Colruyt Group, Belgium's largest retail conglomerate, was on a mission to optimize its retail operations and enhance customer experiences. As part of its digital transformation program, the company aimed to streamline store processes, improve co-worker and customer communications, and drive innovation. The group decided to replace shared dedicated scanning devices with personal consumer devices that would be easy for store staff to operate and always stay connected. They sought a solution that offered superior software-based barcode scanning, shared their vision for a platform to support future innovation, and was easy to integrate with its suite of apps, supported diverse frameworks and mobile architectures.

Dell Technologies, a global enterprise, was facing challenges with its existing inventory and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Glovia. The system provided batch data updates with reports available every 30 minutes and was not integrated with Dell’s supply chain systems. This led to data disconnects and inefficiencies, which were not suitable for a fast-paced global enterprise. Glovia's reporting queries were consuming too much compute power, and its storage needs were rapidly increasing due to the requirement of storing substantial amounts of historical data for audit purposes. Dell needed to modernize its PRISM system and move from batch data updates to real-time streaming reports. The goal was to create a real-time inventory application with the speed and scale to meet the needs of the business within a year.

Digital Planet, a B2B2C enterprise, was facing challenges with its data warehouse performance due to its gradual expansion over the years. The company wanted to provide a better data analytics experience for its customers, with full self-service reporting capabilities. However, the performance degradation of its data warehouse limited its ability to offer additional data-related services to its customers during office hours. Data refresh was done every hour and updates could take as long as 20 minutes, slowing down the reporting environment for customers. As Digital Planet was looking to enhance its technology offering with both self-service reporting and embedded analytical reporting for its customers, it identified the clear need to optimize its current environment first. This required implementing the right analytics and business intelligence solutions in place that could fulfil all its various data-related objectives.

The customer, a global leader in materials engineering solutions, was facing a challenge in managing the increasing number of queries from its employees. The company's help desk team was overwhelmed with the volume of tickets created in Service Now, which was impacting their productivity and increasing support costs. The company needed a more streamlined approach to facilitate their employees and users to avail information from their help desk team. The challenge was to reduce the number of tickets hitting the help desk without compromising the quality of service. The company identified the need for a well-trained conversational bot that could automate responses for FAQs leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing, and Cognitive Services.

Struggling with Web Security ChallengesIn 2016, rather than invest millions of dollars to replace its outdated legacy infrastructure, DOTComm began migrating its sites and applications to a large cloud services provider. The organization also used a cloud-based web application firewall (WAF) along with robust alerting tools that enabled it to monitor for outages.Unfortunately, the WAF did not perform as expected. Over a two-year period, DOTComm experienced more than 10 outages, each of which brought down a subset of the organization’s websites and applications. These outages lasted anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours — an unacceptable amount of time when they impacted the availability of 24/7 mission-critical services related to public safety.Even when the outages affected less mission-critical DOTComm sites and applications, the organization had to deal with complaints from county departments and citizens. Because the WAF vendor refused to take accountability for these outages, Dolinski was forced to pore over his log files to prove that the issue was the vendor’s responsibility. Once engaged with the vendor for support, Dolinski was often frustrated dealing with entry-level personnel lacking deep knowledge of the WAF.To make matters worse, the WAF vendor was supposed to manage DOTComm’s SSL certificate renewals. However, lacking a graceful certificate renewal process, the vendor often failed to renew DOTComm’s certificates before they expired. As a result, DOTComm sites would either go offline or throw SSL errors.As soon as the contract with the WAF vendor expired, Dolinski began evaluating other solutions.

La Redoute, a French fashion and home furnishings brand with a history of 181 years, was facing a significant challenge in 2014. Despite their long-standing reputation and success, they were struggling to keep up with the rapid shift towards digital commerce. Their traditional business model, which relied heavily on brick-and-mortar stores and printed catalogs, was no longer delivering the desired results. The company recognized the need to transition from their catalog-based model and physical storefronts to a digital platform. The challenge was not just about moving online, but also about maintaining the quality of their product images, which were crucial for their success. With approximately 10 million product images that needed to be replicated and resized across various channels and devices, the task was daunting and time-consuming.

Vadso Municipality in Norway offers extracurricular activities for its citizens, with parents having the ability to enroll their children and receive a subsidy on the fees. However, the program’s availability and enrollment process was not accessible through any digital means. Parents had to manually search for available activities and contact the responsible agency to enroll their children. To claim the subsidy, parents had to visit different departments and submit various documents and forms. This cumbersome process limited the program’s reach. The client wanted a technology that could digitize the entire process, creating a web application that enables parents to explore the activities and enroll their children. The biggest challenge was to understand the entire process and the existing technology that the Vadso Municipality had employed. Developers had to deal with various complex scenarios like different enrollment requirements and eligibility criteria for subsidies. Language barrier and integration with other systems were additional difficulties.

The client, a legal services firm in Australia, had an existing website platform that served as an educational tool and communication gateway. The website was used by potential clients to learn about services and by existing clients to ask questions. However, the manual handling of high volumes of queries and questions posed a significant challenge. This resulted in increased administrative costs and time consumption, negatively impacting the business’s profitability and productivity. The firm sought a solution that would reduce the manual efforts of the administrative team, improve overall productivity, and enhance the quality of customer communication and service.

The Lake Huron and Elgin Area Primary Water Supply Systems in southwestern Ontario, which provide water for approximately 500,000 residents across 15 municipalities, faced a significant challenge with their Lake Huron Primary Transmission Main. This 60-kilometer pipeline, constructed in 1965, experienced four catastrophic failures over the past 55 years, disrupting the supply of drinking water to a significant portion of southwestern Ontario and causing serious flooding. The failures also affected approximately 70 hectares of prime agricultural lands due to soil erosion and deposition. The utility decided to take a proactive approach to managing risks associated with the pipeline, starting with assessments to better understand the main’s baseline condition and then monitoring the pipeline continuously.

The client, a global paint manufacturer with multiple production sites across continents, relied on a single system for mixing and labelling produced paint. Any significant malfunction or downtime of this application would halt production, leading to financial losses. The client was using a bespoke application delivered by a third-party vendor, which required multiple manual steps to launch, such as selecting the correct databases. The client sought to automate this process and reduce the solution’s technical debt, which was slowing down paint production. Additionally, the existing desktop app had compatibility issues with the new version of the Microsoft operating system. The client needed a reliable partner to provide baseline support and continuous improvements to this business-critical system.

The Yunshan Town Complex, located in the scenic Simian Mountain valley, was a unique project for the Shanghai-based Yuangou design agency. The team, more accustomed to designing urban complexes, was tasked with creating a two-building complex that would serve as the entrance point to a new tourist resort. The challenge was to design a structure that would emulate the surrounding mountains and local architecture, while housing an art gallery, retail stores, a wedding chapel, and holiday residences. The rural location and the need to reflect local architectural practices and natural elements presented a significant challenge. Additionally, the consistent rain typical of the climate necessitated the design of roofs that could effectively deflect rain.

The management of regulatory changes is a significant challenge for financial companies. The process is often costly, time-consuming, error-prone, and unpredictable. The volume of regulatory information published by state and federal governments is overwhelming, and financial companies are forced to invest heavily in manpower to keep up. Compliance.ai offers solutions to these inefficiencies, helping financial services companies manage and respond to the growing volume and pace of regulatory change. Their platform includes purpose-built machine learning models and an API for programmatic access to regulatory information. However, the challenge was managing access to the API and its offerings.

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses of all sizes, from home-based to large organizations, are facing the challenge of keeping up with the pace of technological advancements. They are struggling to get the most out of their hardware and software, from individual PCs to complex IT datacenters and cloud systems. The challenge is not just about maintaining the operational efficiency of these systems, but also about proactively monitoring potential issues and ensuring fast repairs throughout their lifecycle. Furthermore, businesses are seeking to turn their big ideas into tangible outcomes, but often find themselves hindered by obstacles in their digital transformation journey. They need to identify their goals, measure progress, streamline costs, and accelerate innovation to achieve true organizational agility.

In the digital age, businesses of all sizes, from home-based to large organizations, are facing the challenge of keeping up with the rapid pace of technological advancements. They are struggling to get the most out of their hardware and software, from individual PCs to complex IT datacenters and cloud systems. Small businesses often feel overlooked, while medium and large organizations are seeking ways to improve IT value and efficiency across their entire ecosystem. Furthermore, businesses are looking for ways to turn their big ideas into tangible outcomes, overcome obstacles, and navigate their digital transformation journey. They are also grappling with the need to respond and recover quickly from cyber threats, plan and execute their digital transformation strategies, deploy new technologies, and manage their IT systems effectively.

Storyblocks, a rapidly growing media company, faced challenges with its monolithic application and synchronous REST API calls between services. As the company transitioned from a disruptor to a major industry player, it began to experience issues with the application they had built when the company was started. The issues persisted even after they had split the monolith into microservices. Developers and data engineers were unable to resolve issues quickly or iterate on their search functionality with sufficient agility. The increasing amount of data threatened to slow down productivity and time to market for new features. The initial solution, an AWS Kinesis data pipeline dumping raw data into Amazon S3, began to fail due to lack of scalability and suitability for fully decoupling services.

Tonik Energy, a UK-based renewable energy company, was facing a challenge with its enterprise architecture. The company had ambitious growth plans and needed an environment that was simple, easily expandable, clearly understood, maintainable, and supportable. However, the existing architecture was largely cloud-based, using modern development frameworks and technologies, but there were significant gaps in knowledge and documentation. There was also a lack of consistency in the service delivery and change management processes. The architecture owner urgently needed to understand whether the existing enterprise architecture was fit for purpose, both in the short term and for the longer term.

Cardinal Health, a leading healthcare services company, was facing challenges with their product ordering process for pharmacy customers. The company, which specializes in the wholesale distribution of pharmaceuticals and medical products, was using embedded laser or LED scan engine devices to facilitate the pharmacy product ordering process. However, these devices had scan accuracy rates of around 70 percent, leading to potential errors and increased costs. Cardinal Health attempted to address this issue by leasing purpose-built scanner hardware to their customers, but found this solution to be lacking in speed and overall scan performance. The company then decided to test a more cost-efficient option with consumer device apps.

Red Dirt Measurement and Controls (RDMC), a company providing a wide range of instrumentation and electrical services for the Oil and Gas industry, was facing a significant challenge in managing their inventory and assets. With hundreds of line items varying in sizes and gauges, RDMC had to deal with a lot of inventory buildup from extra supplies that were not used on jobs. They also had to keep track of important assets for future projects. The lack of asset and inventory controls was affecting their income generation and their ability to control job costs and re-allocate material for the next projects. The company was in dire need of a solution that could provide full visibility of their tools, machinery, and trucks, and help them manage their extra inventory to save money.

Midwest Distribution, a rapidly growing company, was facing a significant challenge in accurately tracking its increasing number of assets due to its growth and the addition of more employees. The company was experiencing issues with employees trading monitors, PCs, and tablets throughout the day, with no effective system in place to track these movements. This lack of a robust tracking system led to problems with lost assets and unauthorized changes in asset locations, which were often not known to the IT Department. The need for a solution was urgent to ensure the smooth operation of the company and to prevent further loss of assets.

As Cox Automotive was formed, executives sought to implement an enterprise data strategy that would enable the company to deliver new customer experiences using rich automotive data from across its brands.When the 20 brands came together, it was not possible to bring all the data together in traditional environments such as Netezza or SQL Server.

Hitachi Systems Security, a global IT security service provider, faced significant challenges as it expanded its operations to over 40 countries. The company's growth led to a highly disjointed environment, as most Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and project management products available were designed for product or manufacturing companies, not service companies. The company had individual tools managing each part of the business, including accounting, projects, resources, and business development. However, none of this information was integrated, leading to difficulties in obtaining accurate and timely integrated information. The company identified project risk by instinct, unable to determine the exact budget, time, and resource allocation to ensure projects stayed on track. Decision making was always two to three months in arrears due to their disparate systems environment, with spreadsheets and whiteboards serving as the primary source of integrated information.

DigiCert, a leading provider of scalable identity and encryption solutions, was already using Imperva’s SaaS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect their on-premises applications when they began migrating some of their workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, they were not satisfied with their existing DDoS mitigation solution on AWS, as it excessively scrubbed traffic and often blocked legitimate traffic. As DigiCert's usage of AWS grew, they realized the need for a new security solution that could manage risk, monitor all traffic, rapidly identify threats, and only allow valid traffic to access their applications. They wanted a solution from a single provider that could deliver both WAF protection and DDoS mitigation across their entire hybrid environment. The solution also needed to lower false positives, assure rapid response to minimize potential business interruption, and automate as much of the security process as possible due to time and resource constraints.

Chick-fil-A, a leading restaurant chain in the United States, was seeking a robust and flexible web application security solution to safeguard the key assets of their digital transformation strategy. These assets included consumer-facing mobile and web applications that were instrumental in enhancing customer satisfaction and driving revenue growth. The existing legacy Web Application Firewall (WAF) that relied on pattern matching rulesets was inadequate in a development lifecycle where distributed software design and deployments were commonplace. The challenge was to find a future-ready WAF that could be easily installed across distributed architecture and effectively prevent account takeover (ATO) attempts and other attacks on public-facing apps in production.

Gannett | USA TODAY Network, the largest local-to-national digital media organization in the U.S., faced the challenge of delivering news quickly and smoothly across the globe. The company required a network that could handle high traffic levels, especially during breaking news, without disruptions for end users. They also needed to be able to scale globally, integrate next-gen innovations effortlessly, and support a developer-first mindset. The company's business happens worldwide, necessitating a network that can deliver as efficiently in Europe or Asia as it does in the U.S. Furthermore, they needed to take advantage of cutting-edge technology and support developers in getting new products and enhancements into production safely and swiftly.

Conductor, a Brazilian company specializing in payment method solutions and processing, faced a significant challenge in raising the availability of its environment with a reduced staff. The company had previously migrated from its in-house operation to Equinix colocation environments in São Paulo International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. However, two years later, the company was struggling to maintain high availability with a smaller team. The challenge was to find a solution that would allow Conductor to continue to grow and innovate its payment processing solutions while maintaining high availability and performance.

OneSource Virtual (OSV), a pioneer of Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) outsourcing, began exploring the implementation of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in late 2018. The company aimed to increase efficiency and accuracy in predefined processes to provide more benefits to end-users within the Workday ecosystem. The challenge was not only to find a platform that would deliver the best technology but also a partner committed to providing expertise and support. The situation became more critical in March 2020 when the United States started feeling the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. OSV had to pivot from its current automated processes and turn to RPA to help with new payroll tax legislation, such as the CARES Act, passed to provide financial assistance to businesses. This required multi-system updates to the company’s proprietary tax software to prepare for a new level of data and tracking.

The client, operating in the financial sector, is working with large collections of client meeting notes in order to search for certain information, then organize and consolidate it into easy-to-read interactive sets so it could be used for different business purposes.So, they needed to search, find, and process texts quickly, and obtain actual insights from the data across the notes, in order to understand their (potential) customers, and identify market trends and risks for further informed business decisions by tagging documents with labels.

Heetch, a French mobility company, was struggling with the management of large quantities of data gathered from drivers, passengers, and global operations. As the company grew, the costs of their data warehouse were spiraling out of control and performance was suffering due to the increasing volume of data. They needed a solution that would allow anyone in the organization to work with large amounts of data while also ensuring optimized resource allocation. The challenge was to find a way to leverage big data with good performance and at reasonable costs, which required serious computational power, optimized resource consumption, and isolated environments for development and production. Managing all these aspects was becoming increasingly complex for the organization.

IQVIA, a global leader in healthcare data and analytics, was grappling with the challenge of managing patient data for up to 70 different clinical studies run by various entities including government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions. The data, originating from 250 unique vendor warehouses, was being copied into a single system using legacy tools and processes like SAS, a process that took several days. Standardizing this data into FDA-compliant formats was another hurdle, requiring 1 to 2 months. As the rate of incoming data from clinical trials increased, and the data became increasingly non-identified and unstructured, IQVIA faced the risk of significant delays. These delays threatened to stall the progress of their clients' clinical studies.

The case study revolves around the use of Monte Carlo simulation for forecasting stock prices. The challenge was to create a sample Alteryx workflow that sources stock price data, performs analysis of the historical prices, uses these metrics to perform Monte Carlo simulations, and then analyzes the output of these simulations to drive business decision making. The aim was to provide an Alteryx template for Monte Carlo simulation-based forecasting that could be used and further enriched by the Alteryx community. The challenge also involved sourcing stock prices from Yahoo Finance, calculating daily percentage change in the stock price, preparing metrics for the simulation, and running the simulation multiple times.