Barclays, a global bank operating in over 50 countries and serving nearly 60 million customers, faced a significant challenge in improving and streamlining the customer experience. The bank's relationships with customers were multifaceted, with customers engaging with the bank through various channels such as mobile, online, and branch locations. The bank had identified 400 different customer journeys, and the challenge was to align these across the enterprise and improve them in a way that positively impacted customers quickly. The director of operations at Barclays, Mike Gamble, recognized the need to transform the bank's processes around customer journeys. He aimed to enhance the understanding of how various functions contribute to delivering customer experiences and then expedite the rollout time of these new processes to achieve the end goal for the customer.

Ashurst, a leading international law firm, faced a significant challenge after a major merger that almost doubled its size. The firm's HR function aimed to transform its operations to support the ongoing strategic growth objectives. The merger presented challenges in managing talent, developing skills, and rewarding performance across the global business. Each part of the business had its own systems and processes for managing absences, tracking performance, and rewarding success. This led to increased manual effort and cost, reduced ability to ensure globally consistent definitions of human capital management metrics, and difficulty in generating comprehensive reports. The firm also faced challenges in answering important questions related to employee skillsets, retention, and compensation policies across the organization.

FMC Corporation, a specialty chemicals manufacturing company, was facing challenges with its indirect procurement processes. The company's decentralized approach to procurement across its global business units made it difficult to manage and control how employees purchased goods and services. This lack of visibility and operational efficiency prevented FMC from leveraging its global scale to negotiate better deals with suppliers, and made it difficult for the company to understand and manage total procurement spend effectively. The company needed a solution that would allow it to take control over global sourcing and spending, and manage global procurement more efficiently through standardized, automated processes.

Asahi Beverages, a leading beverage company in Australia and New Zealand, faced a significant challenge when it acquired several Australian beverage businesses. The enlarged group needed to streamline and optimize operations even as further acquisitions joined the family. The company relied heavily on SAP solutions to manage its extended non-alcohol business processes, from manufacturing through to sales and distribution. However, with several new companies joining the group over the past few years, the Asahi Beverages team was keen to reduce system administration effort and maintenance costs. They wanted to use the savings to invest in new business applications and services. The challenge was to cut the number of IT incidents, accelerate the time for resolution of those incidents, and release valuable time for the technical teams to focus on innovation and business development.

Avnet, a global technology solutions provider, was facing a challenge in delivering rapid and reliable data analysis and reporting to its clients. The company's managed services clients relied on Avnet and its partners to convert their enterprise data into actionable intelligence. However, the existing hosted environment used for data warehousing and business intelligence applications was not meeting the desired performance levels. Avnet had experienced issues with their previous cloud provider, which led them to re-evaluate their hosting arrangement. The company realized that they could provide their customers with better performance and more flexibility at a more attractive price by making some changes.

Bharti Infratel Ltd., a leading communications passive infrastructure provider, was facing a significant challenge in managing and maintaining its over 30,000 communication towers across India. The cost of tower infrastructure management and maintenance was consuming 60 to 70 percent of the operating budget for communications service providers. To keep rates low and expand service into more areas, providers sold off their passive infrastructure to third-party companies that now rent tower space back for a much lower rate. However, Bharti Infratel needed to keep their operating costs low as well. The company wanted to apply business analytics to spot inefficiencies, but with 16 TB of data and growing, it needed a solution that could handle high volumes and still run smoothly. Furthermore, the company had no way to identify how many low-tenancy towers it had overall due to business analytics systems being in silos across the business.

American Eagle Outfitters (AEO), a leading global specialty retailer, was facing challenges in delivering high-quality shopping experiences across all its digital channels. The company relied on limited information from customer feedback forms to understand digital customer experiences. This approach resulted in incomplete information, making it difficult to replicate the exact circumstances that prevented customers from successfully completing their purchases. Consequently, it was challenging to identify 'sticking points' on the online and mobile journey that frustrated customers. The company was also struggling with low conversion rates due to issues such as a corrupted shopping cart and incorrect discount codes. Additionally, AEO was facing difficulties in understanding customer interactions on the mobile channel due to the complexity of multiple mobile devices, browsers, and screen sizes.

ARTESP, the São Paulo State Transport Agency, was facing challenges in managing its vast road network, which spans over 6,400 kilometers and serves more than 20 million people across 271 cities. The agency was struggling with a lack of clear visibility into traffic and road conditions, which made it difficult to prioritize highway maintenance and management activities. This lack of clarity could potentially cause delays to inspection activities. Furthermore, the inconsistency in data reports and responses to problems by the private contractors responsible for day-to-day road maintenance, toll collection, and responding to traffic accidents, hindered ARTESP’s capacity to manage the contracts proactively and risked jeopardizing road quality. The manual effort of identifying road hazards through physical inspections and correlating service issues with accidents was increasingly time-consuming and prone to human error.

A business outsourcing company that provides human capital management solutions, including HR, payroll, talent management, tax and benefits administration solutions, was faced with the challenge of modernizing its mainframe applications. One of the company’s groups, responsible for maintaining a complex payroll application, was tasked with providing web services for its front-end systems, which are written in Java. The payroll application runs on mainframe servers and processes payroll requests in large batches. The group, consisting of developers, testers, quality assurance staff and statutory research analysts, needed to find a development application that would facilitate this modernization effort.

The police forces in the German federal state of Lower Saxony were facing challenges in fighting crime and improving traffic flows due to the lack of efficient use of information from various sources. The existing systems stored information about suspects, incidents, victims of crime, and traffic accidents in several systems, making it difficult for officers to gain an overview without consulting multiple data sources. This process was time-consuming and inefficient. Moreover, the technical demands for analyzing and evaluating incidents had increased over the years, necessitating a more advanced business intelligence solution. The police force needed a solution that could provide officers with individually compiled reports about specific locations and types of crimes in near real-time, supported by a unified, consistent event processing and evaluation system.

Christian Brothers Services, a nonprofit service provider to Catholic and faith-based institutions, faced a challenge with its increasingly dispersed workforce. The company needed to enhance employee access to collaboration and social networking tools. The company's field employees frequently traveled within and outside the country, and many of their customer service agents worked from home full time. The company had been relying on IBM collaboration solutions to keep its workforce connected. However, the existing system of electronic teamrooms was proving to be inefficient. If an employee was involved in multiple projects, a meeting affecting all those projects appeared on each project’s team room calendar instead of as a single entry on the person’s Notes calendar. This led to a lack of centralized information and increased difficulty in managing multiple projects.

Advantech Co., Ltd., a Taiwan-based company offering hardware, software, system integration, design services, and logistics support, was preparing to construct two new buildings. The company wanted to avoid the issues that had plagued its existing facilities, particularly in terms of energy efficiency. This was not only due to the high costs associated with wasteful operations and reactive maintenance procedures but also because of the strict energy efficiency standards imposed by the Taiwanese government for new buildings. The challenge was to develop a solution that would enable Advantech to meet these standards and improve its overall energy efficiency.

Allianz Managed Operations & Services SE (AMOS), the shared service provider for Allianz Group, was faced with the challenge of facilitating compliance by rolling out new, standardized processes to accelerate reporting workflows and streamline quarter- and year-end closing processes. The company was seeking a more robust and efficient way to provide accurate reports in a timely manner. The aim was to build a best-practice approach that could meet the current reporting requirements and deliver the scalability to support future business growth. The challenge was to replace multiple processes with a single, integrated solution that could connect more than 80 source systems to the local SAP ERP and SAP Business Warehouse applications.

Amadori Group, a leading food company in Italy, was facing the challenge of keeping pace with the changing culinary preferences and dietary needs of young people aged 25–35. The company wanted to evolve its marketing to dynamically align with these changes and sought to create engaging ways to target this segment by exploiting the potential of online marketing and social media. The goal was to boost brand visibility, encourage customer loyalty, and gauge consumers’ reactions to products and marketing campaigns. The company also wanted to monitor marketplace perceptions of the Amadori brand and maintain brand integrity and consistency across product lines. Another challenge was to keep the content current and engaging to diverse audiences.

AMB Sports and Entertainment Group (AMBSE), a subsidiary of AMB Group LLC, is responsible for managing the Atlanta Falcons Football Club, the New Atlanta Stadium project, and a future Atlanta Major League Soccer team. The group faced a significant challenge in attracting fans to the stadium, as they had to compete with high-tech, at-home, and other viewing experiences. The group needed to deploy technology that could enhance the traffic and parking experience, provide faster food and beverage service, and offer equal or better Wi-Fi connectivity than at home. The ultimate goal was to create an immersive, one-of-a-kind stadium experience that would draw fans away from their screens at home and into the stadium seats.

AUDI AG, a leading global car manufacturer, was facing stiff competition from low-cost manufacturers developing their own brands. To stay ahead, Audi aimed to create super-efficient business processes. The company had implemented SAP® ERP to manage various aspects of its business operations, from human resources and cost control to supply chain and plant maintenance. Over time, the SAP environment had expanded to around 100 separate systems, running on 12 HP servers with Oracle databases and an additional 24 HP blades. Audi wanted to improve its IT efficiency to reduce capital and operational costs and create a greener infrastructure, aligning with the company’s sustainability strategy. The company also aimed to increase the availability and performance of its SAP systems, making them more scalable and flexible. The IT Services Department at Audi was tasked with helping the company face several broad business challenges, including increasing demands from employees, customers, and suppliers; the need to support new technologies; rising cost pressures; and growing competition.

Banco Galicia, one of Argentina's top three private banks, faced a significant challenge in improving the time-to-market for new financial products and services. The bank's legacy IT applications and systems were unable to support the rapid changes required to stay competitive in the market. The bank's existing software, which had been in place for over 20 years, was largely developed in-house and designed to meet past banking needs. However, the proposed new services required a customer-focused approach, and the older software could not be extended or adapted rapidly enough to provide the necessary capabilities. The bank serves a large client base, from individuals to large corporations, each with specific requirements. The existing IT systems were not flexible enough to differentiate the bank's approach to each client. The challenge was to modernize the IT infrastructure to meet the requirements of a 21st-century bank and compete with the world's major banking corporations.

A Benelux bank, providing banking, savings, investment, and pension products and services, was facing a significant challenge due to the increase in malware-based attacks in its region. The bank was particularly concerned about man-in-the-browser and man-in-the-middle attacks against its customers. While the bank had not experienced a fraud loss from these attacks, the executives were worried about the potential damage these attacks could cause to the bank and its customers. The bank had previously invested heavily in perimeter security, such as intrusion prevention systems, to prevent criminals from accessing the bank's network. However, as fraudsters began targeting bank customers through malware attacks, the bank executives realized the need to expand their security capabilities to the endpoint. The bank was only able to learn about a fraud attempt when a customer reported an issue with their account balance. Therefore, they sought an additional layer of security to gain an early warning of malware-driven attacks.

Brazil’s Ministry of Justice, specifically the Department of Assets Recovery and International Legal Cooperation, was tasked with the challenge of identifying and investigating the illicit proceeds of criminal activities such as corruption, organized crime, drug trafficking, and money laundering. The department created the Technology Laboratory Against Money Laundering (LAB-LD) to support complex investigations into corruption and money laundering. As of 2014, there are 43 laboratories across Brazil, which make up the Federal Laboratory Network Against Money Laundering (REDE-LAB). These laboratories analyze a vast amount of data to uncover and freeze illicit assets. However, the process of analyzing the data was complex and time-consuming, often taking months and thousands of person-hours. The challenge was further compounded by the fact that 60 percent of the data came from structured sources such as databases and spreadsheets, and the remaining 40 percent from unstructured sources, such as social media and email.

Bugaboo, a Dutch company known for its trendy pushchairs, was facing challenges in generating accurate financial and sales forecasts in a timely manner. The company's rapid growth had led to changes in planning and forecasting requirements, and the existing system, IBM Cognos Planning, was reaching its limits. Performance-related issues were causing disruptions, and any changes to the planning model required the entire system to be halted. The model was split into four geographic regions to facilitate management outside office hours, but this meant that each change had to be implemented four times. Furthermore, Bugaboo wanted to broaden its planning and forecasting to include more than just financial and sales forecasts. For instance, the Innovation Department wanted to monitor costs at every stage of a project, from development through to production.

The California Franchise Tax Board (FTB), a part of the California Government Operations Agency, was faced with a daunting task. They had a list of over three million delinquent or non-filing taxpayers and were struggling to determine where to start the collection process. The traditional methods of relying on experience and anecdotal evidence were no longer effective, and state revenue was suffering as a result. The board was grappling with a multibillion-dollar gap between the amount they collected and the amount they were owed. The challenge was to find a more efficient and effective way to prioritize nonpayment cases and increase revenue collection.

Canadian National Railway Company (CN), a major economic player transporting over CAD250 billion worth of goods annually, faced a significant challenge in its financial reporting process. The company's accounting team was burdened with increasingly complex accounting standards and internal demands, making financial reporting labor-intensive. The team was responsible for generating a variety of reports, including quarterly and annual regulatory reports, internal monthly statements, and executive analysis. However, many of these processes were spreadsheet-based and had reached their limits. The team was spending more time on low-value activities such as data collection and performing repetitive tasks, which was inefficient and took away from more value-added tasks like analysis.

CarrefourSA, a leading multinational retail group, set an ambitious revenue goal of USD 2.7 billion by 2016 in Turkey. To achieve this, the company aimed to more than double its retail footprint by opening at least one new store every day for an entire year. However, the existing processes and systems meant it took an entire month to set up a new store. The company faced the challenge of expanding its store landscape rapidly to connect with prospects ahead of its competitors. The process of making a new retail store operational involved onboarding new employees, installing and connecting the point-of-sale systems, adding new delivery points to the stock distribution network, and more. The company relied on multiple different business systems to manage these business processes, which were complex and time-consuming due to limited integration between the systems.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is tasked with managing an enormous data archive of 100 petabytes, a volume that nearly doubles as 13 large data centers worldwide receive partial copies of the data. The data is generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, which is used to reconstruct the first moments of the universe to gain a better understanding of physical laws. The LHC generates more than 25 petabytes of data in the four main LHC experiments, even with drastic data filtering protocols in place. CERN does not have the computing capacity required to analyze the data, so it relies on a distributed environment consisting of 160 different computer centers located in 45 countries to distribute data to its scientists. The biggest challenge is the constant influx of data, more than a gigabyte per second, which needs to be stored, preserved in the long term, and made accessible to several thousand physicists worldwide.

Chamberlain Group, Inc., a leading connected products company, recognized a gap in the market where consumers wanted to use their smartphones to control and monitor their garage doors from anywhere in the world. The company developed an innovative solution, the MyQ smartphone app, which quickly gained popularity with a monthly growth rate in user numbers hitting 15 percent. However, the existing system architecture was not robust enough to withstand the pressure of this growth rate for long, and the risk of impact on performance and availability was constantly rising. The company needed to ensure that the app was highly reliable and responsive for consumers, especially when it controls something as important as the security of peoples’ homes. The challenge was to make the existing architecture more robust and scalable, so that it could support future peaks of up to one million concurrent consumer actions.

ABT Power Management, a family-owned company that provides engineered solutions for DC powered applications, was facing a significant challenge. As the company grew and took on new customers, it realized the need to increase its headcount. However, the transfer of technical knowledge to new employees, essential for delivering exceptional customer services, posed a significant hurdle. In the early days, institutional knowledge was stored in the minds of company experts, who had vast experience working in the industry. As the company expanded, it needed a new way to store and share institutional knowledge effectively with new members of its team. The challenge was to find a solution that could bridge the gap between classroom learning and professional learning, enabling new employees to get up to speed on the industry faster and more efficiently.

Going to hospital can be intimidating for young patients, whether going in for a routine examination or major surgery. Alder Hey Children’s Hospital wanted to use technology to reduce patients’ anxiety about their hospital experiences. The hospital considered this when it built its new facility, taking care to keep the architecture and décor light and whimsical. But the organisation wanted to do more than make its facility welcoming—it wanted to make the entire hospital experience less stressful for patients and their families. The hospital aimed to keep surprises to a minimum for young patients by providing them with information tailored to their needs.

SHS Group, a leading FMCG company, wanted to empower its sales teams with timely, accurate information on all aspects of product performance, sales activity, and market trends. However, slow reporting was dulling business insight and threatened to put the group at risk of losing out on opportunities to boost sales and business volumes. As SHS Group grew through acquisition and expanded its brand portfolio, the group found that existing systems were struggling to cope with the corresponding increase in data volumes. The group's entire sales and marketing division, and its drinks division all run on an integrated SAP ERP instance. These areas generate an immense amount of data, and it was becoming more and more of a challenge to provide business users with timely access to the information they needed to perform analysis and reporting.

Factor-y S.r.l., a web portal developer, was faced with the challenge of migrating its development infrastructure to a reliable cloud services provider with highly responsive technical support. The company needed a solution that would not only provide a secure and reliable environment but also support its expansion by providing resources to create and deliver innovative offerings.

The leading chemicals manufacturer was facing challenges in gaining fast insight required to boost business performance and profitability due to staff and systems spread across many different business units. The company was also experiencing availability problems, often having to take the system offline for software upgrades, back-ups and patches. The company's SAP application user base was expected to grow by several thousand users due to internal reorganization, making capturing operational insights even more difficult. The company recognized the need to reduce downtime, and ensure high availability and reliability for users, and looked for a stable platform it could rely on to keep operations running smoothly around the clock.