CNH Industrial, a global leader in capital goods, was on a digital transformation journey with a focus on improving their customer experience. The company was seeking innovative solutions to optimize their spare parts management business across the 12 brands within the group. The challenge was to find a solution that could support the end-to-end supply chain, monitor changing customer needs, and align the supply chain with those needs in real-time. CNH Industrial needed a powerful processing, SaaS-based solution that could provide real-time visibility and collaboration across their supply chain, enhance collaboration across dealers and stakeholders in multi-tier networks, and maximize parts availability to minimize machine downtime and total cost of ownership (TCO).

The challenge faced by Alinka Rutkowska, the founder of Author Remake, was two-fold. Firstly, she needed to find and reach her target audience - aspiring authors who would benefit from her services. This required effective marketing strategies and tools to identify potential leads and engage them effectively. Secondly, she needed to bridge the gap between publishing a story and ensuring it finds an audience. This involved not only helping authors publish their work but also guiding them on how to market their work to the right audience. The process of reaching out to potential leads, engaging them, and converting them into customers was time-consuming and required a significant amount of effort and resources.

The economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 crisis has significantly impacted small businesses, leading to layoffs and closures. Lee Easton, the owner of AeroVision, empathized with these struggling businesses and sought to provide a platform for sharing success stories of businesses that had managed to pivot and adapt during these challenging times. He was inspired by stories of businesses that had successfully transitioned from traditional models to innovative ones, such as escape room businesses offering 'escape room in a box' subscriptions, real estate agents using Zoom for virtual property tours, and companies shifting from brick-and-mortar sales to eCommerce. However, managing and publishing these stories required a streamlined and efficient process.

Hugh & Crye, a men's fashion company, was facing a challenge in managing their customer data for email campaigns. They wanted to understand their customers better, specifically whether a customer was making their first purchase or a subsequent one. This information was crucial for their email marketing campaigns, which were designed differently for first-time buyers and returning customers. However, they lacked the bandwidth to manually track a customer's lifecycle, especially in relation to purchases. The process of exporting data, segmenting it, and preparing it for their email marketing in MailChimp was extremely manual and time-consuming.

Veronica Lieberman, while working for a fashion subscription box, identified a gap in the market. She noticed that the fixed inventory of these boxes didn't allow for individual styles to break through. She also found that recreating outfits from online inspiration was a challenging task. Veronica decided to create Make It Hapin, a personal shopping and styling service that helps people recreate their online fashion inspirations within their budgets. However, she faced a significant challenge in bringing her vision to life. She knew she wanted to use Mailchimp and Front for her business, but she needed a way to get these platforms to communicate with each other. She also wanted to automate some of the processes to avoid being constantly on-call and on alert for new client requests.

Livestorm, a webinar platform, was faced with the challenge of efficiently managing and utilizing the vast amount of data flowing through their web applications and tools. The data, which included information about how customers use their product, their identities, and how they discovered Livestorm, was crucial for creating targeted messages to increase sales, product interaction, and referrals. However, the company was struggling to put this data to work effectively. Despite using over 10 marketing applications, the data often sat unused due to inefficiencies in their tech stack. While some of the apps had native integrations, Livestorm relied heavily on Zapier, an app automation tool, for more advanced workflows. The challenge was to create a system that could efficiently capture, process, and utilize this data to improve their marketing efforts and close more sales.

In the sales domain, distinguishing between new and existing leads is crucial. Different workflows are often employed for new leads, such as calls, demos, and onboarding email campaigns, which are not used for existing leads. The challenge lies in differentiating new leads from those already contacted without having to manually verify their status. This was the situation faced by Tatiana Sharp, Senior Systems Technologist at Lightmark Media, a digital marketing firm for real estate companies. The clients of Lightmark Media, busy real estate investors, often found it difficult to check a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to verify if they had already made initial contact with a lead. The majority of these leads came in via phone call or text message, and Lightmark Media used CallRail to track, analyze, and value these leads.

Reali, a real estate startup, was facing the challenge of keeping up with the fast-paced real estate market. As the company expanded its operations across 15 states and three continents, the need for speed and agility became even more critical. The company needed to unlock key customer data to help real estate agents find and sell homes more efficiently. However, the biggest barrier was not the lack of tools but the ability of the team to use them effectively. The cornerstone of Reali's marketing stack, Segment, a customer data platform (CDP), was challenging to use without coding knowledge. The company needed a solution to get data from all relevant apps and systems into Segment.

Simple Green Smoothies, a company founded by Jen Hansard, was facing a challenge in maintaining a healthy and engaged community. The company, which started by sharing smoothie recipes on Instagram, had grown to include several recipe books, an app, a blog, and a free seven-day experience. However, the company was struggling with maintaining customer engagement after a purchase. The company's Community Experience Manager, Dan Mottayaw, had crafted a high-level email marketing strategy using Autopilot, but there was a problem. The company needed to connect their WooCommerce shop, which powered their online store, to their email system. This was crucial for the company to provide timely and relevant content to their customers, thereby fostering a thriving and healthy community.

Streak, a Gmail-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform, was facing challenges in managing customer support and sales requests. The inherent challenges of customer support, such as dealing with customers on their less-than-best days, required a high level of camaraderie and collaboration within the team. The team needed to share helpful language, search tips, and find ways forward when issues arose. Furthermore, the process of managing and linking customer data with support requests was manual and time-consuming. The engineering and customer success teams needed a way to communicate effectively, especially when bugs were fixed. The customer success team also needed a way to transform an email into a Streak Box, a repository of all information about a particular subject, in this case, a customer.

Mary Albright, a Senior Content Engineer at digital marketing firm Wpromote, had an unconventional journey into the tech industry. Her interest in technology began with a popular game in the early 2000s, Neopets, where she learned to customize in-game items using HTML. This early exposure to coding sparked her interest in technology and automation. However, her career took a detour into the fashion industry, where she worked as an international high fashion model. In this industry, she faced the challenge of managing data from different agents in Paris, Milan, New York, and London, who all had different formats for sending her bookings and castings.

The Soldiers Project, an organization providing free counseling to service members and their families, faced a significant challenge in managing their data across multiple platforms. The organization had to manually enter information from one platform to another, a process that was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. This issue was particularly problematic during the training stage of their operations, where they had to register attendees across different platforms to keep the information accurate and synced. The tedious manual tasks were taking away valuable time that could have been used to expand their network and reach more soldiers.

TravelPerk, a business travel software company, was facing the challenge of scaling their operations while keeping their team small and costs low. The company was growing, which meant that they needed to make hiring decisions, sometimes for roles not essential to their core product, but necessary for running a business. This would mean dedicating large chunks of money away from essential practices. The company also needed to integrate a plethora of tools and systems to run their operations lean and efficiently without getting lost in code. They wanted to keep their coding to a minimum and free their marketers to craft the tools they needed.

The healthcare industry is facing a significant challenge in terms of interoperability. With the introduction of federal legislation promoting the adoption of electronic health records, software vendors rushed to provide solutions. However, these solutions often maintain data in silos, without a common approach for coordination with other solutions. Electronic health data exists in standardized file formats that can transmit various types of medical information, but without interoperability, the benefit of this data is greatly diminished. The lack of interoperability makes it difficult to move files from one place to another in a manner that is useful or meaningful. Traditional solutions, such as enterprise integration platforms, have attempted to address this issue, but they often leave data locked inside siloed systems within each participating organization. This approach also struggles to keep data in sync and maintain a single source of truth with a proven audit trail.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is keen to explore the potential use and implications of a wholesale form of central bank digital currency (CBDC) using distributed ledger technology (DLT). The challenge lies in the development of a proof-of-concept (POC) for the issuance of a tokenised form of CBDC that can be used by wholesale market participants for the funding, settlement, and repayment of a tokenised syndicated loan on an Ethereum-based DLT platform. The RBA aims to understand the implications of 'atomic' delivery-versus-payment settlement on a DLT platform as well as other potential programmability and automation features of tokenised CBDC and financial assets.

Societe Generale - Forge, the digital capital markets platform of the Societe Generale Group, was in need of technology and services for its ongoing Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) pilot activities. The challenge was to continue building upon its recent groundbreaking achievements such as the issuance of a 100 million Euro covered bond on blockchain in 2019, and the issuance of a 40 million Euro bond that was settled with a CBDC in 2020, a joint project with the Banque de France, the French central bank. The focus was on CBDC issuance and management, delivery versus payment, and cross-ledger interoperability.

The Avastars team was faced with a significant challenge. They were operating under a serverless architecture and needed a way to receive notifications when certain events were triggered on their smart contracts. The team was under pressure due to limited time and resources. They did not want to set up machines to handle long-running processes, which would have been a time-consuming and resource-intensive task. Additionally, they required their information to be encoded in a specific format and delivered promptly as soon as it was available. The challenge was to find a solution that could meet these specific needs without disrupting their existing serverless architecture.

A medical clinic with over 120 providers was facing a significant security challenge. Despite using best-in-class endpoint detection and response (EDR) software, the clinic was still vulnerable to cyber threats. NodeZero, a security solution, was able to identify a device’s Local Security Authority Subsystem Service Process (LSASS), dump and crack user credentials, move laterally, and gain Windows Domain Administrator privileges. This resulted in full domain rights, a situation that should have been detected and blocked by the EDR. Upon investigation, it was discovered that the EDR solution was misconfigured on several devices. Additionally, the clinic had neglected to purchase an add-on module designed to alert on lateral movement. The clinic also faced challenges in patch management. While they recognized the urgency to install updates to their infrastructure, understanding what to patch, what to defer, and ensuring that patches remediate weaknesses was a complex task.

A specialist bank in the UK, processing a high volume of sensitive data, recognized the need to review its approach to cybersecurity due to digital transformation and the rapidly evolving threat landscape. The bank was concerned about its increased security risk due to a recently launched online banking portal and an increasing number of workloads moving to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The bank had previously used other providers for penetration testing but felt the need for a fresh approach to uncover vulnerabilities that may have been overlooked. The bank sought the expertise of Redscan, with whom it already had a strong relationship, to provide in-depth insight and support its compliance with the requirements of the Financial Conduct Authority, the Prudential Regulation Authority, and the GDPR.

Biobest, a global leader in integrated pest management, biological control, and pollination, faced a complex challenge of balancing production capacity and demand. The company operates in an industry characterized by long production times of up to 16 weeks, fluctuating levels of demand, and variations in crop yields due to their biological nature. This created a complex balancing act between available production capacity and demand. The company was also grappling with the challenge of treating each subsidiary as a separate business entity, which led to disjointed operations and inefficiencies. Additionally, the company was heavily reliant on Excel-based forecast templates to collect information from customers and distributors, which proved challenging to keep up-to-date.

Simon Data, a SaaS company based in New York, operates a data platform that allows clients to manage their marketing data. The platform is powered by a complex, multi-tenant environment with datasets of varying lineages, schemas, and business purposes. Some datasets are common across client accounts, while others are client-specific. This setup, while beneficial for customers, posed a significant challenge for engineers trying to drive analytical insights across the system. The platform had several analytics products built into it, but the company wanted to consolidate them on a standard foundation and streamline the development and deployment processes. They aimed to build a framework that could be used for future analytics product development on any part of their core platform. The goals for the system included a seamless development experience, support for querying arbitrary data, fluency in managing various schemas, and an ability to rapidly prototype and develop the user experience. They also wanted to transparently present the queries and transformations used to produce results to facilitate QA by multiple stakeholders.

Qualibrate, a SaaS company based in Amsterdam, was seeking an effective way to provide its users with the flexibility of advanced reporting and simplicity in generating dashboards. While there were several great products available in the market such as Kibana and Grafana, Qualibrate wanted to offer a seamless experience within their own platform. The challenge was to find a solution that would integrate well with their current platform which uses Vue.js. After considering various options, they found Cube from Statsbot.co to be a perfect fit for their use case. However, there was a significant caveat - Cube did not have an implementation for Vue.js. This led Qualibrate to consider working with the community to improve the MongoDB connector and integrate Cube into their workflow.

Canalbank, a Panamanian bank, was facing a series of challenges due to the changing and competitive environment in the banking sector. These challenges were marked by regulatory changes, the continuous search for administrative efficiency, the elimination of friction in existing processes with internal and external customers, the personalization of products and services, cost reduction, and sustainability challenges. In 2019, Canalbank had implemented a new IT system, SAP, as a calculation engine for all operations linked to customer management and banking products. However, the bank's management team realized the need for a solution that could help them overcome the aforementioned business challenges. They initiated a request for information from three technology providers to find a suitable solution.

The Technical Standards Institute of Costa Rica (INTECO), a 35-year-old organization providing standardization, training, and evaluation services, was seeking to digitalize its services to enhance customer service. With an extensive catalog of over 3,500 technical standards, INTECO caters to a multitude of companies and is part of the largest certification network in the world, IQNET. Despite having developed its own audit management system to systematize and centralize information, INTECO was in search of a SaaS solution that could further systematize and automate its processes without the need for programming code. The challenge was to find a solution that would meet its business needs and help streamline its business processes to meet the expectations of all stakeholders.

Masymas Supermarkets, a Spanish retailer and part of Hijos de Luis Rodríguez, S.A, was seeking to improve its processes, reinforce sales channels, and increase customer satisfaction. The supermarket chain and consumer product distributor aimed to drive digital transformation to achieve complete automation of its operations. The challenge was to implement a system that could automate various business processes, eliminate human errors, and expedite tasks. The company also wanted to digitize tasks related to contracting suppliers, eliminating the use of paper and telephone calls for follow-ups. Another challenge was to streamline all procedures related to franchisee management. The company was looking for a solution that could help them become a leading example for the rest of the food retail sector.

Interstate Cargo, a utility trailer dealership with over 75 stores nationwide, was facing challenges with its outdated processes. As a growing company with multiple new stores and ongoing hiring, the need for process automation quickly became evident. The company's existing processes involved a heavy reliance on email, which was being used for simple tasks like getting approvals. These email approval processes were often disorganized, confusing, and slow, leading to inefficiencies in the company's operations. The company's CEO and Lead Developer began searching for a workflow automation platform that could replace their email processes, alter internal applications to improve efficiency, and increase company-wide organization.

Closed Loop Partners, a New York-based company, is committed to advancing the circular economy through its three key business segments: an investment firm, innovation center, and operating group. The company has always been focused on impact measurement and management, but it has been continuously evolving its methodologies and processes. The company aims to drive systems change through every investment it makes, and its impact outcomes are driven by the business models of its portfolio companies. However, the company faced a challenge in capturing robust data and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that measure emissions that have been and could be avoided as a result of its investments. The company also wanted to broaden its impact metrics to include all emissions, both produced and avoided, to fully understand its carbon footprint and identify opportunities for improvement.

A global business information company was facing challenges with its new customer onboarding process, which is a crucial gateway to its product offerings. The company needed to speed up this process, boost sales through new partnerships, and ensure seamless integration with any partner. The company's match application, which connects each customer's data with a unique identifier, was at the heart of its business process and required modernization and migration to a cloud environment. The company sought the help of Cognizant, with whom it had a long-term relationship, to re-architect and modernize its match application.

In jam and fruit spread manufacturing, there is a process to eliminate foreign objects and impurities contained in the materials. Until now, that inspection has been conducted by human eyes, however, there were several issues such as the heavy physical burden on employees and inconsistent detection accuracy. Due to the wide variety of raw materials and differing shapes of fruits, it was considered extremely difficult to automate this inspection process.

AIG, one of the world's largest financial and insurance companies, faced significant challenges in delivering a seamless customer experience. Despite promoting a 'one call does it all' approach, their call center representatives had to manually enter data from their call center application into their core insurance system. Their IBM i applications, while reliable, were difficult to integrate with other systems in the technical stack. This made it nearly impossible to provide users with instant calculations of car insurance exchanges, a process that would have taken a year of development with the existing tools. This delay could potentially lead to the loss of clients and increased costs. AIG had invested heavily in streamlining their call center processes, but implementation proved challenging and the long-term approach was still far from achieving a fully online, fully digital workflow. Additionally, AIG needed a better way to pay insurance claims without redundant, monthly manual effort. The process took eight days of work every month and could not be done on the legacy system, leading to frustration and a sense of wasted time and effort for the insurance agents.