MediaWen International, a B2B and SaaS provider, wanted to launch online linguistic solutions for customers worldwide. The company needed to partner with a global provider that could offer high-performance cloud infrastructure and cognitive computing technologies. The solutions were aimed at providing cognitive subtitling, translation, and dubbing functionality for customers in various sectors including media and entertainment, e-learning, finance, government, and healthcare.

US Foods, a leading distributor of more than 350,000 products to over 250,000 customers, was facing a challenge with software license compliance across its 15,000 endpoints. The company was using a cumbersome endpoint management tool that required significant manual effort and time to collect and assimilate software installation and licensing data. The process was decentralized due to bandwidth inconsistency across different distribution centers, leading to a lack of control and systematization. The company was also facing the risk of costly software audits from vendors vigilant about protecting their licensing revenue and enforcing their agreements.

Refresco Gerber, a leading European bottler of soft drinks and juices, was facing a challenge in controlling the access, usage, and security of corporate data as the company expanded across Europe. The company's rapid growth and acquisition of smaller operations and rival distributors brought along a diversity of systems and practices. As teams used their personal mobile devices to access information on the move, ensuring the protection of precious corporate data became increasingly difficult.

Saint-Gobain CPS, a global provider of advanced materials for various industries, was facing a challenge in providing accurate and timely information about delivery schedules and status to its clients. The company had little visibility of the status of goods once they were loaded onto trucks at the factory and until they were delivered to client sites. This lack of transparency led to problems such as delayed deliveries, damaged goods in transit, and inefficiencies in the delivery chain. The company's clients, who were looking to reduce costs by holding less stock in their warehouses, needed better information on the timing of deliveries to avoid out-of-stock situations and unnecessary waiting times for deliveries.

Shiseido Co., Ltd., a leading cosmetics firm, wanted to enhance the customer experience by providing its Beauty Consultants (BCs) with a new way to engage with customers, influence product development and socially connect with each other. The company has been supporting BCs’ work with technology for nearly 30 years and began exploring mobility early on. To advance mobile innovation and offer better tools for customer engagement, product feedback and teamwork, Shiseido wanted to equip BCs with Apple iPad “Beauty Tablets,” which required developing new mobile apps for the tablet format. Creating apps for varied devices and operating environments can be difficult if developers have to become experts in the language and parameters of each mobile device.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. wanted to deliver a more customized travel experience to drive customer loyalty and improve customer satisfaction levels. However, with its existing booking systems, it could be challenging to meet customers’ requests. The system allowed a guest to select a room type and rate plan. However, each type of room could potentially be available in many locations, such as on different floors of a hotel, and guests could not easily provide guidance on their location preferences. In fact, when booking a stay on the web, guests’ only option for requesting a specific location, such as on a high floor or near the elevator, was to enter a comment in a text field. But if a hotel associate didn’t see the comment or didn’t speak the customer’s language, Starwood would not necessarily meet the request. Plus, the company had no way to track how frequently it satisfied these requests.

Uvionics Tech, a startup company, was in need of a high-performance cloud development solution to launch its product portfolio. The company initially attempted to combine Amazon Web Services capabilities with third-party open source software. However, integration issues between the two platforms hindered its development efforts. The company was in search of a flexible, integrated development platform with powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) capabilities that could easily scale as demands change.

Vasaloppet, a nonprofit organization that manages and operates an annual 90-km cross-country ski race in Sweden, wanted to expand its business and increase its positive impact on the region. The organization aimed to boost the popularity of its summer cycling and running races and its off-season recreation opportunities. They wanted to provide athletes and spectators with a range of interactive features to enhance their experience and engagement with the events.

With an increasing number of financial service providers entering the market, Western Union needed to improve its digital user experience. The company sought to understand why customers sometimes abandoned the website before completing transactions and how to streamline the online experience to deliver better service.

Westpac New Zealand Ltd. wanted to offer its mobile banking customers unprecedented account access and functionality. Customers wanted a consistent banking experience regardless of how they accessed their accounts, but most mobile banking apps offered limited features and required multiple logins to access different accounts. The bank wanted to overcome these hurdles and provide a seamless and comprehensive mobile banking experience.

Westpac New Zealand Ltd. was facing a challenge with its complex IT environment that had grown over the decades. The bank initiated a strategic initiative to simplify it. Part of this simplification initiative included examining existing business processes to find ways to improve them to better serve customers. The company’s existing method for process documentation, using Microsoft Visio software and open source tools, was cumbersome and often resulted in duplicated effort. A staff member would create project documentation and then move on to another project. This led to a lack of continuity and loss of valuable information. To improve its processes, the bank needed to establish a process library.

Autodesk, a global leader in 3D computer-aided design, engineering, and entertainment software, was transitioning to a subscription business model which required real-time customer service and support. The company was dealing with a high volume of customer inquiries, half of which pertained to activation code requests, changes of address, contract problems, and technical issues. The resolution time for inquiries could be 1.5 days or more. With the move to subscription underway, Autodesk needed to respond more quickly to customer inquiries and scale for future volume.

Ferrovial, a leading infrastructure operator based in Madrid, Spain, was keen to expand its construction business internationally. However, the company's existing systems were inflexible, non-scalable, and highly customized, making it difficult to adapt to the diverse requirements of operating in multiple countries. The company lacked online integration, centralization, a shared and corporate-wide view of business information, and the capability to adjust to challenging requirements coming from multiple locations. Employees performed manual calculations that were slow and error-prone, and did not offer an accurate view of the business. This decentralized way of working and the use of obsolete technology prevented Ferrovial from growing faster and joining forces with suppliers and subsidiaries when embarking on international construction projects.

Harrow Council in northwest London, serving around 250,000 people, was tasked with reducing its social services budget by millions of pounds over four years. The council had already developed a reputation for innovation with its groundbreaking My Community ePurse (MCeP) solution, which empowers service users by offering them control and choice over how they spend their social care personal budgets. However, the council wanted to expand this solution and make it available to a larger audience by adding a healthcare component. The council believed that this expansion could result in further savings and provide eligible citizens with the ability to manage and control their own health and care budgets, choosing care services that would better match their needs.

L’Oréal, a global leader in beauty products, faced a major internal challenge around managing product information due to its vast portfolio and the varying standards and approaches across its divisions and geographic zones. The company lacked a single source of truth for product information, which hindered internal reporting and planning, made it harder to prepare statutory reports, and had a direct impact on L’Oréal’s effectiveness. L’Oréal needed to improve data quality and align product information across all parties, from suppliers through to manufacturing, distribution, and retail. Doing so would assist the Group to get the right product to the right place at the right time, driving revenues and profitability.

Mercy Health Select, LLC, an accountable care organization (ACO) for the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), needed to improve the quality of care it provides by mining disparate data sources and identifying at-risk patients so that clinicians could intervene quickly. As an ACO, Mercy Health Select must demonstrate the ability to increase the quality of care while lowering costs. However, not all of the affiliated primary care providers (PCPs) in the Mercy Health Select network use the same electronic health record (EHR) platform, making it difficult to share information about at-risk patients among facilities. Insurance claims can bridge these gaps in data sharing, but facilities must submit and bill the claims before PCPs receive them— a process that can take as long as three months.

Mercy Health, a premier healthcare provider with 450 health facilities located in Ohio and Kentucky, decided to transition to a Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model. The organization first needed to meet all National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) certification requirements within a 15-month time frame. At the same time, Mercy Health was working to integrate its Accountable Care Organization (ACO) and future bundled care initiatives across its entire network, which includes 147 PCP offices in Ohio and Kentucky. To support these initiatives, Mercy Health engaged Watson Health, a leader in big data-driven healthcare transformation, to use its cloud-based platform to manage populations, engage patients, and meet PCMH and ACO goals.

As the City & Guilds Group grew, its senior leadership team wanted to understand how each part of the business aligned with its core values, as well as each employee’s engagement with their roles and responsibilities. One of their highest strategic priorities has been delivering a quality customer experience. They believe that engaged employees are more likely to be productive, and to make positive contributions to their learning products and services. Delighting their customers generates more surplus to reinvest in their purpose. For that reason, they wanted to discover the levels of employee engagement in each part of the business.

Community Health Network, a leading not-for-profit health system with five hospitals and more than 200 sites of care across central Indiana, was facing the challenge of attracting, retaining, and developing talent across its organization. The organization recognized that employee engagement was a key enabler of organizational performance. The more committed their people were to their vision, mission, and strategy, the more inspired they would be to deliver the highest quality of care to their patients. However, due to the scale of its organization, talent management posed complex challenges.

Daifuku Co., Ltd., a global enterprise focusing on industrial-materials handling, was facing challenges with its outdated infrastructure for communications and collaboration. The company had not updated its core system in Japan for some time, and affiliate companies and offices outside of Japan relied primarily on inefficient email for communications and sharing information, with no support for mobile access. Acquired firms’ communication systems remained separate. These deficiencies slowed business processes, reduced staff productivity, and inhibited Daifuku from achieving its goals of driving innovation and increasing international sales.

EMLYON Business School needed to move beyond traditional education models to become a leader in digital education and offer a new global learning and teaching experience. The school wanted to deliver content on a global scale while enabling on-demand, personalized education. It also aimed to reach students in emerging markets where education demand is high. The school had plans to expand into three new markets by 2018 and wanted to ensure the same high-level quality of educational content in various places and at all times.

Flex Contact Center, a professional services company offering telesales, call-center, anti-attrition, back-office, helpdesk and collection services, has grown rapidly since its establishment in 2009. With operations in 12 sites across two states and four cities in Brazil, the company employs more than 11,000 people. However, the company realized that to prevent barriers to future expansion, it was essential to make it as easy as possible for its people to work together effectively—even if they were based in separate geographical locations. Traditional approaches to collaboration—based on email and phone calls—threatened to reduce productivity. Flex Contact Center wanted to enable better collaboration and communication across its workforce, but did not want to make large investments in infrastructure.

Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) is the largest school system in Georgia, serving over 175,000 students across 136 schools. As part of its digital Content, Learning, Assessment and Support System (eCLASS) program, GCPS wanted to help teachers and school leaders collaborate more effectively on ways to improve curriculum and sharpen instructional skills. However, collaboration was limited to meetings, working sessions, and formal, in-person, professional development. To share information and ideas outside of meetings, teachers, administrators and support staff relied heavily on email and shared drives. As their inboxes and drives grew unwieldy, some teachers and leaders began using commercial social applications for professional online collaboration.

I-CAR, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to training the collision repair inter-industry, was facing challenges in keeping up with the rapidly evolving lightweight vehicle materials and advanced technologies. The organization needed a robust system to deliver its training materials that could reach collision repair professionals in their workplaces. The system also needed to be easily updated at one time regardless of where the information was stored and used. The organization was also looking to enhance its training programs to become increasingly relevant, engaging, accessible and timely.

IntraHealth International, a nonprofit organization that empowers local health workers to better serve communities in need, realized that it needed to overhaul its approach to recruiting to better address changes in the industry and to support organizational needs. The organization's human resources processes were initially dictated by the demands of donors, leading to a recruitment process that was driven to meet the needs of donors and projects, and not necessarily the needs of the organization as a whole. As a result, each country office had its own hiring practices that it applied to meet specific donor-driven deadlines. IntraHealth realized that it needed an overarching, organization-wide approach and process to integrate both donor and organizational priorities.

The jewelry retailer operates hundreds of stores across the United States and was facing a challenge in attracting and retaining skilled and motivated people to drive sales and business growth. The company wanted to refine its approach to sales associate recruitment and sought a more accurate way to assess new applicants and determine whether they had the qualities needed to develop successfully in their roles and contribute to the company’s continued growth. The challenge was to find a way to ensure that an applicant has the right skills for the job, and that they fit in with a company’s culture and ways of working.

McDonald’s UK was experiencing growth in its business and workforce. To sustain this growth, changes needed to be made in restaurant operations, supported by more “customer confident” employees and managers who would deliver a great customer experience. The company needed to enhance its existing selection process for new employees with a rigorous and customer centric recruitment strategy with the goal of hiring candidates who were capable of meeting the rapidly evolving needs of the business. The recruitment team had to find an innovative way to reduce the time recruiters and managers spent on screening and assessing unsuitable candidates. At the same time, the team had to provide a positive candidate experience to each applicant, whether they were successful or not.

Meander Medical Center, a healthcare provider in the Netherlands, was seeking innovative ways to better serve its patients. The center wanted to extend its support for the healing process beyond the walls of its medical facilities by offering a personalized, interactive patient portal. This portal would provide patients with relevant personal content from various Meander systems, such as insurance information, medical records, required online forms, scheduled appointments, medications, available doctors, and individualized treatment plans. However, the center needed a portal platform and solution implementation partner to help deliver on its vision for a digital healing environment.

Merck KGaA, a global pharmaceutical and chemical company based in Germany, needed to foster innovation to remain competitive. The company needed to capitalize on the collective intelligence of its workforce by uniting the widely distributed and functionally distinct competencies of its employees. The company sought a practical way to energize its personnel to use social business technologies to share observations, knowledge, and expertise.

Odin, a leading provider of cloud software solutions, needed a way to train its thousands of partners and employees quickly, thoroughly and cost-effectively. The company wanted to reduce the cost of training services through blended learning, which allows learners to find the right information exactly when they need it. Odin also needed a learning system that would cater to an audience that prefers do-it-yourself methods rather than sitting through formal trainer-led courses in a classroom. The company needed a solution that could be up and running quickly, could track classroom training and tie it with online learning, had a social element and could automate the certification program.