RTI Hotel Supply, Inc. has been providing specialized procurement services to the hospitality industry since 1989. The company focuses primarily on the Caribbean and Latin American marketplace and has built a solid reputation as a single-source provider of high-quality products. A second division builds customized hotel furnishings including vanities, casework, and seating. The company had relied on Sage 300 as its accounting and distribution software, but had neglected to update the software for several years. Rapid growth, including the opening of several international offices, ultimately prompted the company to invest in its technology infrastructure and to update its system to the most current level.

CHIN Radio, a pioneer in multicultural radio broadcasting, was looking to update its accounting system. The company wanted a modern, flexible solution that could interface with its advertising revenue application. The company was concerned about the migration of data from its legacy system to the new one, and wanted to ensure that it would have access to both historical and current financial data from the start. The company also wanted to eliminate costly data entry time and the errors associated with manual entry.

The Grand Beach Hotel, a luxury hotel in Miami Beach, was in need of a financial and reporting solution. The hotel initially considered proprietary software designed specifically for hotel accounting, but found it to be nearly twice the cost of Sage 300 and didn't offer any additional benefits. Microsoft Dynamics GP was also considered but was deemed overly complex for the hotel's needs. The hotel wanted a system that was easy to learn, easy to use, and could deliver core accounting functionality, remote access capabilities, flexible reporting, and scalability at a competitive price point.

Fairmont Raffles Hotels International (FRHI) is a leading global hotel company with more than 70 hotels under the Fairmont, Raffles, and Swissôtel brands. The company’s business model centers around the design, development, and management of hotels for the properties’ owners. FRHI sought a reliable, flexible, and cost-effective solution that could be deployed globally and serve as the financial backbone of each individual hotel and the centralized database for its corporate offices. The company needed a system that could adapt to different sizes of hotels, from a 1,000-room resort to a 150-room hotel. The system also needed to be reliable and affordable, with no single point of failure, and flexible enough to integrate with other applications.

Posera, Inc., a leading provider of point-of-sale software and hardware to the hospitality and restaurant industries, was struggling to manage several different software packages across various office locations and departments as it grew rapidly. The company needed an integrated business technology solution that would serve the entire organization, providing a 360-degree view of its customers for sales, service, support, and accounting-related interactions. The front office was the primary concern, yet a powerful back-office business management system was also needed. Posera considered three integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions before deciding on Sage 300 and Sage CRM.

Workspace Commercial Furniture, a respected name in quality Australian furniture, was struggling with its business systems. The company was using an antiquated UNIX-based accounting system that was slow, error-prone, and required programmers’ time to create reports. Moreover, its sales operations were run manually, which was inefficient and required triplicate data entry. The company was looking for a new solution that was ultraflexible, especially in reporting options. It also wanted an end-to-end system with sophisticated financial analysis and customer relationship management capabilities.

Navtrak, a manufacturer of global positioning system (GPS) equipment, was facing challenges with its QuickBooks financial software. The software was not providing an adequate audit trail, the ability to perform analysis, or deep inventory tracking. It also allowed people to delete transactions when they shouldn't, leaving the company with little management control. Navtrak needed a solution that could provide better financial management, inventory tracking, and overall control of the business operations.

Nylene Canada, a nylon manufacturer, was spun off from Honeywell Nylon Canada and had to find a system to support its own financial management quickly. The company needed an economical ERP system that could be installed in just three months to manage all aspects of business and manufacturing operations. The system had to be capable of handling cash management, a function previously handled by the treasury department at Honeywell. The transition had to be seamless to customers and not disrupt the ongoing workflow of users.

Wiseco Piston, Inc., a world leader in high-performance aftermarket pistons, was using a proprietary business software that predated PC technology. The software was not integrated, could not provide up-to-date reports, and prevented offering online services. The company was in need of a system that was designed for midsized companies, addressed manufacturing and distribution operations, and was backed by a respected name. The company also needed a system that could help it comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) was struggling with separate nonintegrated systems for various parts of its business. It was difficult to extract information from these systems and impossible to integrate data from the museum’s diverse operations. With a budget topping $30 million, every penny must be accounted for. The museum needed an advanced financial solution that could manage the diverse information integration needs, reporting, and distribution requirements of a $30 million operation.

Andex Industries, a manufacturer of consumer product packaging, was looking to replace its old AS/400 platform with a flexible, integrated ERP solution that could adapt to its manufacturing model. The company had been using a mix of custom programs, legacy applications, and industry-specific software, which was not efficient. The company hired an independent consultant to help them find a new solution. They evaluated five packages and arranged demonstrations of Sage 500 ERP and Made2Manage. They needed a solution that incorporated all the functionality they needed, including planning and scheduling, credit card processing, business monitoring and alerts, core accounting, plus payroll and human resource management.

Pediatrix Medical Group, a leading provider of maternal-fetal, newborn, and pediatric sub-specialty physician services, was facing significant challenges in its claims processing due to lack of data integration. The company works with multiple clearinghouses for insurance claims and receiving claims status reports, each of which employs unique and complex formats in generating reports. The lack of data integration between internal applications and clearinghouses caused breaks in information flow, slowing down the claims review and reporting process, and creating a disconnect between reporting and other process steps in the Pediatrix patient life cycle. As the volume of the claims increased, these challenges grew more severe, causing bottlenecks and delays in insurance claims processing.

Unruly Media, a leading global technology platform for social video distribution and analytics, was faced with the challenge of providing its clients with real-time visibility into the social footprint of their videos. This included factors such as reach, shareability, and other elements critical to gaining a competitive business advantage. The company needed a robust solution that could handle the delivery, tracking, and auditing of billions of video views across thousands of social video campaigns for hundreds of brands.

TimoCom, Europe’s leading provider of freight and vehicle exchange services, was faced with the challenge of managing 450,000 freight offers per day and 30,000 warehouse/logistics options with efficiency and security. The business was complicated by the varied operational and regulatory requirements and languages of different countries. Company leaders recognized early on that sustained business growth would require improved performance and deeper insights into its international operations. In the transport and freight forwarding industry, orders tend to be large and represent a large investment on the part of the customer. Criminal organizations sometimes monitor and prey upon transport networks, attempting to steal valuable freight in transit.

Axiell, a UK-based company that designs, develops, implements, and supports systems for libraries, archives, museums, and other community resources, was looking to expand its services to all 33 boroughs of London, a growth rate of almost 200 percent. The company's existing system, a 64-bit Solaris system, limited scalability and was not able to support the increased workload that would come with this expansion. Axiell needed a system that could handle the increased workload without causing slowdowns or failures. Additionally, many of Axiell's customers are run by local government agencies, which are under pressure to control costs. As a result, Axiell was looking for a less expensive but technically superior platform that could help it increase service without increasing costs.

Banca IFIS, an independent Italian bank specializing in financing enterprises, faced a challenge when new Italian banking regulations imposed a demand for a higher level of security and data protection. The bank had to evolve its core business application to meet these new challenges. The main issue was the limited time frame available to implement the new version of their application to meet the timeline given to the bank. In less than one year, they had to deliver a cost-effective and scalable solution, a fully unicode enabled database and application to support Banca IFIS expansion, high availability, and a secured infrastructure fulfilling disaster recovery targets imposed by new banking regulations.

C&K Market, a supermarket chain servicing Oregon and Northern California, was facing the need to transition from its legacy VMS platform to a new platform. The company wanted to adopt an open source database solution to take advantage of improved efficiencies, scalability, and low total cost of ownership. The company had been running Ingres on a VMS platform, which was being phased out. The efficient reporting and analysis of pricing and inventory – and effective control of costs – was all enabled through the Ingres Database, an enterprise open source database.

DAI Rubicon, a company that provides publishers with an end-to-end solution including print, distribution, and circulation management, was facing a challenge. They were in a high volume, low margin business and needed to find a better way for customers to manage their logistics for online purchases. They decided to add a point of sale supply chain delivery solution that would make the ordering process more transparent, scalable, and easier to manage without adding to the cost. They chose Base2Services, Australia’s leading open source cloud computing specialist, to build the supply chain delivery solution. They wanted a solution that was more scalable, more transparent, and easy to use, built on the Amazon EC2 cloud that would lower their ongoing operational costs.

The Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) in Germany was tasked with monitoring seismometer and infrasound stations in support of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-ban Treaty (CTbT). The CTbT, signed in 1996, prohibits all forms of nuclear testing in any environment, whether it’s underground, underwater, or in the atmosphere. The international monitoring system monitors compliance with the treaty, and comprises a global network of monitoring stations. One of BGR’s primary tasks includes monitoring seismometer and infrasound stations in support of the CTbT. In addition to monitoring the CTbT, the second key task of the BGR research group is the monitoring of earthquakes. Even today, it is still almost impossible to forecast when and where an earthquake might occur. Germany has seismically active regions that are repeatedly subject to earthquakes. Due to the high population and industrial density, continuous monitoring of seismic activity is essential. Only by careful monitoring is it possible to identify long term trends and make forecasts on future earthquakes and the accompanying seismic hazard. Both current and historical data on earthquakes form the basis for many scientific investigations.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is dedicated to solving cases of child abduction and child sexual exploitation. Timely information is vital to the organization’s work, as its workers collaborate internally and with partner agencies around the globe to find and recover children at risk. When NCMEC began the implementation of its first database, it wanted to make sure its technology worked as hard – and as tirelessly – as its personnel. To help agencies and organizations around the world work together, the solution had to be able to support Web-based applications and websites in multiple languages and character sets serving diverse user communities. With time a critical factor in every case, the system also had to deliver maximum availability under any conditions.

NETinfo, a rapidly growing independent software vendor, was faced with the challenge of providing a cost-effective, fully customizable e-banking multi-channel solution to financial institutions. The solution needed to meet high-performance requirements including scalability, always-on availability, robust security, and full customizability. Additionally, the solution had to support multiple jurisdictions, single sign-on across multiple banks, and multi-signature workflows. The company initially used Oracle for the NETteller e-banking platform, but the high upfront licensing fees and costly ongoing support significantly increased the total cost of ownership. MySQL was also considered but was quickly rejected due to its lack of critical features such as online backup, point-in-time restore, and security features.

NK.pl, a popular social networking service in Poland, was facing a challenge in keeping pace with the changing preferences and behaviors of its 13 million users. The traditional transaction database used by NK.pl was not powerful enough to process the 250 terabytes of data generated by its users in a timely manner. When product managers attempted to run queries against the data, which was spread across 1,500 servers, they faced query response times of three to four weeks. Such slow response times were unacceptable to NK.pl because the data was outdated and meaningless by the time it was received. To optimize product features, marketing efforts, and the experience of its social network members, NK.pl needed a system that could perform both simple and rich queries quickly for intra-day analysis and response in an extremely cost-effective manner.

With its business growing, Peerless needed a more consistent, flexible platform to modernize its production environment and support future expansion. The company began exploring commercial off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and underlying databases. While companies in similar situations often go straight to proprietary vendors, Peerless decided to build its own ERP solution from the ground up. With a team of just a half-dozen developers, Hamilton’s department set out to develop a fully featured business platform that would automate every aspect of the company’s business processes – from forecasting and ordering, to production, packaging, and distribution – in order to enable a highly optimized just-in-time manufacturing process. To support this environment, Peerless required a flexible, scalable database environment that would be easy for developers to optimize around the evolving ERP platform.

The Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD), an executive agency of the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was facing the challenge of keeping pace with rising regulatory challenges without increasing costs. The organization’s mission encompasses ensuring the safety, effectiveness, and regulatory compliance of plant protection products used by both industry and amateur gardeners; regulating a market worth around £450 million in the UK and a similar figure in overseas exports; and shaping UK policies on pesticide issues – all with a staff of only 200. Technology plays a vital role in making this possible. Most recently, Park’s group was called on to deliver a particularly high-profile project – enabling the electronic delivery of all services, followed by the introduction of a complete, end-to-end electronic workflow for the entire new product application and approval process.

Colgate-Palmolive's Online Acceleration Center of Excellence in London was focused on transforming its digital offering in markets throughout the EU. However, reporting on key digital advertising parameters was largely manual. Local media teams logged into various ad platforms, collected data, and inserted them into Excel templates to create bi-weekly reports. These reports were then sent to brand managers in respective markets and the local agency teams, with no automated flow of information. The process was slow and time-consuming, involving over 25 people in the EU region. Furthermore, the data was practically out of date by the time it arrived with the analysts and decision makers. The reports were distributed via email, clogging up inboxes and increasing the possibility of a data discrepancy.

The Philadelphia 76ers, a part of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment’s (HBSE) portfolio, had a data ecosystem consisting of over 130 data sources. Managing and expanding this data infrastructure was becoming increasingly difficult and time-consuming. The process of connecting to a new data source could take weeks, severely limiting the bandwidth of the data team. The fixed timelines surrounding live events made flexibility and agility of data operations paramount. The existing data consolidation procedure was not scalable and was preventing the team from fully focusing on uncovering the insights the data could provide.

IKEA Austria was facing challenges in consolidating data from various sources, which was crucial for understanding the needs of its customers and preparing for future growth. The company was dealing with multiple data sources and using the services of several agencies, which led to data silos and unavailability of data. Data quality was also a significant issue, with different KPIs and naming conventions used for campaigns on different channels, making reporting on campaign performance extremely difficult. The company was also facing challenges in terms of data accessibility, with global teams at IKEA having to wait for days, even weeks, for the information they needed.

Globalvia, a global infrastructure concessions management company, faced the challenge of consolidating and structuring business data from 29 diverse and geographically dispersed concessions to maximize management efficiency. The company manages concessions in seven countries, including highways, railways, hospitals, and ports, each with different management criteria. There were no defined roles and responsibilities and no governing data policy. The company needed to consolidate data and define its processes to facilitate a corporate transformation. Globalvia developed the Prometheus project to chart a course for unifying and standardizing processes, systems, and corporate culture. This project led to the Delphi technology initiative to facilitate an organization-wide transformation. The project’s stakeholders set out to develop a single management model based on innovation, with higher quality data for improved internal processes and better decision-making. They wanted to establish a model that could detect trends and make it easier to determine the profitability of their concessions.

HEROLD's initial challenge was to quickly monetize enormous amounts of addresses, household and corporate data that it acquired from purchasing a directory business. The company was seeking a better way to connect its customer-the businesses that advertise with it -with user of its digital properties, therefore HEROLD needed to create new digital products that could summarize and structure HEROLD's data assets so it could be productized and resold. Additional challenges included: Integrating and Managing Complex and High Volumes of Data. Integrating, accessing and searching the massive amounts of acquired personalized and address data could not be accomplished with HEROLD's existing relational database technology. Much of HEROLD's company data resided in as many as 15 separate systems and included records on more than 360,000 businesses, comprising of unstructured pieces such as product information, user reviews and recommendations, ratings, photos and text descriptions, which came from product feeds and manual entries. Aggressive Timeline to Demonstrate Return on Investment. HEROLD needed to integrate the newly acquired structured and unstructured data into its systems to quickly create and introduce new products that would help them stay ahead of the competition while demonstrating return on investment to management.

The AIRBUS flight test program is a key component of aircraft development. Every part in every possible configuration must be tested in as many scenarios as possible. This creates multiple types of data, all in different silos — plane configuration criteria, flight data criteria, flight event behaviors, crew reports, and other unstructured content criteria. Historically, each test flight required manual research into previous tests to create a set of specific requests, and the effort to leverage data to optimize those new flight tests was considerable. While a lot of data was generated during testing, AIRBUS’ process to search within the data in order to simply retrieve a specific condition and its result was a slow, manual one. And, flight test environments are constantly changing, with a series of maneuvers done at specific locations, which meant that traditional data approaches couldn’t keep up with this complex data challenge.