Bouman GGZ, the largest mental health organization in the Netherlands, was faced with a very compartmentalized information system at the end of 2005. The Planning & Control and Finance departments provided managers with information from their financial system, HR delivered data from their HRM system, and the Clinical group delivered data from their healthcare system. Each department did this in its own way, with its own tools: Excel, Cognos or Oracle. After a few days, the managers received a print-out or an Excel sheet with the information they had requested. This was not a model of efficiency and customer-friendliness. At the same time, a need was emerging to combine the data from the three systems. Personnel, financial and clinical data is often interconnected and that’s how the management wanted to see it. But it wasn’t possible: everything was compartmentalized.

COPARTS Autoteile GmbH, a distributor of automotive parts and business services catering to repair shops in Germany and Europe, was faced with the challenge of managing its complex network between members, partners, and industry. The company needed a detailed overview of all sales, value-added services, and expenditures to provide members greater transparency of COPARTS services and leverage in negotiations with suppliers and service partners. The aim was to combine sales figures in different formats from industry, partners, and members, and compare them with the information on the different value-added services, their ranking, and expenditures of COPARTS in time-line comparisons. Previously, these figures were processed in Excel, which was time-consuming.

Dunlop Hiflex Oy, a distribution company specialized in high and low-pressure hoses and fittings, was facing challenges in managing its vast data. The company had streamlined its business processes with the Movex ERP system, which stored all data around sales, purchases, inventories, and deliveries. However, managing this data was challenging in a marketplace where quick deliveries and excellent customer service played central roles. The operational knowledge of the Movex ERP system varied widely across the organization, creating a bottleneck and making analysis too slow. The IT staff was overwhelmed with frequent requests for aggregated information, resulting in the inability to deliver timely information. The company needed a solution that all employees could use to quickly and easily modify the data to meet their personal requirements.

FRIMO Group, a world leader in the development and manufacture of production systems for quality plastic components, faced several challenges. They had a complex infrastructure that included CRM and project management systems based on SQL Server and SAP. They needed to visualize and analyze sales data from CRM while taking into account complex access rules. They also needed to evaluate and analyze SAP FI-CO-PS. The solution had to be implemented internationally at 10 sites as well as in agency operations.

Fullerton India, a financial services company, faced the challenge of acquiring profitable customers. The company needed a tool that could profile, verify, and flag delinquent customers early in the loan lifecycle to ensure profitability and growth. The tool had to be scalable to handle increasing data volume and complexity, flexible enough to allow for additional KPIs and defining customized business rules. It also needed to integrate data across sources and accurately display the same for analysis across verticals, like RISK, COLLECTION, FINCON, BUSINESS PLANNING. The company required quick reports to meet its dynamic requirements and consolidate data from multiple systems and present it in an easy-to-understand format.

Gemeente Haarlem, a city council in the Netherlands, was under pressure to reduce costs and improve performance management while also introducing new service delivery models to boost efficiency. The council had adopted a business lead approach to performance management and was working towards developing a shared services strategy for ICT, and other areas, such as finance and HR, between its different departments. ICT formerly operated semi autonomously using disparate data sources and had accumulated more than 100 million records. A principal driver for the change programme was to embed a performance management culture throughout the organisation and transform the delivery of public services. Cost effective, easy to use, business intelligence (BI) technology emerged as a vital tool for achieving success with the change agenda in the long term.

Helsingborg Hospital, one of Sweden's largest privatized emergency hospitals, was facing a challenge to maintain its regional leadership position and high standards of service and medical care. The hospital was struggling to improve the quality of information and statistics that abound in the numerous data systems to drive operational improvements. The hospital needed a solution that could help it leverage the vast amount of data it had to improve its operations and maintain its leadership position in the healthcare industry.

Lundbeck A/S, an international medical concern, was facing challenges in providing a quick and effective overview of complex clinical and operational data. The company was working on a digital process for the collection of medical research data that was previously recorded on paper forms by doctors worldwide. The information was recorded digitally and stored in several different databases. The company needed to monitor and analyze the information collected during product development. An important link in the development phase was the ability to test the product's effect on a large number of people. These test results were collected in a set of databases. The company needed a solution to simplify reporting and optimize the planning of clinical studies.

MAF Carrefour Hypermarkets, a rapidly expanding retail industry player in the Middle East region, faced challenges in gaining rapid access to massive amounts of data and reducing time for analysis and reporting. The senior executives needed meaningful answers at their fingertips as operational decision making is key to driving performance in highly competitive and growing markets. The challenge was not only to deliver a tool that can fill the gap of a managerial dashboard but also provide an in-depth view into the data below as and when needed. With existing business intelligence (BI) reporting tools, managers were able to get reports and analysis. However, they were unable to gain insights into growing volumes of ‘big data’ and have a bird’s eye view over the full operations.

National Frozen Foods Corporation, a leading private label packer of vegetables, faced challenges with poor visibility into production data. The company found it difficult to analyze data across disparate IT systems for ERP, warehouse management, HR, and other systems. There was no way to package company data to executives and other employees. The company recently upgraded its legacy ERP, Warehouse Management, and other systems to better accommodate the selection, quality, varieties of crops, seasonality, growing methods, and inventory management needs of customers. While those systems provided better access to the information management and operations professionals needed, the source was limited to exported data in Microsoft Excel. This proved difficult and time-consuming, particularly for those users with non-technical backgrounds.

Nipro Europe NV, a part of the global Nipro Corporation, develops, produces, and sells medical and pharmaceutical aids across Europe, Africa, Russia, and parts of the Middle East. The company also oversees four production facilities in the United States and seven in Europe. To enhance its operational efficiency, Nipro Europe switched to SAP ERP in 2010. However, the company faced challenges in providing insights into data from four different SAP systems and giving employees the tools to report and analyze data. Answering ad hoc queries and consolidating data from the various systems remained an issue. SAP also offers possibilities for this, but these are more strategic in nature and often lead to complex and time-consuming projects.

Piraeus Bank Group, the fourth-largest Greek lender, was facing challenges in accessing 'big data' for marketing campaigns, monitoring liquidity in near real time, and reorganizing its branch network based on better insight. The bank had invested in a new data warehouse based on IBM Banking Data Warehouse to improve organizational effectiveness and profitability. However, they needed a solution that was easy to use across the organization and could handle the exploration of terabytes of big data with one application. The bank also wanted to transform itself by closing the skills gap between IT experts and business users through self-service analysis.

Region Skåne Habilitation and Assistive Technology Services, a group within healthcare organization Region Skåne, was facing several challenges. They needed to coordinate six different operational systems, improve the presentation of analysis in a visually engaging format, and reduce manual data collection and analysis. The services they provide are based on the principle that all people are equal regardless of age, gender, disability, and ethnic or religious background. They help treat people with permanent disabilities with exercise and assistive technology to enable participation in everyday life. The services are based on each patient’s expressed needs, which change in nature and extent throughout a person’s lifetime.

Rexam Beverage Can Europe & Asia, the largest can manufacturer in Europe, faced a significant challenge in extracting business data from SAP and other data sources to create ad hoc reports. The company's executives needed to highlight key accounts and drill down into products, countries, and sales offices. The main business challenge was that Rexam had huge business value locked into its data sources but lacked a set of applications to extract it to solve business issues immediately. Reports could take one person five working days to compile which often caused issues for executives working to tight deadlines. The company needed a user-friendly business intelligence (BI) tool to avoid the need for users to download huge quantities of data to produce Excel spreadsheets over which managers had little control.

South Staffs Water, a water utility serving 1.29 million people and 38,000 businesses in the West Midlands of the United Kingdom, was facing a challenge of information overload. The company had over 100 static reports, making it difficult to develop a single version of the truth from their raw data. This data was housed in multiple sources including Oracle, Excel spreadsheet software, and Microsoft Access. The company needed to reduce these reports to between 20 and 30 to avoid complete information overload. Their vision was for one consolidated reporting front end that gave their users a single version of the truth. Additionally, the company was under constant scrutiny from the Office of Water Services (Ofwat), its regulator, and needed to meet external challenges from them.

Target Express, the largest independent express delivery company in the UK, was looking to enhance its industry-leading image as an open, proactive business partner. The company wanted to quickly unlock data stored in various systems to provide superior service and share detailed logistical information with customers beyond standard industry KPIs. A key account recognized that a huge repository of information residing in Target Express’ systems would be valuable for conducting their business more effectively. The customer requested access to the data which would disclose what it cost them to operate in a specific area, move specific products, during a specific time of year, and numerous other operational insights.

Tommy Hilfiger's head office databases are periodically updated with data that’s necessary for the work of all group companies and partners. The Russian representative office receives these updates in the form of Excel files from the head office. Head office uses the Oracle and SAP software, and the Russian partners use several different configurations of 1С:Enteprise business management software and other vendor systems. Another challenge was the timely receipt of sales reports from the Russian partners. The supervision system requires partners to provide weekly sales reports to the Moscow office and each of the 12 partner companies keeps daily accounting of sales in spreadsheets or in various accounting systems. At the end of each week, the data is emailed to Moscow, where it is manually consolidated into a report. As the data gathering and consolidation process was lengthy, the Moscow office would often experience delays in receiving information. Moreover, all reports consisted of ‘raw’ figures, which had to be processed and analyzed for a long time before any decision could be made.

Toshiba Europe, a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, was seeking to improve its service quality, measure the performance of its outsourcing partners, and optimize its spare parts procedures. The company's customer service is supported in eight European countries by external customer contact centres that handle around 60,000 calls a month. The company wanted an analysis solution that could check whether the agreed service levels were being met by monitoring various key performance indicators (KPIs). In the repairs department, the aim was to analyse turn-round times on individual orders, so as to manage more efficiently the repairs and necessary logistics processes. The company was looking for an analysis solution that could be installed simply and quickly and then flexibly operated by the European specialist operations department itself. The system should avoid taking a toll on internal IT resources or incurring cost-intensive days spent on site by external consultants, as well as being capable of collating and analysing data without needing a special data warehouse.

Wanbury, a rapidly expanding pharmaceutical company in India, was facing challenges in accessing and analyzing its 'big data'. The company's business was growing and it needed to improve its business discovery capacity to cater to an increasingly mobile executive team and enable complex analysis of large data sets. The company was previously using a system of exporting data from various standalone applications into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to generate largely static BI reports. This system had several drawbacks, including reduced accountability for, and visibility of, organizational and individual performance. This often delayed decision making by senior management and heads of departments. The reporting solution was also unable to provide analysis trending capabilities to executives who were on the move or away from the office.

Globus, a retail chain of supermarkets, was facing challenges in reducing time to value, consolidating data from multiple unstructured sources, and gaining better insight into ongoing campaigns and promotions to increase the efficiency and profitability of operations. The management information system used by Globus was provided by an external company and was based on static Excel reports published in a web environment. The online reporting system could only use a limited number of dimensions and as a result many decisive processes were based on not completely identical outputs, while some reports were not available at all and many were created by manually copying from various systems into Excel tables.

Laureate Education Asia, a part of the Laureate International Universities network, was facing challenges in financial forecasting and reporting. The process of preparing monthly analysis and reporting at their regional office was time-consuming, taking up to seven hours to run a comparison of financial performance of their different institutions from Oracle Hyperion. They wanted to reduce this time and improve the quality of their reporting. They also wanted to enable their staff to archive their own data and extract forecasts on a self-service basis for quicker decision-making.

Medair, a humanitarian organization, was facing a challenge in gathering and analyzing data from the field. They were using Open Data Toolkit (ODK) to collect health and nutrition metrics in the field, which would drive their programming and the work of other NGOs in the region. However, they needed specific analytic visualization to better understand the survey data and respond most effectively with their program work. The potential for impact was enormous, as the data would be used by hundreds of personnel working in the region daily to make better-informed decisions and save more lives.

IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information, analytics, and expertise, was facing challenges in providing effective SAP user support due to the tightly controlled and audited nature of its SAP production system. The system required multiple layers of authorization to access any data, which often resulted in delays before access to production was granted. Prior to implementing Qlik Gold Client, Markit was manually creating, matching, and reviewing a massive amount of information to mimic production data in QA, which was proving to be an inefficient process. The company was looking for a solution that could reduce the excessive use of Firefighter access while still addressing compliance issues.

DomainPower, a leading real-time bidding exchange connecting online advertisers to rich native advertising inventory, was dealing with a high volume of transactional data from its online auctions. The company recognized the need for a data warehouse to analyze market trends related to its supply inventory and the value of advertising. They decided to explore Amazon Web Services, but the daily source data changes proved to be a challenge. Daily batch data updates between DomainPower’s on-premises Microsoft SQL Server system and an Amazon Redshift data warehouse would not meet the business needs. This represented an obstacle to using Amazon Redshift, since keeping the environments in sync might require significant development effort and ongoing maintenance.

Tangerine, a direct bank in Canada, was looking to become a more full-service digital bank. They wanted to listen closely to their customers and create services that their customers were looking for. This required Tangerine to have access to customer data in real time so they could respond quickly to their needs. As they began this journey, they reached out to their customers to find out what they wanted from a bank. The first step was to develop a responsive website with a user interface that easily adapts to the device customers are using to access it. The next step was to leverage customer data differently. They needed to keep track of customer feedback and complaints, which included every face-to-face and phone interaction with a customer, in addition to social media sentiment. This requirement had Tangerine’s IT team looking at the data in their current data warehouse as well as the expected growth for their data over the next several years. It also had the team looking at the time it took to move their data so that their bank managers could analyze it while the data was fresh.

Vancouver International Airport (YVR) is striving to become the preferred TransPacific hub for passengers traveling between Asia and the Americas. To achieve this, YVR needed near real-time data analytics to gain a clear understanding of how passengers, bags, and planes move through the airport. This data would enable YVR to optimize its minimum connection time and enhance the passenger experience.

AdventHealth, a healthcare organization, was looking for ways to integrate technology more deeply into the workflows of their frontline workers. They wanted to provide a tool that would help streamline workflows and increase the quality of work life for their clinical team. The challenge was to provide a tool that would be useful from an operational standpoint, providing near-real-time dashboards to give the nursing team and leadership the opportunity for action, not reaction. The goal was to develop a comprehensive tool for all levels of team members, from frontline nurses to the chief nursing officer, that could be used operationally to make actionable decisions to impact both patient outcomes and ensure good stewardship.

The wine industry was facing a significant data gap. Consumers around the world were constantly sharing their thoughts and feelings about wine, how they buy it, and where they're drinking it, resulting in vast quantities of data. However, there wasn't a good way to track that digital trail to meet consumers where they are. The industry needed a way to harness this data and use it to their advantage. Additionally, there was a fear factor around data, partly due to privacy and security issues. Wine people can also be shy about their lack of knowledge and bandwidth to learn more. There was also a romanticized element of the wine lifestyle that seemed at odds with the concept of data.

ENI’s upstream activities are complex with more than 160 natural gas and oil extraction plants located worldwide sending performance and operations data on a daily basis. Keeping track of the overall situation is essential for managing maintenance operations and ensuring that the company reaches its targets. Without a dedicated platform, the data sent by the plants used to be collected via email and analyzed manually, using standard spreadsheets and occupying vast amounts of time and resources. Managers were only able to see an overview of production towards the end of the working day, via a PDF sent by email, with limited possibility for in-depth analysis. ENI needed to improve the control and analysis of this information, not so much for operations but for managerial purposes. The objective was to improve the timeliness, quality and granularity of the data, seeking to create a platform that provided a good customer experience and also enabled the analysis of historical data to allow managers to monitor performance more effectively.

ForbiddenPlanet.com, a leading science fiction retailer in Europe, was struggling with data analysis. The company had a vast amount of data but lacked a system for effective analysis. This was particularly problematic in their fast-paced comics business, where new editions are released weekly and accurate estimations of product demand are crucial. The company's management account meetings were inefficient, with an 80-page management pack of quarterly account data that was already out of date by the time of the meeting. The lack of real-time data analysis led to meetings ending with more questions than answers.