Angostura Limited, a leading Caribbean rum producer, was facing challenges with its manual, paper-based sales process. The process was creating delays in getting orders and related information into SAP. The salesperson had to physically print the customer’s current data before a customer visit and orders and payment receipts were handwritten and manually entered later into SAP. This required the manual intervention from at least four separate departments multiple times along the process. While in the field, the salesperson could not directly answer customer questions regarding available stock and account balances, and would need to phone the related area to inquire.

Royal Dirkzwager, a European leader in providing information and communication technologies to the maritime-logistics market, was facing a data overload due to the continuous stream of information from 120,000 ships transmitting every two seconds. The company was struggling to cope with the overwhelming data volumes, growing demand for precision ship tracking, and increasing customer functionality requests. The traditional ship-based transponders were limited to communicating data only when a ship came in to port and were unable to reach further than 40km offshore. The company needed a solution to exploit the data for added functionality and reduced costs.

DB Netz AG, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn AG, is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure for rail operations. The company's IT infrastructure was complex and many applications were developed independently from one another, leading to data being managed in different databases and functionalities for realizing requirements being developed redundantly. This resulted in higher costs and longer project durations. The company sought to develop an innovative IT toolbox system as part of a service-oriented architecture that would structure and harmonize the development process for all IT applications within the company. The goal was to automate processes from technical requirements through realization and documentation.

The Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) in Kuwait had been relying on the stable architecture of Adabas and Natural for its core civic information systems and applications for almost three decades. However, personnel changes over time, along with inadequate standards and controls, led to a fragmentation of key business and technical knowledge. This was upheld by just a few seasoned agency employees. As a result, production changes were increasingly unpredictable and the risk was high that new decrees from the Kuwaiti government could not be implemented in time. The agency needed to regain control over its IT assets and business process information, expand knowledge throughout the organization and be able to plan for and make changes safely once again.

Accarda AG, a specialist in integrated customer management, is Switzerland’s leader in customer loyalty cards with a payment function. The company manages more than two million customer loyalty cards, with annual card revenues of 2.5 billion Swiss francs. Accarda AG ensures a favorable ratio of costs to benefits for its clients. The company stands for high-performance, individualized business processes and strict adherence to the client’s budget and timing requirements. Consistent process management, with quality assurance in accordance with ISO 9001, is the key to ensuring that Accarda’s clients derive the greatest possible benefit from the growth in sales that can be expected from implementing a loyalty card program. The company was looking for a solution to measure, analyze and optimize business process chains, create dashboards for the online visualization of process measurement results, and provide online access to the entire range of process-related and organizational knowledge.

Gist Limited, a leading U.K. supply chain solutions provider, needed to improve the speed, efficiency, and traceability of its enterprise interfaces. The company's success depends on its ability to consistently deliver superior service 24/7 despite challenging targets. Gist's IT systems had to be as reliable as the rest of its business, otherwise, it would escalate very quickly. If there was an unplanned middleware outage, file or data issue lasting longer than 20 minutes, the business would already be saying, 'Now it's too late. We're going to have to go manual and pick to an estimate.' This increases costs, incurs customer fines, and affects the company's reputation. Gist's supply chain is incredibly fast: A sandwich produced by a supplier in Scotland is available for sale by a store in the south of England, more than 500 miles away, a mere 24 hours after manufacture.

Deutsche Telekom Technischer Service GmbH (DTTS) offers its customers a market-oriented service portfolio for Deutsche Telekom telecommunication, IT and IP technologies, from on-site consulting to total customer network management. DTTS services are geared toward private, corporate and carrier customer segments. DTTS sought to identify and leverage existing synergies and to keep the cost of modeling and maintenance at a minimum. To achieve this, DTTS looked at options to introduce a leaner process management system. The different production lines share many of the same or similar procedures and steps. DTTS wanted avoid redundancies while maintaining the benefit of customer-segment-specific processes. Otherwise, it would take too much effort to model and maintain so many different business processes, and existing synergies wouldn’t be realized.

The Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA) operates one of the largest IT landscapes in Germany with numerous IT processes, many of them business-critical. The agency can only perform its tasks smoothly if it has effective IT support. Therefore, the BA has high requirements for process availability, performance and scalability. These requirements are reflected in the IT target landscape, which is designed to provide future-proof support for BA business processes. The BA’s IT strategy is to take a comprehensive approach and avoid compromise from a purely technical perspective. The IT department’s vision serves as the foundation for ongoing IT strategy development. That vision is to be the most capable, high-performance and cost-effective service provider in the public sector.

Travelbasys, a leader in the European travel software market, faced challenges due to the growing industry transition to the web and increasing competition from startups. The company's core system, RBS, was based on a mainframe architecture, which was becoming outdated as the travel business moved to the cloud. A new generation of travel agents, developers, and customers were unfamiliar with host-based systems. The task for travelbasys was to transition to the web, compete in a newly lean and connected travel market—and do it without compromising 40 years-worth of process, data and customer investments.

US Foods had grown through hundreds of acquisitions over decades. As a result, the company lacked an easily adaptable IT infrastructure. Information was uncoordinated across systems. Its 63 branches acted autonomously using different business processes. This resulted in inaccurate pricing, manual processes, inconsistent data and a lack of visibility across divisions.

In 2011, Philips embarked on a journey to become an agile, process-oriented global company. To this end, Philips launched the “Accelerate!” program to build an agile and focused transformation process to help business owners bring propositions to market faster and improve existing business-market combinations. The challenge was to improve collaboration between business process owners, IT and internal and external partners and connect the different components of the IT transformation.

Discovery Communications, a global nonfiction media company, was facing challenges with its high-volume process of managing, reviewing, and renewing thousands of contracts a year. The process was previously based on email and spreadsheets, varied by region, and offered minimal opportunity for oversight, governance, and data mining. Management wanted greater visibility into the process to optimize revenue and ensure opportunities were not missed. The process had to be accessible and reliable for international and mobile sales as well as senior-level executives.

Nielsen, a global information and measurement company, was facing a challenge with its operations. The company's operations had to wait for up to 20 seconds to view product details and between transactions. They were using a fat client application over a terminal server or 'green screens' to characterize a product. The increasing speed and globalization of business necessitated the replacement of the regionally silo’d fat clients/green screens systems with a highly performing, single global platform delivering globally aligned product information.

The University of Leipzig faces several major challenges. Recognizing trends in the private sector, responding faster and better to changing industry requirements, teaching theory through practice and setting new standards in education are at the top of the list. Only by achieving this can an excellent university thoroughly prepare its students for their future careers. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) are growth markets worldwide. In the medium to long term, the demand for specialists in these fields will be very great. It is thus necessary to recognize opportunities for collaboration with the private sector and share the responsibility for equipping the market with the needed talent.

HSBC Turkey had planned to double its customers and regional branches in five years without changing staff. To support this fast expansion, HSBC Turkey took a holistic approach to SOA governance—one that will assure effective lifecycle management, asset governance and impact analysis while increasing service re-usability. From the first application deployed, it was obvious SOA governance was essential to getting the maximum value from SOA. Governance would guarantee the success of the company’s transformation to an SOA and unify all legacy governance processes within a single framework. The company would be able to enhance asset management and re-usability by improving existing governance roles, procedures and rules.

VR Leasing Group, a member of FinanzVerbund, a cooperative association of financial solutions providers based in Germany, was facing challenges due to its heterogeneous IT landscape. The disparity in the IT landscape made it difficult to standardize or automate sales processes, particularly the loan application processing. Each disparate application in the process had its own address list, and data had to be entered manually and then verified. This resulted in an overlap in functionality between systems, adding to the inefficiency. The sales partners used various browser-based online front-ends, each with its own specific application process and its own address list, which was not always consistent with addresses stored in the other front-ends or in back-end application management and customer relationship management systems. This resulted in an excessive effort to test and maintain application functions and interfaces that carried out similar tasks. The same was true for assuring the quality of master address data since data was not exchanged automatically between disparate applications.

Mondi Packaging Bags’ site acquisition strategy resulted in a heterogeneous IT landscape structure that was rapidly becoming too complex. Over 20 different back-office systems were running on a wide variety of platforms and with varying software release statuses — all systems needed to be connected to the sales portal. The company was also planning to gradually implement SAP systems in all of its larger production sites. The challenge was to create an integration layer to connect all company systems and all of its customers’ procurement systems to the sales portal.

Lyreco, a global office supply distributor, was facing challenges in real-time stock and sales insight. The company was in need of improving service assurance and driving operational cost savings from restocking and servicing machines. The lack of real-time data was causing inefficiencies in their operations and was affecting their customer service levels. The company was also looking for ways to innovate and take advantage of a connected, digital future. They wanted to embed IoT technology in their products to redefine their relationship with their partners and customers.

A leading credit card company was failing to meet its one-second Service Level Agreement (SLA) for identifying blacklisted credit cards approximately 0.3 percent of the time. This resulted in blacklisted cards being improperly accepted, costing the company an estimated $10 million annually. The causes were twofold. First, the company kept its list of seven million blacklisted card numbers and individuals in a disk-bound Oracle® database, which was slow to access. Second, the Java® garbage collector caused extended, unpredictable pauses. Each pause forced the company to “guess” on many transactions, exposing the company to losses.

The company, a Fortune 100 shipping company, was facing a challenge in presenting relevant cross-sell offers to its customers within the stipulated Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The company receives more than 32 million tracking requests daily, each of which presents an opportunity to increase sales and customer satisfaction by serving up relevant content and offers. However, deciding which offers to present required time-consuming calls to multiple disk-bound databases, resulting in data retrieval times at least four times slower than those mandated by SLAs. This lag was cutting into potential cross-sell revenues and putting the company at risk of upsetting customers with a subpar online experience.

The company, a top loyalty program provider, was facing a challenge in meeting the aggressive end-to-end Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 500 milliseconds for every transaction, as demanded by large retail prospects. The company's data center took an average of 20 percent longer than that — 600 milliseconds — just to query upwards of 32GB of customer data in a central, disk-bound database. Furthermore, Java-related garbage collection pauses caused unexpected spikes in response times that would have resulted in financial penalties for failure to meet the SLA, and in unhappy customers. In order to win new business from larger retailers, the company realized it had to move its data into fast machine memory.

The company, a leading global producer of passive electronic components and interconnects, was facing several challenges. It was operating on a legacy mainframe infrastructure that was over 30 years old. The mainframe IBM environment, which included Software AG’s Adabas, Natural and EntireX, was still functional but was not equipped to handle the demands of the modern manufacturing world. The company was facing rising operational costs and was struggling to prepare for the green energy revolution and faster production cycles. By 2013, the company was in a critical situation. Backup hardware had become impossible to find, older users supporting the legacy system were retiring, software updates were non-existent, and adding new functionality was off the table. This meant that in the event of a disaster, there was nobody the company could call.

The company, a leading marketing agency, was facing challenges due to the overwhelming volumes of data, the industry-wide revolution in digitalization, and a disruptive media and advertising environment. The company needed to deliver marketing messages to customers where they are, when they are receptive, and perfectly optimized for the right device or medium. They also needed to move beyond simple, post-campaign analysis to a set of analytic techniques that incorporated probability, statistics, algorithmic modeling, data mining, and machine learning. The volumes of data, computational resources, and technical knowhow required for this were tremendous.

Chevron, one of the top three integrated energy companies, wanted a centralized SAP® system with standardized process and master data design. The company was seeking to extract more value from its business processes. Additionally, Chevron identified the need for business process intelligence and a governance framework to ensure high quality and management of all material master data in SAP®. The challenge was to implement a system that could cover a wide range of processes, activities, and master data types across multiple countries.

The company, a global leader in consumer health products, was facing several challenges. They wanted to 'win differently' with a digital business platform, improve access to information enterprise-wide, reduce manual work and standardize processes, increase visibility across the global supply chain, and become more customer-centric. They were dealing with painful processes like manually collecting data from disconnected systems. They had no way to detect issues in delivery flow, and customer interactions were reactive rather than proactive. Costs increased due to shipment escalations. The disjointed Approval for Product Release (APR) process required manually consolidating paper specs into binders across all R&D functions. Every region had a different framework with no way to monitor or share information. There was no workflow support, no integration to other systems.

MPWiK S.A., a major water company in Poland, aimed to improve productivity across all operational areas while maintaining the quality of its core services. The company also sought to introduce a management system based on business processes that could be independently audited through formal certification, including ISO 9001 for quality management, ISO 14001 for environment management, and ISO 18001 for workplace safety. In 2010, MPWiK S.A. initiated a process transformation program to enhance productivity and transparency. Information technology was identified as a key factor in the success of this initiative, enabling the company to reorganize and introduce measurable and repeatable processes. This led to improvements in all core operational areas such as water production, network service and maintenance, and water leakage reduction.

As big, fast data proliferates, more and more data streams are being generated in real time from a myriad of data sources, such as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, markets, mobile devices, internal transactional systems and clickstream analysis. Real-time insights must be derived from this data to give a competitive edge to agile organizations that want to act on these insights before they lose their value. To handle billions of these data streams, new software architectures and techniques are needed. These types of software are called “Big Data Streaming Analytics.” Companies need educated specialists to harness the power of big data. The Streaming Analytics Education Package (SAEP) is Software AG´s answer to the growing demand for data science experts. Universities and private companies share the responsibility of training the sought-after talent currently demanded by the market.

Suva, a Swiss insurance company, was facing the challenge of managing its complex and diverse business processes for which no single-source IT solution existed. The company had to manage its heterogeneous software and hardware systems, which were comprised of core prevention, insurance, and rehabilitation solutions as well as various interdisciplinary applications. Suva was also looking for a way to align its business strategy and IT, support corporate governance, and manage its IT architecture in a heterogeneous IT environment.

HealthCare.gov, the official website of U.S. Affordable Care Act, was launched in 2013 to assist millions of uninsured Americans. However, the site was over budget and unreliable, fraught with technical difficulties. Citizens had only from Nov. 1 to Jan. 31 to use the site compare insurance options and sign up for 2014. The unexpectedly high number of visitors began to overload the site’s infrastructure. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scrambled for answers from a variety of sources, including internal government experts, external programmers and industry partner, Software AG. The main challenge was to rapidly improve the performance of the website, assure a stable and scalable platform— especially during peak buying season, and increase site reliability so that no data’s lost.

The global player in the oil and gas industry was spending over $1 billion annually on technology to organize, store, and share information that drives the business. However, the enterprise IT infrastructure had become complicated due to piecemeal construction throughout the company’s business units and a tangled web of legacy systems from mergers and acquisitions dating back to the early 1980s. The company had an estimated 8,000 applications costing over $600 million to run annually. Despite the significant annual expenditure on new systems, there was no alignment to a multi-year road map. Application strategies were inconsistent across the business units, and there was no common architecture or strategy.