Culina Group, a food and drink logistics specialist, faced challenges with its pre-installed telematics systems, which were not aligned across its fleet. This misalignment made it difficult to gain useful intelligence and maximize benefits. The company needed an integrated, one-stop solution to support improved utilization, safety metrics, and driver behavior. In 2011, Culina went to market looking for a solution that could address these needs. They selected Microlise due to the quality of its solutions, cost-competitiveness, and positive customer feedback. The Microlise product roadmap was also a critical factor, as Culina needed a forward-looking partner to support its continuing growth.

Having introduced a Safe and Fuel Efficient Driving (SAFED) initiative in 2008, Carlsberg saw an improvement in fuel efficiency. However, without the ability to monitor driver performance, and delivering effective coaching and training, the benefits of SAFED were short lived. The challenge was clear – Carlsberg needed to maintain the benefits of SAFED training through a prolonged period. Carlsberg set key objectives – to improve MPG whilst reducing emissions in line with its corporate social responsibility programme.

In 2008, MAN Truck & Bus UK were seeking a telematics partner to offer a solution to its customer base. As a major player in the UK market, the company needed a reliable and innovative telematics partner that it could work with in the long term to develop the solution as the technology evolved. After having previously worked with two telematics partners, MAN conducted a detailed search of the market in order to find a partner that was both reliable and able to offer a market leading solution. The company wanted to find an established player, but one that was able to work with the team at MAN to develop the solution according to specific requirements and use cases. The ability to white label a solution was key, in order to ensure that the MAN telematics offering would be in keeping with other services offered to customers.

DFS, a sofa retailer and manufacturer with 51 operating centres across the UK, faces the challenge of controlling driver behaviour to ensure safety, cost-effectiveness, and optimal fleet performance. With around 250 7.5-ton vehicles and 45 articulated vehicles with 80 trailers, DFS delivers 12,000 orders weekly. The drivers not only drive but also install furniture, making customer service a top priority. The main challenge is to monitor and provide feedback on driver behaviour to maintain high safety standards and reduce fuel costs.

The time-critical nature of the chilled distribution industry presents significant challenges for any transport operation in this sector. Ensuring that deliveries arrive within tight specified time windows is crucial to minimizing waste and providing great customer service. NFT recognized that greater operational efficiency was necessary to remain competitive in this market. One of NFT's key aims was to increase operational efficiency to ensure that more consignments were delivered within a specified time window to help ensure that when an NFT vehicle arrived at a customer location, a bay would be available to facilitate swift turnaround.

Lakeland had been managing much of their routing in antiquated ways. With this volume of work, the Solid Waste Division’s use of Excel spreadsheets to track and manage hundreds of weekly routes was just not up to the task. Lisa McCall, Systems and Applications Manager for Lakeland, describes their routing system before RouteSmart as highly inefficient. For their Solid Waste Division, they needed a more efficient way to accomplish more routes other than through spreadsheets that would take countless hours and months to compile. They didn’t really have a routing department but it would’ve involved a lot of resources—all of the supervisors and some of the drivers would have needed to participate in rerouting. And, with Excel, there were items falling through the cracks. Because they couldn’t visualize their route data on a map, there was no way to verify that the addresses were being pulled correctly from the billing system.

This large US-based financial institution faced significant challenges in managing their security operations. With millions of log events processed daily, investigating notables and remediating critical events without a 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC) became overwhelming. Additionally, they were hosting significant data in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and needed an additional layer of security to further reduce and mitigate risk. The company had limited resources and required a solution that could manage continuous monitoring and alerting of security events, as well as co-manage their Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system.

When this client came to Proficio, they were already housing their webcam data in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cloud security was a priority, so they needed to have around the clock protection to ensure their data was secure but didn’t have the resources to monitor their networks 24/7 while also managing a cloud infrastructure, which is often time consuming and overwhelming for a security team. This posed the issue of acquiring additional support to leverage these security controls and maximize the value of their AWS setup for the company.

Given the amount of sensitive data that is processed on Funding Societies’ website, cybersecurity is of the utmost importance. Protecting their clients’ information is critical to maintaining trust in the relationships between both parties so when it came to looking for a security partner, they were determined to find a company that would take the role seriously and view their security as a shared responsibility. Investing in a Secure Future Funding Societies is on a mission to bring SMEs and investors together to bridge a US$320 billion SME financing gap in Southeast Asia. But to reach this goal, it must gain the trust of businesses and their investors that their valuable personal data is secure. While the platform had a security team in place and invested in Splunk Enterprise and Enterprise Security (ES), it quickly became evident that as the company grew, it would need more help to keep up with the 24/7 monitoring and alerting required to keep their networks safe. Funding Societies decided to partner with a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service provider that could provide continuous security monitoring and help prioritize and investigate the influx of alerts while its team focused on other priorities.

Gas contamination and variation affect chip yield rates and the required reduction in impurity levels for successful chip production. Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) drives performance to meet the requirements. To meet their CPI goals, Praxair uses NWA Quality Analyst to drive control limits tighter and decrease variation. Business requirements are driving the move to less variation and higher process capability. Many customers are demanding tighter process control and “ship-to-control” capability. Vendors such as Praxair who actively use SPC and CPI can successfully negotiate specifications with regard to their actual process capability and guarantee they will be a capable supplier. Their production is at least three sigma level, and with the ongoing CPI program they have projects in place to improve process capability to meet the evolving business demands.

With any home automation solution, users want to monitor and control connected devices from anywhere with an Internet connection, all from their smartphone. Logitech Harmony hub-based remotes include a smartphone app for iOS and Android for this functionality. To power this capability, the Logitech development team needed a way to securely and reliably stream data between the smartphone application and the Harmony Hub. Logitech uses PubNub Realtime Pub/Sub Messaging to power the real-time communication between the smartphone application and hub to enable Harmony users to control their devices outside the home. Flexible and customizable, the Harmony API also allows 3rd party apps (like IFTTT) to integrate and extend Harmony functionality. The Harmony API uses PubNub to communicate third party app requests to the Harmony Hub in the user’s home. Beyond device control, PubNub also streams device state from the Hub to the smartphone application. This enables users to monitor the status of devices in their home in realtime, such as temperature, or whether the lights are turned on and off. Overall, PubNub’s realtime data streaming keeps users in the loop in realtime, and streams any changes as they arise.

Disprz, an interactive employee development and engagement platform, needed to build and deploy a scalable and reliable platform to deliver collaborative and realtime eLearning functionalities. The platform required a hosted realtime service to handle key interactive features such as group chat, messaging, and collaborative whiteboards. Initially built on an in-house stack using Socket.IO and other open-source components, Disprz faced challenges when the influx of users pushed the initial stack to its capacity, threatening the ability to deliver a fast and engaging eLearning experience.

Healthcare transportation is an inefficient, archaic system. 3.6 million Americans miss medical appointments every year due to lack of reliable transportation. $6 billion is spent on healthcare-related transportation every year. Missed medical appointments cost the U.S. healthcare system more than $150 billion per year, and $10 billion of this is caused by avoidable transportation problems. One Call saw the problem with existing healthcare transportation solutions: a combination of patient, dispatcher, and contracted vehicle services manually communicating through a number of channels led to a massive number of missed rides, incorrect pick-up and drop-off locations, penalties, and fees. One Call knew that using emerging technologies, the entire experience could be streamlined to provide a more cost-effective and positive experience for patients.

Building chat for the healthcare industry is more than just writing code. Strict compliance, complex rules, and closely-monitored regulation of sensitive healthcare data that’s stored and sent isn’t just an expectation – it’s a legal requirement. As a result, everything from the backend infrastructure to the end user features need to be carefully deployed, and maintained at a higher level of sophistication than other industries. After releasing the first version of their application, MedX started to notice stability issues with their backend infrastructure, as well as bugs with their client application. Devoting internal resources to focus on improving reliability, the MedX team quickly recognized they lacked the domain knowledge to continue to improve and innovate their app. With over 23,000 physicians using the application, MedX needed to improve reliability, and open up the opportunity to create new, innovative features for their users.

To deliver realtime, interactive second screen experiences, FanHub required a way to stream and sync data across connected devices. With sports, rapid delivery of data is essential, and lag or downtime is unacceptable for connected users. Reliability and speed were paramount considerations for the FanHub in the games and other experiences that it offers. In FanHub’s case, they needed to be able to deliver notifications, updates, and alerts, as well as update and sync front end UI, all in realtime. From the early stages of development of their realtime backend, FanHub knew they wanted to use a commercial data stream network. With a large audience and the requirement of realtime, FanHub chose the PubNub Data Stream Network.

Veeps needed a reliable and scalable solution to handle real-time chat during live-streamed performances. Their previous solutions lacked the flexibility and scalability required to maintain their infrastructure in-house. They needed a platform that could handle a high number of concurrent users and deliver messages fast and reliably, ensuring a seamless experience for both artists and fans.

Located on the edges of two continental and two oceanic tectonic plates, Indonesia is home to more than 500 volcanoes (128 of which are active), and threatened by some of the greatest seismic activity in the world. Furthermore, much of this activity is offshore and brings the significant added risk of tsunamis. The country experiences recurring small/medium scale natural disasters compounded by a high risk of less frequent, but very large-scale, natural disasters that necessitate a systemwide international humanitarian response. When disasters strike, especially in remote areas of the Indonesian archipelago, existing response capacities are invariably stretched. Besides operational challenges brought about by the country’s geographical characteristics, national disaster response capabilities are further limited by poor logistics infrastructure, especially in remote areas, and lack of facilities to store, handle, and consolidate humanitarian cargo for distribution in disaster-affected areas. TLI-AP was tasked with considering the prepositioning of relief supplies at strategic locations across Indonesia to enhance national disaster response capabilities. The developers wanted to select the most appropriate locations for establishing an efficient network of emergency response facilities in Indonesia. The network design requirements included each of the six main islands needing to be equipped with its own emergency response facility and no capacity constraints for the facilities being sited.

Eldorado Company, a huge electronics retailer in Russia, with stores in 350 cities, needed to determine the optimal number of warehouses, and where they should be situated, in order to better fulfill customer demand and minimize delivery and storage expenses. The analysis showed that the problem could be solved with introduction of the anyLogistix supply chain optimization system. Input data provided by the customer described potential warehousing points: rent cost, investments for building new or modernizing old warehouses, average level and cost of storage, overall costs for staffing and security, etc. In addition, the anyLogistix simulation model considered the warehouse and retail store GIS coordinates, and distances between cities.

Buyers Products faced significant challenges due to inefficient, labor-intensive processes and tremendous growth in their supply chain operations. The company had been using manual, paper-based systems which required keypunching all data, leading to inefficiencies. With the move to a new 150,000 square foot distribution center, nearly doubling their capacity, Buyers needed to significantly increase efficiency to manage their growing inventory and product flow. Additionally, customers were increasingly requesting more services and documentation, including EDI capability, compliance labeling, and advance ship notices (ASNs).

For A.N. Deringer, the economic collapse of 2008 coincided with the realization that their Warehouse Management System (WMS) was outdated. The existing system lacked the functionality to compete in the modern environment, where customers demand rapid access to information. The company was running three different software packages to meet customer needs and had a third party hosting a significant part of their system. This setup was insufficient for their growing needs, and they sought a robust, intuitive system that was easily adaptable, easy to configure, and easy to train customers and employees to use. Additionally, Deringer needed to bring their system back in-house to improve visibility and control.

Amplifier wanted better visibility, scale, and extensibility from its inventory and order fulfillment processes. When Amplifier first launched its business in 2001, it relied on a traditional catalog order fulfillment software package to manage the distribution of client inventory. However, the software couldn't keep pace as the company grew. Importing order data could take an entire day, and the physical order fulfillment capabilities were maxed out. Amplifier's operations were constrained, and they needed a solution that could handle more than 10,000 shipments in a single day.

To accelerate its growth across many new and emerging international markets, Okaïdi realized it had to eliminate many of the operational constraints within its supply chain and re-engineer its warehousing and distribution processes. As Jean-Luc Soufflet, managing director at Okaïdi confirms: “Managing strong growth is a complex challenge for any company, particularly in an international development context. We consider a robust supply chain infrastructure a key component of our expansion strategy and so the creation of an optimized model in one region, that can be replicated anywhere in the world, was regarded as a crucial aspect of our growth plan.”

Norauto’s expensive and inefficient proprietary warehouse system had become obsolete. The company needed to support its growth and replace the outdated system to improve operational productivity, comply with automotive sector tracking standards, and achieve a 99.9% order accuracy in the fulfillment process. The goal was to implement a reliable and upgradable supply chain execution system.

In recent years, Batory Foods began to see changes emerge in the food industry such as the farm-to-fork movement, a greater spotlight on food allergens and heightened consumer awareness of production processes. These developments helped spur increasingly stringent industry regulations and added complexity. Given the company’s distributed model, executives knew they could no longer rely on internal processes to meet the small, complicated requirements of customers across their network in a manner that reflected and supported company values. Batory Foods needed to address inventory and supply chain management on a grander scale and began looking for a warehouse management system (WMS) vendor that could meet its needs.

Following a period of sustained growth, Catering Engros needed a new logistics system to handle its fulfilment operation, particularly in light of anticipated further growth. The company sought a system to manage its 24/7 operation in both warehouses and introduce proven standards and processes to improve efficiency in its supply chain operations. The previous reliance on a paper-based system led to frequent errors in picking and shipping, and a lack of real-time stock visibility adversely impacted inventory management. The legacy system could not pinpoint the exact location of stock, leading to bottlenecks and picking errors that required replacement shipments, negatively affecting customer service and environmental impact.

Century Martial Arts faced numerous competitive pressures and was constantly challenged with the need to reduce costs while providing a superior customer experience. Upgrades to the existing AS400 were costly, making it difficult to keep pace with growth and technology developments.

Kolok Unlimited, a major printer supplies distributor in Africa, faced significant challenges with its warehouse management and manual systems. The company's international growth led to increased transaction volumes, which the existing manual, card-based stock-control system could not handle efficiently. Deliveries were delayed, and stock management became problematic, with items often being misplaced. Additionally, the high level of crime in the region, including theft and vehicle hijacking, compounded the difficulties. The lack of basic IT skills among warehouse staff further exacerbated the situation, necessitating an advanced warehouse management solution to streamline operations and improve efficiency.

Swizzels Matlow faced significant challenges with their existing paper-based warehouse management system. The manual system required staff to re-enter information into a computer, leading to mistakes and duplication of effort. The growing business, driven by increased customer demand, needed a more efficient and reliable system to manage stock location and improve operational efficiency. The lack of real-time visibility and the potential for errors in re-keying information were major concerns, impacting customer service levels and overall business performance.

Forever Direct needed to centralize its logistical processes in a new regional distribution centre (RDC) to supply 93 countries in EMEA with Forever Living Products. The company also had to process 'direct delivery' orders for distributors in 19 countries. The original distribution model involved goods being dispatched from multiple distribution centres or directly from the US-based factories, which was complex and inefficient. Surveys indicated that the supply chain was too complex and was slowing down product and information flows. The company needed a modern, centralized distribution approach to meet 100% of the demand and delivery requirements of its distributors.

Understanding issues in a web application may be a challenge, but getting the same understanding from a mobile app is a flat-out guessing game. Just ask Pierre-Luc Simard, CTO at Mirego. “If you’re developing a web app, you can test in every single condition from your computer,” he says. “You can try every version of each browser. You can simulate any kind of network connection. With mobile applications, you can’t do it all. You make your best guess based on the limited evidence at hand, then you release a new version to every single user through the AppStore or Google Play. You can’t release it to a subset of users — it goes out to every single user. When working with the AppStore you may have to wait two weeks for the review, and then, at long last, you find out if you actually fixed the problem. It’s like driving blind, except you don’t know if you’ve wrecked the car until weeks afterward.” In many cases, an issue emerges only after users have complained — which usually means a crop of one-star reviews in the various stores. “It can be very difficult to recover from a lot of bad reviews,” says Simard. “For every one-star review, you need a couple five-star reviews to get back on track. In other words, waiting for users to complain can be a very damaging approach to testing a mobile application.”