Piraeus Bank Group, one of the most dynamic financial organizations in Greece, was facing challenges due to its rapid international expansion. The bank needed a well-defined enterprise architecture at its headquarters that could be rolled out to its subsidiaries to streamline local operations based on the Piraeus Bank model. Additionally, the bank was experiencing a rate of growth that involved operational modifications on a daily basis, which needed to be efficiently maintained and distributed. The bank also aimed to create a strong, well-documented, comprehensive, and flexible enterprise architecture that would be valid for Piraeus Bank Greece but also applicable at the Group level. This would allow for efficient distribution of Group policies and operations and quick integration of newly acquired subsidiaries.

Brenntag Europe, a world leader in international chemical distribution, was facing challenges due to its continuous growth. The growth had led to a highly disparate and inefficient IT environment. There was a lack of enterprise-wide process standardization and visibility. The company also needed to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley criteria and improve its quality management for ISO certification and audits. The company desired to implement a consistent operational foundation, built with standardized and modular processes, to facilitate simplified implementations and the optimization of existing applications.

Vipnet, a leading GSM operator in Croatia, was required to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) as part of the Mobilkom Austria group. The compliance required making business processes transparent and proving the efficiency of its internal control system. However, the company faced several challenges. Controls weren't specifically defined and couldn't be mapped as part of a process flow, leading to insufficient process mapping. Additionally, controls weren't tested. The company needed a financially oriented approach to process management to become SOX compliant.

In 2008, the Estonian eHealth Foundation set out to build a nationwide Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. The country’s goal was to improve the quality and convenience of healthcare for 1.3 million citizens by centrally storing their health records. To make the best decisions at the point of care, physicians would be able to access a citizen’s EHR online, anytime. This massive undertaking needed a flexible integration platform. After extensive research, the foundation selected webMethods Integration Server, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), to link disparate information silos and local databases.

W&W Group, a financial services provider, was facing challenges with its Internal Control System (ICS). The existing ICS was not able to support the company's high standards for risk management and was making it difficult for them to comply with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. The lack of good-quality documentation and a process-related overview of risks increased the chances of shortcomings in their process controls and risk assessments. The company needed to standardize their alert and escalation management processes and provide status reports on the performance of the ICS itself to meet new German regulatory requirements.

Apollo-Optik, Germany's largest retail chain for optical products, was facing challenges in serving its customers with high-quality products and on-time delivery. The company's IT landscape was complex and consisted of several different back-end systems, leading to redundancy in data and functionality. For instance, retrieving all data on a customer required calling upon many relevant functions in different systems. This inefficiency prompted Apollo-Optik to transition to a more efficient Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and implement re-usable services across all systems. The company aimed to provide the highest level of quality in customized eyeglasses on time, every time, and needed a solution that could help achieve this goal.

Wales & West Utilities (WWU) is a regulated gas distribution business that transports gas safely to more than 7 million people through its network of the 35,000 kms of pipelines that covers Wales and Southwest England. The company is responsible for attending gas emergencies on streets and at businesses and homes within one or two hours. However, WWU faced challenges in monitoring the emergency process, which was a manual and labor-intensive activity. The company used a simple Comma Separated Values (CSV) user interface to a standalone system that queried databases directly. This system was resilient in the event of a failover, but it did not provide real-time visibility into the emergency process.

Attracting and keeping mobile phone customers requires continuous innovation. Orange UK excels at this. To meet customer expectations, Orange strives to provide products and services that are simple and user-friendly. That is why the company set out to make pay-as-you-go mobile service as convenient and easy as possible. The challenge was to create a system that allows customers to top up their accounts from anywhere while on the go. The process needed to be fast and seamless, interacting with up to 10 systems and sending the customers their top-up approval in seconds.

TURKSTAT, the Turkish Statistical Institute, is responsible for Turkey’s official statistics on a wide range of topics. As part of its corporate e-transformation, the institute aimed to provide fast, easy and secure access to statistics needed by different interest groups. Manual methods of sharing this information were insufficient. TURKSTAT needed to provide data to outside groups categorically, according to user needs, and in a dynamic and sustainable way. As more organizations needed to share data, TURKSTAT found using manual methods or writing code was inadequate. The institute urgently needed a high-speed data exchange platform. Additionally, security was a key concern. TURKSTAT has always been a trusted institution. Decisionmakers are confident in statistical information published by TURKSTAT, and providers of data are certain that their privacy is well-protected. That level of trust could not change.

CSC Scandihealth aimed to become a market leader in Denmark within electronic patient records, maintain the Nordic countries as a home market, and develop the company into a “Centre of Excellence” within European healthcare. The company needed to choose a new technology for their IT solutions in the 1980s. They wanted an effective development tool suitable for creating a standard system for developing patient records. They studied five different solutions from various suppliers before deciding on Software AG because they offered the most flexible development tools and were easy to communicate with.

The UNIQA Group insurance companies receive thousands of paper documents by mail every day. Sorting and forwarding these documents for action was taking too much time and effort, which is why UNIQA sought an automated business process management solution. Its goals were to shorten processing times, lower administrative costs and better distribute the workload to speed up processing. In the past, document distribution was time- and staff-intensive. It could take several days before documents finally reached the right administrator, who then had to scan them for documentation and archiving purposes.

All direct trading operations at DWS are conducted via its IKS investment account service. As Europe’s largest supplier of public funds, DWS has been handling all necessary customer and account management since the late 1980s with an Adabas- and Natural-based mainframe application. In the late 1990s, DWS put its entire It landscape, including this essential application, to the test. the need for action arose in particular because of insufficient integration of the different It systems. A need for modernization was quickly identified in the IKS department, DWS’s internal distribution channel for the funds trade. Over the years, a number of isolated solutions with only limited interaction capabilities had emerged. The mainframe application was developed with Adabas and Natural in the late 1980s for central customer and account management. It was distressing that marketing and distribution applications, such as call center and document management, could only access the mainframe application via workaround solutions or, in some cases, could not access it at all.

Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, Israel’s fourth largest bank and the country’s largest mortgage bank, was facing stiff competition in the dynamic Israeli banking industry. The bank wanted to reach customers in new ways and offer custom-tailored products quickly and easily. However, the bank's legacy systems did not fit the bank’s ongoing business and legal requirements. The competition among banks was harsh and, in order to succeed, the bank had to change the way it handled customers and the products it offered. The bank’s IT infrastructure integrates core mainframe systems with applications running on open environments, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), optical archiving and Web-based applications. The bank clerk’s desktop included both 3270-emulation and .NET applications, requiring them to switch between screens while working with the customer.

Icelandair, one of the largest private companies in Iceland, was facing a challenge. Despite the increase in online ticket sales, the company was not realizing the expected cost savings, staffing reductions, and operational efficiency gains. For every reduction in telephone sales man-hours, there was a corresponding increase in the amount of back-office effort needed to support online sales. The company was also struggling with regional variations in ticket sales processes, which were not standardized across the organization. The airline industry is highly competitive, and airlines must constantly seek out efficiency in their operations to remain profitable. Icelandair needed to operate on the highest possible load factor and attract and retain customers who now shop online for their flight needs.

Insurance companies are facing immense challenges due to market deregulation and increased customer demands. This requires a high degree of market orientation and flexibility of business processes. One of the key questions determining lasting success is whether insurance companies’ legacy IT systems can keep pace with this development. Nuremberg-based uniVersa faced this challenge and needed to ensure their IT systems could adapt and evolve with the changing market. They also faced a specific challenge of creating appropriate inventory management systems for their new insurance product, Tip-Top Tabaluga, in less than two months.

Hibernian General Insurance, one of Ireland's largest and most respected insurers, was facing challenges in serving insurance brokers and policy holders while reducing the time and cost to administer insurance policies. One of Hibernian’s key applications is its Branch Policy System (BPS)—a character-based application used by internal administration and call center staff to service insurance brokers and policy holders. To improve response times to these customers and reduce the costs of administering insurance policies, Hibernian decided to take a service-oriented approach and create a Web-based, easy-to-use interface that leverages and reuses existing key functionality contained within the business-critical Branch Policy application. Initially, Hibernian planned to replace its legacy application with an off-the-shelf general insurance package. However, over the years, there has been a large investment in this system which has provided users with a very high-level of functionality. This was found extremely hard to replace with an off-the-shelf general insurance package.

Nissan Europe, a pan-European service provider to Nissan Europe, faced several challenges. The company was dealing with competition from the East, reliance on manual processes, and an aging internal mainframe architecture. The company had relied on Software AG’s Adabas & Natural for database management and application development since it opened its flagship plant in the U.K. in the 1980s. However, with continuous improvements in efficiency and speed, the partnership has helped Nissan Europe develop an entire suite of mission-critical applications that run on Adabas & Natural, touching everything from manufacturing, to purchasing, to sales and marketing. With zero software failures in the past 30 years, Nissan Europe returned to Software AG for the next step in the evolution of its Adabas & Natural systems: committing to a new efficiency-boosting, feature-enhancing, cost-reducing project running through 2022.

Nissan, one of the world's largest automobile manufacturers, was facing the challenge of fulfilling its strategy of producing and delivering made-to-order vehicles. The company had been relying on Software AG's Adabas and Natural for database management and application development since 1985. However, with the increasing customer demand for customized cars, Nissan recognized the need to improve database performance and application efficiency. The challenges of an overburdened database were inevitable as database backups were interfering with employee productivity and a high number of data files running in parallel on a critical path often created a bottleneck.

The Bavarian Federal State Department of Taxation has a major daily task of corresponding with citizens through letters. The content of these letters is the primary challenge, but they also need to be printed, enveloped, and dispatched in a timely manner. This is a manually intensive task for the 16,000 tax clerks. The department recognized that if only a portion of these letters could be processed automatically, immediately after they’ve been composed, the taxation department could reduce costs and, at the same time, utilize staff’s time more efficiently.

7-Eleven, the world's largest convenience store chain, faced a significant challenge in maintaining a supply chain and distribution network to support thousands of stores. The company had to coordinate orders with hundreds of suppliers to deliver products to stores on a daily basis. Many of its smaller suppliers did not have the infrastructure in place to support Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technologies, which 7-Eleven used to automate the exchange of orders and business documents with some of its largest partners. As a result, the company had to rely largely on manual processes with paper invoices faxed, mailed or emailed into the company, and manually keyed into back-end financial applications.

JLG Industries, a renowned manufacturer of aerial work platforms and telehandlers, was facing increasing competitive pressures on its replacement parts business. The company was using a cost-plus pricing strategy for its service parts, which was proving ineffective. This approach created a 'blind spot' and lacked market adaptation. Customers were seeking more cost-effective solutions and started buying non-OEM replacement parts from competitors, compromising quality for lower pricing. This trend signaled to JLG the need for a new approach to parts pricing. The challenge was to optimize pricing for 140,000 service parts with a department of one.

Lexmark, a leading printer and multifunction machine manufacturer, decided to exit the consumer inkjet business in 2012 to focus on the enterprise market. The company aimed to shift its focus towards software and services that could help customers save time and money. Lexmark's new strategy was more consultative, emphasizing complete solutions that reduce costs by maximizing the efficiency of networked workgroup-style printers and multifunction machines. However, this service-oriented strategy required real-time visibility into its global operation to offer service-level agreements that guarantee minimum downtime.

Alstom Transport, a promoter of sustainable mobility, was in need of a SysML (Systems Modeling Language) tools supplier that truly understood the standard. They conducted a comprehensive evaluation of all the leading SysML tools on the market, focusing on several key criteria: conformance with the SysML standard, ease of integration and extensibility, collaborative design, ability to manage product lines, and quality of support. As a multi-national company, Alstom Transport’s systems design projects involve teams in a variety of countries. Therefore, a development environment truly capable of supporting collaborative working across dispersed teams was important to Alstom Transport.

Technip, a world leader in project management, engineering, and construction for the energy industry, faced challenges in optimizing the design of its installations to meet the needs of the oil and gas giants. The company was using manual methods for equation data production and entry into Excel, which led to many errors. The company also needed to adapt quickly to the many developments in calculation over the past 20 years. The design office needed a solution that could provide high transparency and perfect legibility for all operations carried out, which was not possible with Excel.

National Oilwell Varco's Pressure Control Group (PCG) was facing challenges in training and assessing its engineers to ensure they design quality products, meet regulatory requirements, and follow strict internal guidelines. The traditional industry practice of pairing new hires with mentors was proving inadequate due to the mentors' own project commitments. The lack of formalized training and accountability led to significant rework, slowing the design process and potentially impacting product quality. The company needed a paradigm shift in its training approach to improve engineering quality and accountability. Additionally, the company was struggling to deliver on a tremendous backlog of business due to substantial business growth over the past several years.

Metso, a world-leading industrial company, was facing challenges with its global supply chain. The company was using a location-based, on-shelf availability model, which resulted in isolated and independently managed inventories across its 39 locations. This approach was inefficient and reduced Metso's ability to serve its customers effectively. The company also had to manage intricate material flows, making it difficult to predict part lead time. Furthermore, the constraints of a legacy system and a focus on individual supply issues rather than broader strategic improvements were hindering Metso's growth and profitability. The company needed a solution that could match its complicated network and grow with its business.

Fujitsu Technology Solutions, a leading European IT infrastructure provider, was experiencing rapid growth in its service business. However, the company's 20-year-old proprietary service middleware was unable to keep up with its evolving business needs. Fujitsu required a solution that would offer greater flexibility for user interfaces, facilitate improvements in its 24/7 support, enable faster on-boarding of customers, and increase cost efficiencies. The solution also needed to ensure continuous availability throughout the transition process due to demanding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and high penalties.

The Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) was faced with the challenge of improving the availability of data between federal, state, county, and local agencies as well as external partners. They needed to ensure easy interoperability between systems and applications while meeting local, state, and federal reporting and compliance requirements. The agencies were previously limited by point-to-point, hardcoded integrations, siloed systems, and manual processes that were paper-based and slow. This made it difficult for them to share information securely in real time and streamline their services to better meet citizen needs.

Physicists at CERN conduct extensive experiments using particle accelerators. A variety of process visualization and control systems is used to monitor the equipment, including the TIM system and Diagnostics and Monitoring (DIAMON). TIM monitors around 120,000 sensors in such areas as building services engineering, while DIAMON monitors some of the equipment and IT components related to the particle accelerators. Technicians and engineers at the control stations have dashboards that show the status of the systems; the dashboards are continuously updated based on the data from the monitoring systems. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to CERN to operate the monitoring platforms in the most fail-safe way possible. Because these systems play the role of a control center, unexpected occurrences, power outages and major accidents result in a large number of events. One of the requirements for the implementation was that the incoming data could be processed in less than one second. Even during the greatest peaks, the infrastructure must be stable enough to handle the large number of status messages and help the staff in the control center and engineers troubleshooting the systems.

Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM), a top global shipping company, was seeking to improve its business processes and enhance operational efficiency. The company had recently implemented SAP ERP, which increased the company's IT heterogeneity. This led to a need for seamless communication between the different IT systems. HMM wanted to address a spectrum of business integration needs, such as supply chain automation, application integration, and data synchronization. The company was looking for a single integration solution that would quickly connect any system or application without coding.