Each year, more than two million people die due to food-borne illnesses, and the world discards more than USD75 billion worth of food. For food distributors such as US-based Mars, Incorporated, food recalls cost at least USD10 million each. Mars didn’t have a way to test its thousands of food ingredients, so its response to pathogens was mainly reactive.

Migros Zurich (GMZ) operates a vast network of stores, specialty markets, and food outlets, serving around 1.5 million customers. The company's reputation rests on its ability to provide high-quality goods and services at reasonable prices with clockwork efficiency. However, the company's maintenance staff needed a way to aggregate, consolidate, and analyze information from asset inventories, service requests, work orders, maintenance records, equipment service contracts, warranties, service level agreements, and service and technical documentation, much of it archived in physical form in the company's central offices. These records contained thousands of data points needed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current condition of its resources and transform its maintenance practices from reactive to proactive. In addition, to promote efficiency in the field, the company needed a mobile solution that would provide field technicians with anywhere, real-time access to the company’s asset management system.

Milgard Manufacturing, Inc., a leading producer of windows and patio doors, operates on a demand-driven manufacturing model to avoid overstocking issues. This approach requires the company to predict sales extremely accurately to ensure it has the resources needed to fill incoming customer orders quickly. Sales of windows are influenced by various factors, including housing market fluctuations and regional preferences. Therefore, Milgard needs to ensure that its annual budgets and forecasts accurately reflect the impact of these factors. The company's inflexible approach to planning threatened to hamper business agility, prompting it to seek a better solution.

Mueller, Inc., a company specializing in metal buildings and roofing products, was facing a challenge. To remain competitive, it needed to be as nimble as small companies and as scalable as larger competitors. However, its existing business intelligence platform lacked the ability to derive insight from unstructured data. The company was also facing a skills gap due to its location in a small town with a limited talent pool. Mueller had to make a choice between sticking to its values and identity or moving its headquarters to a big city where it could solve its problems by hiring more people. The company chose to stay in West Texas, which meant it needed to find smarter ways to work.

Municipal Parking Services (MPS) designs, develops, manufactures and markets technologically advanced parking solutions, such as its patented Sentry Meter and SAAS software – a connected device with built-in touchscreen and cameras that capture real-time data about drivers and parking behavior. In most municipalities, parking is an under-utilized asset. Few cities have the resources to fully enforce their parking rules. As a result, it’s estimated that only 50 percent of people comply and pay in full for their parking, and only 20 percent of infringements are actually penalized, due to a lack of enforcement personnel. MPS wanted to analyze data from these meters to develop even smarter parking services, but the sheer volume of data made this difficult to achieve.

One of NEWLOG Consulting’s clients wanted to launch a new tracking and tracing system in one month. The client wanted to grow into new markets by transforming into a fully fledged express delivery operation that offered value-added logistics services. The client wanted to bring the new solution to market as soon as possible, and set a goal to go live with an initial release in one month. With no time or budget for a traditional development approach, NEWLOG Consulting needed a platform that it could use to rapidly develop and deploy the new system.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) supports and conducts vital medical research. However, it was facing challenges in helping scientists find rapid answers to research questions and drive treatment breakthroughs. The NIH collects vast quantities of data from patients who volunteer to participate in clinical trials at the NIH Clinical Center. The insights hidden within this wealth of information could hold the key to advancing medical research and enhancing patient care, but only if researchers are able to access and analyze the data. As technological and scientific advances increase the scale and pace of medical research, NIH must work to provide scientists with even faster insight into ever-increasing data volumes. A few years ago, the NIH Clinical Center realized that the volume and complexity of data threatened to outstrip the capacity of its existing systems.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., one of the world’s largest insurance and financial services companies, needed to improve its market responsiveness. The company was highly dependent on technology and was facing a fast-paced, highly regulated industry with new products and services that needed to be delivered quickly. Ten years ago, Nationwide used primarily waterfall development methodologies to create the software products that its members, customers and agents use online. However, the gap between software requirements and product delivery with the waterfall method had caused a rift between IT and the business. Recognizing the value it could achieve by embracing lean and agile practices at scale for its enterprise, Nationwide began shifting from waterfall to agile development.

Nationwide Building Society, one of the world’s largest mutual financial institutions, wanted to offer its customers easier access to its financial advisors. However, with a limited number of advisors, many smaller branches were unable to provide full-time coverage. The Society wondered if customers would be happy to connect via a live video link. The concept proved hugely popular, but the challenge was to replicate the solution on a commercial scale. Moving from six to hundreds of branches brought a completely new set of challenges, including business process transformation and cultural change, not to mention technology deployment and scalability.

Nationwide Building Society, the world’s largest building society and the UK’s second-largest savings provider and third-largest mortgage provider, recognized the importance of continuous innovation to achieve its growth objectives. The society wanted to provide a consistent and integrated multi-channel experience across mobile, internet, call centres and in-branch services. However, it faced challenges in coordinating a large pipeline of ongoing change across projects and business lines. The society needed a delivery capability that would be able to stay aligned with rapidly evolving requirements from customers, the business and from regulators. Additionally, it wanted to be able to achieve more efficient control of the development of its software assets across multiple channels.

Nationwide, a leading financial institution in the UK, recognized the need to keep up with the competition in the mobile banking sector. The success of its competitors’ mobile banking offerings meant that there was a widening competitive gap for the Society both in terms of channel costs and digital reputation. Essentially, competitors were more successfully broadening their channels to allow the movement of low-value transactions to mobile banking, freeing up their branches for higher-value mediated or regulated transactions and sales. Recognizing that the re-engineering of its internet channel had provided Nationwide with the perfect foundations to provide a competitive, scalable, performant and yet elegant mobile banking solution, Nationwide launched the Mobile Banking programme to deliver its next digital channel offering to market.

Nissan Australia, a company that imports, markets, and sells Nissan vehicles, was facing a complex challenge of coordinating the importation of thousands of vehicles in hundreds of different models, grades, colors, and configurations to meet varying customer demands in different regions. The company's car flow planning process revolved around a legacy planning tool, supplemented by spreadsheets. The use of spreadsheets made version control difficult, which was a particular problem because the company’s car flow is constantly evolving. The company needed a more sophisticated business planning platform to upgrade its car flow forecasting process.

The Poole College of Management at NC State University wanted a platform to help students turn big data into knowledge for better decision making. The school integrates teaching, research and active engagement with businesses to give students real-world experience in uncovering new business opportunities. As the Poole College of Management evaluated big data platforms that its students could use when working with local businesses, staff looked for a solution that could efficiently handle an extremely large volume and variety of structured and unstructured data.

North Pacific Bank Ltd., a major financial institution in Japan, was created through the merger of three major banks. The bank faced a significant challenge in integrating and identifying customer data from each of its previous business entities. This lack of visibility into client behaviors across business channel expansions meant that the bank could not implement an effective customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, which was hindering its marketing efforts.

Every year, nearly 2 million patients in the US contract healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), despite the fact that proper hand washing can easily prevent these infections. OhioHealth, a nonprofit, faith-based system of hospitals and healthcare providers serving 40 counties around Columbus, needed a systematic way to monitor, analyze, and improve compliance with hand-washing and sanitizing procedures. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide real-time monitoring and analytics to spot noncompliance patterns quickly and implement remedial action to lower the risk of HAIs.

Oncor Electric Delivery Company LLC, the largest regulated electric distribution and transmission company in Texas, aimed to modernize its operations to proactively manage outages and meet more sophisticated energy needs. The company wanted to develop an interactive power grid that records energy usage data from homes and businesses every 15 minutes and transforms that data into actionable decision-making intelligence for energy providers and consumers alike. The goal was to be able to accurately respond to outages and restore services without requiring any contact from the customer. In many cases, outages occur during the middle of a workday, when nobody’s home. Oncor would experience a significant spike in customer calls and service orders after working hours, which meant customers would unnecessarily end up in a long queue waiting for service.

Bus companies face a significant challenge in optimizing the utilization of staff and vehicles to maximize customer satisfaction, while minimizing operational costs and carbon emissions. Events such as vehicle breakdowns, accidents, adverse weather, driver or passenger illness, construction delays, and traffic congestion can disrupt carefully planned schedules. Traditional operational planning for vehicles and crews is an offline process involving significant manual effort and does not adapt quickly or easily to changing real-world conditions. As a result, bus companies tend to maintain costly reserve vehicles and crews to fill gaps in the schedule. Optibus recognized that bus companies waste millions of dollars annually through inefficient scheduling, oversized fleets, and delays in responding to unexpected events.

Orbico Group, a leading distributor in Europe, was facing challenges due to its rapid expansion across the continent. The company was struggling to manage the increasing volumes of data related to finance, sales, receivables, and inventory across different countries. The main challenge was to provide the best service to their suppliers, customers, and financial institutions by gaining as much insight from their data as possible. The rapid growth led to a situation where they were operating more than 20 companies in 15 different markets across Europe, making data management a struggle. To bring greater consistency and accuracy to group-wide reporting, Orbico realized that it needed to adopt a more robust approach.

Outokumpu, a leading manufacturer of steel products, realized that by moving from reactive to proactive maintenance for its production line machines, it could improve availability, efficiency, quality and safety at its Avesta steel mill. The mill is known for the special grades of stainless steel it produces for the offshore oil and gas industry. Delivering a product that can withstand corrosive saltwater and extreme weather conditions requires very precise control of production processes. At the same time, production needs to be efficient and uninterrupted to meet the expectations of demanding clients, whose multi-million dollar offshore construction projects depend on Outokumpu’s ability to deliver the right materials at the right time. The company's top priority is always to keep all its employees safe while they work in the mill.

PREPAR-VIE, a life assurance filial of BRED Banque Populaire, needed to be ready for the Solvency II Directive that governs insurance firms in the European Union. This directive sets quantitative requirements for the amount of capital each insurer must legally hold, known as the solvency capital requirement (SCR). However, PREPAR-VIE lacked a formal solution for asset-liability management (ALM), making it impossible to calculate the best-estimate liability for the SCR in a timely and efficient manner. Previously, the business only needed to make provisions within a one-year horizon, which their financial systems could handle. However, to perform the stochastic projections required for Solvency II, they needed a new approach.

PRO BTP is the social protection group for French building and construction professionals. It offers members (employees, retirees, craftsmen and construction companies) services in the areas of pension and health insurance (provident, health and savings). The firm had been using a processing system that was identifying unjustified health claims only after they had been paid. To reduce system abuses and better control expenses, PRO BTP needed to detect suspicious claims before the company reimbursed health professionals.

Penn Pharma, a PCI company, recognized the need for a maintenance and calibration planning system to increase availability and service levels at its new contained manufacturing facility. The company wanted to develop a proactive, predictive approach to maintenance planning. The company realized that an enterprise-class maintenance management system could also help meet the stringent regulations that apply to pharmaceutical manufacturing, and the growing expectations of its safety-conscious clients.

Phact, a telecommunications service provider, needed to accelerate its big data analytics capabilities to support its telco clients serving millions of customers in a highly performance-sensitive industry. The company was previously replicating its main IBM DB2 database running on Linux to a separate Microsoft SQL Server database to enable analytics. However, this replication could take up to one minute to make operational data available for analytical processing—an unacceptable delay in telecoms terms, where every second counts. In addition to introducing this delay, this approach also offered limited performance when executing complex queries.

Premier Farnell, a leading global distributor of electronics components, was facing a challenge with its business data being trapped in silos, making it difficult to gain insights into customer purchasing behavior. The company needed a way to integrate and govern data across its diverse business to understand purchasing behavior, market trends, and new demands. This would enable them to present each customer with the right product at the right time, sparking sales growth. The company set out to establish a strategy around the management and governance of its business data in order to derive the maximum possible value for the organization and keep costs down.

Quintillion, a hedge fund administration company, wanted to keep its business on track for profitable growth without compromising on the high-quality, personalized service that its clients have come to expect. For each of their funds, there is a large volume of related documentation that needs to be processed and accessed on an ongoing basis, such as emails, application forms, financial statements and more. Their teams need instant access to this content in order to serve clients effectively—they can’t afford to waste time sifting through their systems to locate a particular piece of information.

ING Bank Śląski, part of the ING Group, needed a more responsive, multichannel loan-application system to retain its competitive position as a modern credit bank. The bank was also concerned about the time to market for new products and promotions and the time to cash for approved loans. The bank wanted a system that could not only approve or deny credit in near-real time but also analyze a customer’s profile so that the bank could customize the final loan. The solution also needed to allow the bank to simulate and create the optimal requirements for new loan products before launch, speeding time to market and helping maximize revenue for the bank.

ING Bank was facing challenges with its marketing campaigns which were slow, costly and losing effectiveness. The bank had no single customer view and cycle times for campaigns could exceed 20 weeks. Inbound channels could not be supported with the previous solutions. A lack of relevance and coordination across channels generated subpar results while driving up costs. The bank recognized the need to rebuild its marketing technology infrastructure and processes to become more automated, coordinated and personalized, as well as take advantage of inbound marketing opportunities.

Inventive, a company committed to equitable, collaborative innovation, was looking to launch its fair-trade crowdsourcing portal. For this, it needed a flexible, cost-effective development platform and high-performance cloud hosting infrastructure. The company needed to ensure that the infrastructure was scalable to continue extending its portal solution as needed. The platform also needed to offer on-demand development capabilities to agilely support new projects.

The KLM Open, one of the oldest golf tournaments in the European Tour, was facing a challenge as large-screen, high-definition television was driving an increasing number of fans to watch sports at home rather than in person. To counter this trend and enhance the live experience for fans, the KLM Open wanted to provide a new and more interactive mobile application. However, they lacked the infrastructure and expertise needed to develop and deploy such a solution. The goal was to provide fans attending the tournament with real-time access to leaderboards, players’ locations and maps that show the user’s current location and how to get to various points of interest.

MediaWen International, a B2B and SaaS provider, wanted to launch online linguistic solutions for customers worldwide. The company needed to partner with a global provider that could offer high-performance cloud infrastructure and cognitive computing technologies. The solutions were aimed at providing cognitive subtitling, translation, and dubbing functionality for customers in various sectors including media and entertainment, e-learning, finance, government, and healthcare.