Logrand’s vision is to become a customer-centric, Digital Enterprise. To achieve this, Logrand wants to adopt new digital business models and change from manual operations to those that are reactive, predictable and automated. The end game: Increase customer satisfaction.

With the prediction of 50 billion devices being connected by 2020, the Internet of Things is revolutionizing every aspect of life. Wipro Technologies, a leading systems integrator, consulting, and services company, is at the forefront of this transformation with its Looking Glass solution—an Internet of Things solution for smart, connected products. The challenge was to integrate, capture, analyze, and respond to data captured by embedded sensors in remote printers at customer sites. The company needed to understand and act immediately on real-time maintenance data to proactively increase service levels, drive down costs, and maximize asset uptime, utilization, and placement.

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.

Schwering & Hasse (S&H), a Germany-based company, manufactures a massive volume of copper magnet wire, with 400 production lines producing 140,000 kilometers of wire per day in a 24/7 operation. The wire, which is coated with a thin layer of insulation, is a critical component of numerous electrical products, such as transformers and motors. The tolerances required for the insulation are minute, with even a tiny deviation from the specification rendering the wire useless. S&H's mission is to manufacture as much wire as possible with as few errors as possible. However, the company faced challenges in maintaining high quality standards due to rapidly changing customer demands and product specifications. The company's existing information systems were not equipped to create a factory that was truly “transparent” to both line workers and managers, and did not provide detailed, real-time information about every phase in the production process.

In the financial services sector, the ability to deliver new capabilities daily in a compliant manner is crucial. However, Standard Chartered, like many organizations, was hindered by a multitude of interfaces that impeded agility. The bank sought to innovate faster by reducing interfaces and enhancing quality through the use of a globally federated business process framework.

SKF, a leading knowledge engineering company, was tasked with supporting its customer, Stora Enso, a global provider of paper, wood, and packaging products, with cutting-edge solutions. Stora Enso uses SKF’s cloud-based condition monitoring suite to ensure asset availability and is gearing up for growth. A prerequisite for this growth was establishing an interconnection between SKF’s software and Stora Enso’s SAP® system. In the past, there was no integration between SKF software and SAP. All individual software integrations for customers were developed from scratch.

Since 1952, distributor Casbega has focused on the flow of Coca-Cola products in Spain. Recently, the company took a closer look at the flow of its processes—starting with accounting. Specifically, Casbega wanted to speed up invoice administration and reduce related costs. Document flow between branch offices and departments was too excessive, and email was proving inadequate in driving workflow and managing files. Every year, Casbega’s accounting department processes 40,000 invoices from other departments and regional offices. The invoice approval process varies depending on the office and department. Invoices advance to different levels of approval, enabling the delegation of tasks and the automatic generation of reminders to the responsible employees at each level. All employees who process invoices keep a copy of each invoice as a record. The process is integrated with an accounting system controlled by SAP technology.

California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) is America’s second largest public pension fund and the largest educator-only pension fund in the world. The organization was facing the challenge of reducing operating costs by moving Natural batch to the less-expensive IBM zIIP™ processor. The organization was looking for a solution that would not require any changes to the existing code or modification to batch jobs for the START application. The organization was also concerned that a new product would require more testing and more validation, which would mean more time to realize savings.

Oriflame, a beauty company selling direct in more than 60 countries, faced several challenges. The company's average annual growth of 11 percent over the past 20 years and expansion into more than 40 countries brought many business challenges. This naturally created challenges for Oriflame’s Global Shared Services IT Group as well: to incorporate new markets, adapt requirements and manage disparate business needs. In Oriflame, the one business constant is clearly change. The primary business applications were consistent across Oriflame: the in-house sales application (Orisales), JDA® Platform for supply chain management and IFS Applications™ for ERP. However, the alignment issues were at a more fundamental level.

FortisBC, a fully integrated electric utility in southeastern British Columbia, was facing challenges with its decade-old customer information system. The system, which was used daily by customer service, was out of warranty and needed a language, interface, and database update. The system had proven functionality worth preserving, but replacing it could have cost tens of millions of dollars. The company wanted to modernize the system at a fraction of the cost of replacing it. Other goals included adding a Web front-end, creating a single sign-on environment, improving security and eliminating manual password changes, assuring easy mobile and remote access, building a platform for a next generation of business services, and improving the ability to deliver more self-services to the customer.

Swisscom, a leading telecommunications and IT company in Switzerland, faced several challenges. The industry-wide move to digitalization, a rapidly expanding B2B market, and growing demand for increased system flexibility were among the key issues. The old way of managing transactions, which involved manual input and piles of paper, was inefficient and costly. The company needed a solution that would not compromise data security while improving speed and efficiency. Swisscom also wanted to reduce the number of steps in some processes by half to cut costs and improve turnaround time and quality.

Swisscom, the leading telecommunications provider in Switzerland, was facing challenges with its order process reporting. The company was unable to proactively monitor orders, and the analysis of existing data was either extremely difficult or impossible. This led to frequent, time-consuming internal queries, often triggered by customer inquiries. The lack of transparency and efficiency in the process led to high frustration levels both internally and externally, damaging the company's reputation and resulting in lower sales. Swisscom needed a solution that would allow for the monitoring of all processes with problem alerts, transparent and fast reporting, easy measurement and display of KPIs, direct access to process information for various departments, and comprehensive project documentation.

Alliance Healthcare, a leading pharmaceutical wholesaler in Germany, was facing high competitive pressure and a need to improve performance. The company's inventory system, Wapha, developed with Adabas & Natural, needed to be moved from the expensive mainframe environment to a more cost-effective Linux platform. The company also wanted to align its systems with IT optimizations and protect its long-term investments in its inventory system. The company's IT landscape was diverse and heterogeneous, making the rapid implementation of new requirements time- and cost-intensive. This was not acceptable in a market that is highly rebate- and sales-oriented and subject to frequent legal changes in Germany’s regulated health system.

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.

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.

Continental, a major supplier to the automotive industry, faced a significant challenge due to its rapid growth through acquisitions. This growth left the company with a legacy of diverse IT systems, making it difficult to have a clear view of the IT landscape. The company needed to standardize its applications to conform to industry standards and align more closely with the business. The complexity of the situation was further compounded by the fact that Continental is known for its tires, but it is a vital supplier at all stages of the automotive manufacturing process. The company's automotive business grew rapidly through twelve major acquisitions since 2000, increasing its capability and expertise but also its IT complexity.

Boehringer Ingelheim operates in a highly competitive market, which requires significant agility to react to changing market demands and compliance with a multitude of regulatory demands. This leads to a complex set of business processes that need to be supported by a flexible and agile IT. The specific challenge was to ensure the consistency of changes across all four architectural dimensions. The company needed to introduce a state-of-the-art EA framework including a unified tool-based EA repository in order to actively manage the portfolio of enterprise standards. They also needed to define a comprehensive multi-dimensional long-term planning process to ensure that IS/IT applications and services are aligned with the business strategies.

The Army of the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence was facing challenges with accurate equipment demand forecasting and costed activity planning due to disparate systems, a myriad of spreadsheets and information from different sources. This led to wrong stock levels, poor equipment utilization, conflicting requests for resources, unsighted but avoidable costs and expensive waste. It took an inordinate amount of time to collect and aggregate data for business use. Activities were often delayed, rearranged, re-scoped or cancelled when resources were already committed. The challenge was getting the right information at the right time.

Fraport AG, a leading international professional services organization in the aviation industry, operates more than 1,100 applications to support its employees. It was essential to maintain an overview and a working environment that’s as standardized as possible. Information relating to the processes and applications forms the foundation for the IT department’s work. Numerous business decisions are made based on it. For regulatory reasons, it is indispensable for fulfilling obligations to the works council and German data protection laws. Initially, the information was kept in an extensive Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheet, but administering it centrally was taking more and more time. A comprehensive solution for process and application management had to be found.

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.

Avnet, a leading technology manufacturer and distributor, faced a significant challenge due to its evolving business needs and the need to integrate multiple applications running on various platforms. The company had made over seventy acquisitions in the past 20 years, which further complicated their IT infrastructure. The high-cost integration infrastructure consisted of thousands of Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) maps to stage, data to replicate, which created latency problems, as well as thousands of services to support. IT needed to become more agile and assure high-quality integration while lowering the cost of development for the business.

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.

Tier-1 and Tier-2 telco companies—big and complex organizations—rely on Amdocs to support their business and operational transformations into Digital Enterprises. Such massive transformations involve many different stakeholders, each with a different focus, view and interest. Managing these stakeholders and assuring clear communications during a large-scale project is absolutely critical to success.

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.