Primur Systems and Resources, an IT solutions and services provider based in New South Wales, Australia, identified a gap in its competitors’ Internet of Things (IoT) offerings. The company's customers were seeking automation, condition monitoring, and predictive maintenance solutions. To stay up-to-date with the latest technology and provide end-to-end IoT solutions, Primur needed a robust and versatile IoT platform. The company's clients, which span various sectors including manufacturing, distribution, health, finance, and insurance, required customized, end-to-end solutions to their IoT issues. These ranged from monitoring the transportation of goods and performing diagnostics of truck engines, to ensuring livestock is eating properly.

Future Intelligence Ltd., a telecom engineering SME based in Greece, was facing challenges with spiraling street lighting costs and the need to improve public safety and protect the environment. The company saw an opportunity to improve municipal operations via the Internet of Things (IoT). Street lighting is an essential community service, but it can consume up to 40 percent of a municipality’s budget. Moreover, in many cases, lighting is not energy efficient, adding to greenhouse gas concerns and pollution. These challenges led municipalities to transform into smart cities, and they found an ideal way to make that change: Future Intelligence built on Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT.

James Cook University (JCU) in Australia wanted to start an Engineering IoT degree program to educate students thoroughly so that they could get jobs in the IoT industry. They needed to partner with a technology provider that could not only provide the IoT platform, but also work with the university on IoT-related projects, as well as help to educate the students. The university also had to educate students and parents about the IoT and its potential for post-graduation employment. The hands-on part of the course is run by Prithvi Moses, Solution Architect at Software AG. He runs Cumulocity IoT workshops three times during the final year IoT capstone project.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services faced the challenge of modernizing their systems to optimize services. They needed to invest smartly in IT to save funds for social programs, build on the stability of proven core systems, be equipped to leverage new innovations, and adapt to changing federal regulations. The systems that were in place were built with Adabas & Natural over 25 years ago. While these systems were reliable in processing data for welfare, economic assistance, payments tracking, and other social programs, they were mainframe-based, which meant that case workers couldn’t easily access the latest data or build new innovations.

The State Office for Salaries and Pensions in Germany was facing a growing demand for online services and the need to integrate modern IT systems into mainframe applications. The agency was also looking to digitalize all administrative processes in the long term. The agency handles around 1 million applications for financial assistance annually, totaling more than €1 billion per year. The past decade has seen a growing trend in public administration toward customer-friendly web portals and decentralized applications. The agency was looking to expand webMethods into a central hub for all its applications.

The Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) was facing growing challenges in internal communication and knowledge management due to its rapid growth and innovation-backed success. Siloed applications and a lack of end-to-end process management and control made oversight difficult and put data integrity at risk. For instance, provider fee-payment systems had become so complex to maintain that it took extra manpower and time to process charges to members and payments to providers. The organization needed to make patient medical records quickly and readily available, increase auditing and monitoring of transaction and data movement, improve back-end IT systems and process efficiency, and open 25 years of custom legacy applications and data to all platforms, including a new digital business platform.

Weifu High Technology Group, a leading provider of engine core components and electronic control solutions, faced significant challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Government policies to control the spread of the virus forced many companies to stop or reduce production, impacting the supply chain. Social distancing logistics seriously affected the supply of raw materials and components and hampered product sales. Meanwhile, customers were still demanding their essential car parts. However, the manufacturer’s customer relationship management platform was unable to handle the volume of requests and orders. The company launched three investigatory consulting projects: strategic, organizational and process domain to address the problems. The projects revealed a problem: Weifu had a lot of systems with a lot of processes, but it was not able to control and monitor these processes with the product it was using.

The General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs - Dubai (GDRFAD) was facing several challenges. The impact of the new digital strategy, Dubai 2021, was hindering their e-government plans due to their existing business architecture. They needed to audit their IT infrastructure and resolve their manual compliance process. There was also a lack of reliable sources of information across their 42 departments. The agency was slow and unresponsive, and the business architecture prevented it from reinventing itself. Three disparate units were managing risk and compliance in anything other than a unified way. They wanted to be more agile in responding to demands received by 42 departments and to achieve their goal of improving their smart, intelligent and responsive services.

Facility owners and operators face the challenge of controlling the costs associated with owning, managing, and maintaining a building. Energy usage is a significant concern, with one-third of non-fixed operating expenses going towards maintaining heating, cooling, lights, and computers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that about 30% of this is wasted due to inefficiency. Maintenance is also a costly prospect, with estimates of more than $2 per square foot on repairs and maintenance (not including labor). A 10-story, 150,000-square-foot building can cost $300,000 per year or more. The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly changing the way buildings and building systems are connected and managed, opening up building automation to a broader property market.

Westfalen Weser Energie GmbH & Co. KG., a utility company, was facing major challenges due to global climate change and digital transformation. The pressure for green energy and greater requirements for risk management and data protection were increasing. The company's unique community-shareholding structure and participating communities’ willingness to invest in their own power grids have enabled the Group’s continued successful growth in recent years. However, this growth needed to be recorded in every area and available for continuous improvement. Processes, in particular, had to be documented transparently. WWE worked together with a variety of service providers and system operators, a complete ecosystem that it must be able to control. To do so, many processes and procedures had to be defined and documented. Due to its shareholding structure new partners are added regularly, so processes must continually be adapted.

Digital Dubai, the government office responsible for the city's smart transformation, faced several challenges. These included the need for digital transformation, growing operational costs, vendor lock-in, numerous customer experience initiatives, and the global pandemic and lockdown. The city had dozens of independent apps offering a wide array of services, but lacked the architectural platform to allow interconnectedness on the backend, smooth user journeys, and faster adoption of new technologies. The need for a unified integration backbone was evident to enhance services on streamlined mobile apps, self-service kiosks, and more.

四川澜光发展股份有限公司 (BRC) 是一家拥有 20,000 多名员工和 390 多家企业的公司，在管理其庞大的文档方面面临着巨大的挑战。该公司有 8000 多个有关系统、流程、规范和指南的文档未及时更新。缺乏组织和及时更新影响了系统的实施，影响了工人的效率。此外，由于培训材料分散且无组织，培训新员工是一个耗时的过程。公司需要协调多个部门业务人员的参与，难以控制。这通常会导致新员工感到困惑和起步缓慢。

MAPFRE, a global leader in insurance, faced several challenges as it expanded its operations. The company needed to improve the functionality and performance of its existing operational management system, increase scalability to support global operations, integrate systems and processes across the enterprise, simplify the development of new business solutions, and improve collaboration between business and IT. The international market was particularly competitive due to the residual effects on prices after the global financial crisis in 2008. As a result, insurance providers were being pressured to become more efficient and do more with less. MAPFRE decided BPM was the solution that would provide the scalability and efficiency needed to get ahead in the global marketplace.

The insurance industry is facing a myriad of challenges including aging IT infrastructure, increasing customer churn, decreasing turnover, protracted time-to-market, disruptive new entrants and a steady stream of new regulations. Additionally, more and more customers are looking for a digital touch point with their insurance providers. In order to keep up in this environment, providers are looking for an easy-to-use digital solution that has a rapid ROI, a low TCO and can be integrated with legacy systems. The solution must also come with a Web portal that’s reliable and customer-friendly for easy online access to services. Analysts refer to the market for digital insurance solutions as immature and with lots of potential for growth.

Hillsborough County in Florida, with a population of 1.2 million citizens, operates an Information & Service Center (ISC) to provide a reliable source of information to citizens, businesses, visitors and internal departments. The county aimed to become the “Next-Generation County” and the centralized call center was a significant part of this plan. However, before the implementation of the call center, the county used aging, unmaintained and unsupported on-premises customer relationship management software. Incoming inquiries were handled by “call taking groups” and there were no recorded performance metrics. This led to inefficiencies and a lack of transparency in the handling of customer inquiries.

AXA’s goal is to become the preferred company for all of its stakeholders and customers. This requires a strong focus on the customer and fostering employee involvement by building a culture of trust and SLA achievement. In claims management, in particular, AXA France wanted to identify the cause of SLA issues to increase customer satisfaction and optimize the claims management team. In the end, AXA wants its claims management organization to have a process optimization mindset.

CWS-boco, a specialist in lavatory hygiene, floor mats and textile services, has a clear focus—to always remain the leader in quality and innovation. The corresponding demands on enterprise IT are high. Accurate analysis of processing times are needed for a targeted and rapid increase in the company’s service quality. Estimated times are not enough. In Germany alone, more than 200,000 companies of all sizes and from all industries rely on CWS-boco’s services. A nationwide service network with more than 60 locations, 21 washing and processing plants and more than 600 service vehicles ensures that customer needs are always met throughout the entire service cycle. CWS-boco handles everything from order taking, delivery and all cleaning and repair steps to pick up and exchange of equipment, clothing and consumables.

GAZ-SYSTEM S.A. was established in 2004 from six formerly independent Regional Pipeline Operators (RPOs). Despite the similar nature of their services, each of the entities used a different set of procedures and a unique mix of IT tools. With the EU accession Poland became involved in the process of the European gas market liberalization. The prospects of an open domestic market, providing equal access to gas networks for all market players and, eventually, the interoperation of the gas exchange posed new challenges for gas transmission in Poland. It was GAZ-SYSTEM S.A. whose role it was to prepare the country for the upcoming gas market liberalization in terms of technical, organizational and business capabilities.

Smals, a leading Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services organization in Belgium, had invested years of development in 42 specialized COBOL applications. Once Smals had created a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the organization needed an efficient way to establish communications between the SOA and these core mainframe applications. Effective communication between the systems of the CBSS and Smals is crucial for a swift processing of millions of transactions. “When one of our members wants to process a declaration—for example for registering a new employee in their system—they send an electronic message to the CBSS that uses an IBM mainframe,” Vanneste said. “Formerly, this message was passed through to Smals’ BS2000 mainframe, where the request was processed by one of the 42 specialized COBOL applications and answered.

U.S. Bank expanded through organic growth and numerous acquisitions creating a complex network of systems, process and organizations. Manual paper-based processes that relied on spreadsheets, email and redundant processes resulted in latency and human processing errors that jeopardized their goals of reliability, consistency and innovation. Further, lack of in-house connectivity hindered the bank’s ability to link to external sources for time-critical data inhibiting their need for speed, scalability and agility necessary to grow their business and deliver higher customer satisfaction.

Gardner Denver, a leading global provider of high-quality industrial equipment, technologies, and services, faced several challenges. The company lacked real-time fault detection and the ability to remotely configure equipment, leading to costly servicing and repairs. The company's customers rely on the continuous operation of their industrial equipment, and eliminating downtime was a primary goal. Gardner Denver sells its equipment through a strong, global set of partners and distributors. It needed a way to capture operational information from its machinery and provide it to the organizations best placed to support its customers. Each partner and distributor takes ownership in its customers and pride in the quality performance of its equipment. Delivery of secure and unique solutions by each partner and distributor is critical to ensure high-performing machinery.

The U.S. government law enforcement agency was facing a challenge in managing the massive influx of criminal justice records. The agency collects arrest reports, traffic citations, probation files, photos, and other criminal records from federal, state, tribal, and local agencies. As early as 2010, the agency was dealing with 1 million records or roughly 10 GB of data daily. However, the agency's disk-bound databases could not ingest, cleanse, and assimilate the information quickly enough. By 2013, data volumes had exploded 10x to 100GB streaming in daily.

AVIC, a large-scale enterprise managed by the central government of China, was facing pressure from the aviation industry to improve its processes. The company had no top-level design and individualized processes with no collective strategy. The business and IT strategy were misaligned. AVIC had a number of complex, disparate systems and processes that needed to be streamlined if it was going to outshine its competition in terms of efficiency and agility and deliver on its strategy. Its approach was twofold: First, establish its AVIC Operation System (AOS) and get IT management in order and, second, conduct an in-depth process application analysis and smarten up.

The company provides insight into the watching and buying habits of an estimated 10 million global consumers. Ad agencies and brand marketers rely on the company’s online measurement tools to maximize the effectiveness of fast-moving Internet advertising campaigns, so it’s critical that the company deliver ad performance reports quickly. Customers retrieved campaign performance reports through a web portal, which in turn queried a diskbound database to compile reports from tens of terabytes of ad-tracking data. However, customer satisfaction took a hit when slowdowns in data access began to degrade system performance. In some cases, customers had to wait as long as 20 seconds for campaign reports — an eternity in today’s need-itnow world. Even more troubling, slow database access caused an internal security system to time out on more than 50% of queries, and the problem only got worse as data volumes grew.

The multinational conglomerate corporation, a multibillion-dollar global manufacturer producing industrial, safety and consumer products, faced several challenges. The company decided to globally deploy SAP in 2010. However, the complexity of local legacy configurations strangled the SAP initiative. Millions of dollars were spent monthly on consultants to make changes at the plants and their legacy Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). Four years into a five-year project, the company’s global SAP deployment was only 10 percent complete. The company needed a solution to accelerate SAP integrations at plants across the enterprise—making SAP deployment faster, simpler and safer while leveraging and extending legacy investments.

The Russian oil company faced several challenges including technological disruption across all lines of business, intensifying global competition, managing dozens of subsidiaries operating worldwide, overly complicated business processes, and a government mandate to digitalize operations. The company operates in an extremely challenging physical environment and must manage new disruptive technologies transforming all areas of the oil production process. Failure to keep up can mean unprofitability without warning. The company's top priority is the urgent adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, real-time big data analysis, predictive intelligence and resilient production systems.

The Star Entertainment Group, one of Australia’s largest casino operators, was facing challenges in differentiating its VIP customer experience and closing high-value transactions quickly. The company's existing chip buying process was taking its VIP patrons away from playing for up to 20 minutes as they waited to convert their account credits to chips at a gaming table. The process was manual and resource-intensive, requiring paperwork in triplicate and multiple approvals for security purposes. The company wanted to transform this complex manual process into a fast and convenient mobile experience for its VIPs.

Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to conserving wetlands and other natural spaces for waterfowl, wildlife, and people. To achieve its mission, DUC administers fundraising, retail, and advocacy campaigns and manages projects using software built on Adabas & Natural. However, the organization faced the challenge of moving its applications to the Web and integrating them with third-party applications. This was necessary to engage and mobilize stakeholders effectively, maximize awareness and support, and manage projects in support of its conservation mission.

The American Armed Forces Mutual Aid Association (AAFMAA) was facing a need for new digital services to attract a new generation of members. However, the business was anchored in legacy IT systems, and a rip-and-replace project was deemed too costly and risky. In 2005, AAFMAA needed to innovate and change because the old ways of doing business simply didn't appeal to the new digital generation. Digital business transformation was the answer, but IT could barely handle current business needs. Rip-and-replace projects often seem like the only answer. But getting rid of old systems means losing decades of investments. Worst of all, these expensive multi-million dollar projects come with no guarantee of success. As a practiced investor used to managing risk, AAFMAA didn’t like these odds.

The insurance market is highly dynamic and shaped by intense competition, so insurance companies must be able to adapt processes quickly to changing conditions. As such, ongoing business process optimization is an important factor for strengthening a company’s market position. CosmosDirekt, Germany’s leading online insurance company, has shown consistent growth in this market environment. In order to support its ongoing dynamic development, the company’s long-term goals include optimizing process efficiency and improving customer satisfaction. Faced with stiff competition, it was strategically important for CosmosDirekt to further improve customer satisfaction and process efficiency to expand the company’s leading market position.