (BSS) and operations support system (OSS) to modern data center applications. This process was complex due to the different data formats used by each application and the need to maintain data integrity throughout the migration. The traditional SQL process was deemed too slow and verifying the accuracy of the data migration was nearly impossible. The company required a scalable solution with analytical capabilities to assess data quality, identify errors, uncover root causes and prioritize fixes according to potential impact on revenue or customer experience.

Eastridge Workforce Solutions, a provider of workforce management services and technologies to over 1,300 clients across North America, faced a critical challenge with its time and attendance system. This system, which processes transactions from thousands of people 24/7, 365 days a year, verifies employee attendance and records their time to generate accurate payrolls. Any downtime in this system would be catastrophic, causing significant disruption to Eastridge and its clients. The company needed a high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) solution that would ensure the system and its associated data would always be available, regardless of any potential disasters or scheduled maintenance. However, HA/DR was not a core competency for Eastridge, and the company did not want to distract its IT group from its primary business objectives.

Comcast Corporation, the second largest broadcasting and cable television company in the world by revenue, was facing significant challenges due to the volume and variety of operational and billing data. With over 20 million customers across 40 states, the company needed to establish standardized processes and automate data flows to overcome a wide range of billing, finance, compliance, supply chain, and marketing challenges. In 2009, the company was dealing with massive amounts of data that were causing major revenue assurance challenges. The customer billing review interface required the processing of a billion records every month, within very tight timeframes. The company’s decentralized accounting and finance operations, with 20 different regions and 30 different accounting practices, further compounded these issues.

IDI Independent Distributors Inc., a Canadian-owned business serving the industrial and safety industries, faced a challenge in providing its members with high-quality, enriched product information. The company recognized that its members needed a central repository for data to deliver consistent and trusted product information across various channels. However, smaller individual distributors lacked the resources to deploy a full Product Information Management (PIM) solution independently. IDI decided to invest strategically in a data management solution to help its members compete effectively in the digital marketplace with high-quality content. The goal was to build a vast repository of rich product content and digital assets to aid its members in growing their business across channels.

Clear Technologies, a company that helps businesses maximize the value from information technologies, operates in a highly competitive environment. The company not only competes against other vendors but also against the status quo. To secure a sale, Clear Technologies often has to convince potential customers that the benefits of the new technology justify the cost of switching from the existing technology, including any associated downtime costs. The company's value proposition is to increase organizational effectiveness through innovative products, services, and solutions. However, the hardware and software it sells can't provide value if it is down. Therefore, part of Clear Technologies' revenue is derived from ensuring that their customers' data and applications are always available, even in the event of system failures, disasters, or normal planned maintenance. To support this business model, Clear Technologies needed a business partner that could supply advanced high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), and migration solutions.

In the past, ALICO ran repeated queries to determine resource usage on its IBM i systems. Each time, the query parameters would be changed to get the precise information that the IT department needed. This work was time-consuming, cumbersome and repetitive. To overcome this burden, the company wanted software designed specifically to monitor the health of its systems. Furthermore, it was difficult for ALICO’s central IT department to scrutinize the contents of the disks used by the company’s offices around the world. ALICO wanted a way to find, delete and/or archive obsolete data and objects in order to reclaim wasted disk space. The company also needed a way to track all of the software in use in each of the operating units. ALICO offices in different parts of the world don’t all use the same software applications. And some offices use different versions of the applications used in other offices Thus, to avoid updating the wrong software when performing application maintenance for one of the offices, the central IT department needed to keep track of which offices use which software versions.

Heinz Watties Australia, a large multinational company, faced the challenge of ensuring compliance with the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). The company needed a solution to audit its BPCS and other mission-critical files to comply with regulatory guidelines. The requirements for the solution included capturing changes to files for at least one year, easy access to captured information, and the ability to generate weekly, monthly, and ad-hoc reports. Additionally, the solution needed to provide automated reporting, real-time email reporting for exceptions, and be implemented on all 5 LPARS within budgetary constraints. The implementation needed to be straightforward and primarily carried out by the Heinz IT Department.

The company faced challenges with a large base of repeat customers purchasing through third-party retailers, leading to duplicate customer records and inaccurate or incomplete customer addresses. This situation hindered the company's ability to determine lifetime customer value and overlay additional demographic data to identify new opportunities. The company needed to consolidate and validate data from disparate sources to gain an accurate single view of each customer. With a planned targeted direct mail campaign approaching, the company engaged Precisely to learn more about its Spectrum solution, a technology platform designed to validate, standardize, and enhance customer data.

This regional utility provider was looking for a data strategy to improve the visibility, quality, and value of their enterprise’s data assets. In this highly regulated industry, the company recognized the need for better data governance of their data, including lineage to substantiate data authenticity. One example of a high-priority need was comprehensive analytics to support rate changes with the consumer regulatory boards. The business opportunity was driven by the following factors: Data was siloed within various locations and systems across the pre-existing enterprise. No data governance solution in place. Definitions of critical terms were inconsistent across different business areas (e.g., what is a “customer?”). Existing analysis and reporting were manually generated and cobbled from various sources. Data consumers desired better transparency around data governance, quality, and availability.

David Nieper Ltd, a multinational company with offices in the UK, France, Germany, and Holland, faced the challenge of meeting the highest standards of PCI-DSS compliance. The IT team needed a solution that could efficiently report on audit data contained in IBM i journals across all LPARs. Key requirements included real-time email reporting for exceptions, central management implementation, daily email reports summarizing journal entries, ad hoc report generation, and data integration with a Splunk platform. The solution needed to be straightforward to implement without impacting the performance of underlying applications.

Organizations constantly look to extract more value from the operational data generated within their IT infrastructure, and to analyze that information to determine how their systems and applications are performing. A primary source of operational intelligence for IBM z/OS mainframe users lies in the SMF (System Management Facility) records. These are recorded for just about every event and activity on the system. In order to extract such valuable information, organizations typically are saddled with the time-consuming manual processes of offloading the data, extracting the relevant records and fields, and then transforming the remaining subset with expensive tools like SAS. Even then, essential questions remain unanswered, such as: What is happening now? Is what is happening now different than what was happening this same time last week or the same time one month ago? Can I predict or even prevent issues from impacting performance or adherence to service level agreements (SLAs)? This process is then repeated across the multiple LPARs that exist in most organizations, making it even more time-consuming and increasingly difficult to get complete visibility across the enterprise.

Westpac Pacific Banking, as part of the Global Westpac Banking Corporation, faced the challenge of complying with various regulatory guidelines. They needed comprehensive visibility into their IBM i environment to ensure security and minimize risks of fraud, corruption, and data integrity issues. The existing security compliance software was inadequate, lacking in monitoring specific user activities, extensive reporting capabilities, and real-time exception reporting. The bank required a solution that could be implemented across all 28 LPARs cost-effectively, providing audit-quality traces of technical staff activities.

The insurer faced challenges due to its legacy master data management system, which limited its ability to have a single customer view. This lack of a unified view negatively impacted marketing campaigns, leading to sub-par results. Independent insurance agents struggled to identify all the insurance products a customer might already have, resulting in inappropriate recommendations and a perception that the insurer did not understand customer needs. Additionally, missing demographic or geographic data led to marketing efforts targeting the wrong customers, increasing costs and hindering cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Toyota Material Handling Australia (TMHA) faced stricter auditing requirements due to its growth and classification as a large corporation. The company needed to fulfill both government and internal auditing requirements, which included comprehensive annual governance audits. TMHA's parent company, Toyota Industries Corporation (TICO), required the establishment of an appropriate internal control system to maintain the reliability of financial reporting. A dry-run audit identified several remediation requirements, including the inability to fully trace financial database changes and the need to tighten controls around vendor authority. These issues were significant deficiencies that TMHA couldn't fix internally, necessitating a robust solution to address these challenges.

Under the direction of the chief data officer (CDO), the company launched an aggressive plan to establish and implement data governance tools, policies and processes across the enterprise. The initial effort included the creation of business glossaries in spreadsheets to document metadata, data ownership, definitions and business attributes policies, in addition to the controls that were implemented as part of the data quality initiative. The company also had a critical need to understand data lineage across systems at a business level, which they managed in a spreadsheet tool integrated with Salesforce. These data governance efforts marked important steps to help both business and technical users better manage, understand and use data, but these largely manual solutions lacked the automation, adoption and sustainability needed from a long-term solution. The company still faced numerous challenges, including: Error-prone spreadsheets requiring constant manual attention to keep current, making collaboration and widespread contribution difficult. Technical metadata from key applications required the development of custom code solutions or had to be imported and catalogued manually. Technical data lineage made it nearly impossible for business users to understand or leverage. Usage rights and utilization for licensed data were hard to trace and account for. Policies and processes around data access, permissions and approvals lacked visibility and accountability across the enterprise. The client reached out to Precisely to help them overcome these challenges and achieve the automation, accountability and sustainability the company needed from a governance program.

Total Health Care faced significant challenges due to the disjointed structure of its membership processes, which involved multiple internal systems, external vendors, and CMS. This fragmentation limited the company's visibility into membership data, preventing leadership from gaining a complete and accurate understanding of key membership analytics. The lack of insights and quality control posed financial risks, led to inaccurate quality of care reporting, and missed opportunities to improve the member experience. The company's CIO, Noah Monro, recognized the need for a single platform to provide complete visibility across disparate systems, improve membership analytics, and make better business decisions. Duplicate membership files, resulting from members frequently switching between exchange and Medicaid plans, further complicated the situation by providing an inaccurate view of care gaps and quality measures, ultimately lowering HEDIS scores and health plan reimbursement.

PennEngineering operates facilities across the United States, as well as in Europe and Asia, but its computer systems are centralized at the company’s headquarters in Pennsylvania. At one time, its U.S. factories ran primarily a single shift, allowing considerable time at night and on the weekends to perform necessary system maintenance. However, operations in Europe and Asia dramatically reduced the times during which maintenance can be performed without impacting operations, particularly because the factories in China operate on Saturday and Sunday. In addition, maintenance windows are being further constrained by the U.S. west coast operations since a second shift has been added to keep up with demand. Thus, the cost of downtime was growing, but PennEngineering’s systems still required regular maintenance. The company’s challenge was to find a way to dramatically decrease the amount of system downtime required for maintenance, thereby reducing the cost to the business. The company also needed a more effective way to recover its data in the event of a disaster. Waiting for recovery from a tape restore was no longer an option.

PennEngineering faced the challenge of reducing system downtime for maintenance as it expanded internationally. With operations in Europe and Asia, the available time for maintenance without impacting operations was significantly reduced. The addition of a second shift on the U.S. west coast further constrained maintenance windows. The company needed to decrease system downtime to reduce costs and ensure business continuity. Additionally, PennEngineering required a more effective disaster recovery solution, as waiting for recovery from a tape restore was no longer viable. Hubbell, on the other hand, faced challenges with data quality and time-intensive data entry during its SAP implementation. The company relied on temporary employees for manual data entry, which led to errors and delays. Hubbell needed a solution to improve data quality and empower business users to manage their data effectively.

Eastridge Workforce Solutions provides workforce management services to over 1,300 clients across North America. The company operates a time and attendance system that processes transactions from thousands of people 24/7. Any downtime in this system could have severe consequences for both Eastridge and its clients. The company requires a high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) solution to ensure that its system and data are always available, even during disasters or scheduled maintenance. However, HA/DR is not a core competency for Eastridge, which focuses on delivering innovative workforce solutions. Therefore, the company needs to leverage HA/DR expertise without diverting its IT resources from business objectives.

Health insurance can be confusing, and researching and selecting the right plan can be tedious. Still, insurance customers require a lot of specifics in order to make their decisions. Providing that information in a format people can easily absorb is an ongoing challenge for insurers. Blue Shield of California was not immune to the challenge. Serving organizations across the state, the company formerly recruited new members by showing up at in-person health insurance fairs with large booklets describing various plan options. The Blue Shield of California Marketing team thought a more high-tech experience would be a better fit for their customer base. They also wanted to make insurance information easier to understand. That’s when they heard about Precisely EngageOne Video from a sister organization in another state. “We liked that other Blue Cross Blue Shield plans had used the solution,” Scarborough says. “We were also compelled by the fact that the Precisely account team have experience in our industry. Health insurance is very complicated, and this team has been phenomenal in their ability to understand our business and their dedication to helping us succeed.”

Autoliv, a global leader in automotive safety, faces significant challenges in maintaining stringent on-time delivery requirements for its products, which include seatbelts, airbags, and other safety systems. The company operates in a highly competitive environment where downtime can lead to missed delivery deadlines and measurable revenue losses. Contracts with automakers often include penalties for late shipments, making it crucial for Autoliv to minimize both planned and unplanned downtime. The company's reliance on JD Edwards ERP applications for critical functions such as financial management, inventory, customer service, and purchasing further underscores the need for a reliable high availability (HA) solution. With operations spanning 13 manufacturing facilities worldwide and processing up to 70 million daily transactions, Autoliv's IT infrastructure must be robust and resilient to ensure continuous operations and meet customer expectations.

Traditionally, insurers’ communications with injured workers have taken place over the phone or in writing, and clients have been expected to digest very complex claim information by reading lengthy documents. EML found that these channels did not work best for every client.

Canada Post faced significant challenges in loading data into its SAP solution. The process was time-consuming and costly, requiring third-party IT suppliers to develop CATT and ABAP scripts. Manual data entry from Excel spreadsheets into SAP R/3 led to increased data entry errors. The labor-intensive work processes were not an effective use of employees' time. The Organizational Planning unit needed to load job evaluation points for over 8,000 job positions into SAP, which was estimated to take several months if done manually. Time Management also experienced delays, taking 12 to 16 hours each week to unlock employee records by manually entering data from Excel sheets into SAP.

A large regional U.S. bank faced regulatory scrutiny due to insufficient management of Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements and failure to report suspicious activities. The bank's account-centric approach to transaction risk assessment led to an overwhelming number of alerts, most of which were false positives. This approach prevented the bank from accurately gauging the risk of individual customers across multiple accounts, as some customers held accounts under different names due to data-entry errors or intentional obfuscation. As a result, investigators were overwhelmed by the volume of alerts, and real lawbreakers often went undetected.

IMA Financial Group, located in Kansas, is highly aware of the risks posed by natural disasters, particularly tornadoes, which could lead to significant downtime and data loss. The company’s primary data center is situated in a region prone to such disasters, making it imperative to have a robust disaster recovery (DR) solution. The challenge was to find an affordable DR solution that could back up all company data, including any updates made after the last nightly backup, and allow for easy and rapid recovery of the Sagitta application and its data.

Willis Re faced the challenge of improving the speed and accuracy of their client exposure assessments based on location data. They needed a more thorough understanding of risk exposure levels at individual points on a map to improve estimations of potential losses and ensure clients purchased the correct amount of coverage at the right price. This required a geocoding solution capable of processing high-resolution data for consistent comparisons across country lines, complete systemic control to understand catastrophe models, and visibility into clients' or insurers' books of business to demonstrate the benefits of accurate data.

At one time, NDA protected its data by backing it up to tape nightly. However, that was inadequate because recoveries were too slow and once-a-day backups left too much data vulnerable to loss. One of the problems with nightly tape-based backups is the nightly part. Data entered or updated during the current day is not yet on any backup tape. Consequently, up to a day’s worth of data is always at risk—and more if the most recent tape is unavailable or corrupted. Another problem with nightly tape-based backups is the tape part. To perform a recovery, the backup tape has to be retrieved, possibly from an offsite location, it has to be mounted onto a drive and the necessary data have to be extracted and loaded unto the production server. In the event of a disaster, it might also be necessary to first acquire and configure a new server. In all, recovery can take hours or even a few days. For a dynamic business like NDA, that’s far too long. In addition, tape backups and recoveries involve many manual processes to locate, transport and mount tapes and run the necessary jobs. And, humans are fallible and, consequently, manual processes create opportunities for error. NDA recognized that it needed a disaster recovery solution that protects all of its data, allows data to be recovered almost immediately and minimizes the chance of human error.

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts faces a critical challenge in maintaining its reputation for serving hot, fresh doughnuts at any time of the day. The company operates a complex supply chain that requires 100 percent system reliability to ensure the timely delivery of fresh inventory. Any disruption in system availability could negatively impact their operations, especially given their aggressive inventory control process that involves replacing products that are just a few hours old. The company manages its wholesale operations with an EDI solution from EXTOL running on an IBM i server, supporting 400 users. Additionally, Krispy Kreme relies on an electronic billing system to generate thousands of invoices monthly for large retail outlets, where delayed billings could severely impact cash flow. The company sells its products in numerous locations across the US and eight other countries, making system reliability crucial for maintaining supply chain integrity and avoiding disruptions that could harm their wholesale operations.

The Los Angeles area is highly competitive, with multiple providers competing for the same customers. Spreadsheets used by sales teams were becoming ineffective in showing the depth of opportunities, challenges, and the competitive landscape. It was difficult to manipulate and interpret data in a manner relevant to the sales teams, which hindered their ability to identify untapped markets and drive additional revenues.

Raven Transport, a mid-sized trucking company, faced the challenge of upgrading its IBM systems and operating system while maintaining continuous operations. With a small IT department lacking in-house programmers or hardware experts, the company needed external assistance to perform the migration efficiently. The company operates a 24x7 dispatch center, making it crucial to avoid significant downtime during the upgrade. Additionally, Raven Transport required a seamless transition to the new system to prevent any operational disruptions.

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.