Ashurst, a leading international law firm, faced a significant challenge after a major merger that almost doubled its size. The firm's HR function aimed to transform its operations to support the ongoing strategic growth objectives. The merger presented challenges in managing talent, developing skills, and rewarding performance across the global business. Each part of the business had its own systems and processes for managing absences, tracking performance, and rewarding success. This led to increased manual effort and cost, reduced ability to ensure globally consistent definitions of human capital management metrics, and difficulty in generating comprehensive reports. The firm also faced challenges in answering important questions related to employee skillsets, retention, and compensation policies across the organization.

Asahi Beverages, a leading beverage company in Australia and New Zealand, faced a significant challenge when it acquired several Australian beverage businesses. The enlarged group needed to streamline and optimize operations even as further acquisitions joined the family. The company relied heavily on SAP solutions to manage its extended non-alcohol business processes, from manufacturing through to sales and distribution. However, with several new companies joining the group over the past few years, the Asahi Beverages team was keen to reduce system administration effort and maintenance costs. They wanted to use the savings to invest in new business applications and services. The challenge was to cut the number of IT incidents, accelerate the time for resolution of those incidents, and release valuable time for the technical teams to focus on innovation and business development.

Avnet, a global technology solutions provider, was facing a challenge in delivering rapid and reliable data analysis and reporting to its clients. The company's managed services clients relied on Avnet and its partners to convert their enterprise data into actionable intelligence. However, the existing hosted environment used for data warehousing and business intelligence applications was not meeting the desired performance levels. Avnet had experienced issues with their previous cloud provider, which led them to re-evaluate their hosting arrangement. The company realized that they could provide their customers with better performance and more flexibility at a more attractive price by making some changes.

Bharti Infratel Ltd., a leading communications passive infrastructure provider, was facing a significant challenge in managing and maintaining its over 30,000 communication towers across India. The cost of tower infrastructure management and maintenance was consuming 60 to 70 percent of the operating budget for communications service providers. To keep rates low and expand service into more areas, providers sold off their passive infrastructure to third-party companies that now rent tower space back for a much lower rate. However, Bharti Infratel needed to keep their operating costs low as well. The company wanted to apply business analytics to spot inefficiencies, but with 16 TB of data and growing, it needed a solution that could handle high volumes and still run smoothly. Furthermore, the company had no way to identify how many low-tenancy towers it had overall due to business analytics systems being in silos across the business.

American Eagle Outfitters (AEO), a leading global specialty retailer, was facing challenges in delivering high-quality shopping experiences across all its digital channels. The company relied on limited information from customer feedback forms to understand digital customer experiences. This approach resulted in incomplete information, making it difficult to replicate the exact circumstances that prevented customers from successfully completing their purchases. Consequently, it was challenging to identify 'sticking points' on the online and mobile journey that frustrated customers. The company was also struggling with low conversion rates due to issues such as a corrupted shopping cart and incorrect discount codes. Additionally, AEO was facing difficulties in understanding customer interactions on the mobile channel due to the complexity of multiple mobile devices, browsers, and screen sizes.

ARTESP, the São Paulo State Transport Agency, was facing challenges in managing its vast road network, which spans over 6,400 kilometers and serves more than 20 million people across 271 cities. The agency was struggling with a lack of clear visibility into traffic and road conditions, which made it difficult to prioritize highway maintenance and management activities. This lack of clarity could potentially cause delays to inspection activities. Furthermore, the inconsistency in data reports and responses to problems by the private contractors responsible for day-to-day road maintenance, toll collection, and responding to traffic accidents, hindered ARTESP’s capacity to manage the contracts proactively and risked jeopardizing road quality. The manual effort of identifying road hazards through physical inspections and correlating service issues with accidents was increasingly time-consuming and prone to human error.

A business outsourcing company that provides human capital management solutions, including HR, payroll, talent management, tax and benefits administration solutions, was faced with the challenge of modernizing its mainframe applications. One of the company’s groups, responsible for maintaining a complex payroll application, was tasked with providing web services for its front-end systems, which are written in Java. The payroll application runs on mainframe servers and processes payroll requests in large batches. The group, consisting of developers, testers, quality assurance staff and statutory research analysts, needed to find a development application that would facilitate this modernization effort.

The police forces in the German federal state of Lower Saxony were facing challenges in fighting crime and improving traffic flows due to the lack of efficient use of information from various sources. The existing systems stored information about suspects, incidents, victims of crime, and traffic accidents in several systems, making it difficult for officers to gain an overview without consulting multiple data sources. This process was time-consuming and inefficient. Moreover, the technical demands for analyzing and evaluating incidents had increased over the years, necessitating a more advanced business intelligence solution. The police force needed a solution that could provide officers with individually compiled reports about specific locations and types of crimes in near real-time, supported by a unified, consistent event processing and evaluation system.

Christian Brothers Services, a nonprofit service provider to Catholic and faith-based institutions, faced a challenge with its increasingly dispersed workforce. The company needed to enhance employee access to collaboration and social networking tools. The company's field employees frequently traveled within and outside the country, and many of their customer service agents worked from home full time. The company had been relying on IBM collaboration solutions to keep its workforce connected. However, the existing system of electronic teamrooms was proving to be inefficient. If an employee was involved in multiple projects, a meeting affecting all those projects appeared on each project’s team room calendar instead of as a single entry on the person’s Notes calendar. This led to a lack of centralized information and increased difficulty in managing multiple projects.

Advantech Co., Ltd., a Taiwan-based company offering hardware, software, system integration, design services, and logistics support, was preparing to construct two new buildings. The company wanted to avoid the issues that had plagued its existing facilities, particularly in terms of energy efficiency. This was not only due to the high costs associated with wasteful operations and reactive maintenance procedures but also because of the strict energy efficiency standards imposed by the Taiwanese government for new buildings. The challenge was to develop a solution that would enable Advantech to meet these standards and improve its overall energy efficiency.

Allianz Managed Operations & Services SE (AMOS), the shared service provider for Allianz Group, was faced with the challenge of facilitating compliance by rolling out new, standardized processes to accelerate reporting workflows and streamline quarter- and year-end closing processes. The company was seeking a more robust and efficient way to provide accurate reports in a timely manner. The aim was to build a best-practice approach that could meet the current reporting requirements and deliver the scalability to support future business growth. The challenge was to replace multiple processes with a single, integrated solution that could connect more than 80 source systems to the local SAP ERP and SAP Business Warehouse applications.

Amadori Group, a leading food company in Italy, was facing the challenge of keeping pace with the changing culinary preferences and dietary needs of young people aged 25–35. The company wanted to evolve its marketing to dynamically align with these changes and sought to create engaging ways to target this segment by exploiting the potential of online marketing and social media. The goal was to boost brand visibility, encourage customer loyalty, and gauge consumers’ reactions to products and marketing campaigns. The company also wanted to monitor marketplace perceptions of the Amadori brand and maintain brand integrity and consistency across product lines. Another challenge was to keep the content current and engaging to diverse audiences.

AMB Sports and Entertainment Group (AMBSE), a subsidiary of AMB Group LLC, is responsible for managing the Atlanta Falcons Football Club, the New Atlanta Stadium project, and a future Atlanta Major League Soccer team. The group faced a significant challenge in attracting fans to the stadium, as they had to compete with high-tech, at-home, and other viewing experiences. The group needed to deploy technology that could enhance the traffic and parking experience, provide faster food and beverage service, and offer equal or better Wi-Fi connectivity than at home. The ultimate goal was to create an immersive, one-of-a-kind stadium experience that would draw fans away from their screens at home and into the stadium seats.

AUDI AG, a leading global car manufacturer, was facing stiff competition from low-cost manufacturers developing their own brands. To stay ahead, Audi aimed to create super-efficient business processes. The company had implemented SAP® ERP to manage various aspects of its business operations, from human resources and cost control to supply chain and plant maintenance. Over time, the SAP environment had expanded to around 100 separate systems, running on 12 HP servers with Oracle databases and an additional 24 HP blades. Audi wanted to improve its IT efficiency to reduce capital and operational costs and create a greener infrastructure, aligning with the company’s sustainability strategy. The company also aimed to increase the availability and performance of its SAP systems, making them more scalable and flexible. The IT Services Department at Audi was tasked with helping the company face several broad business challenges, including increasing demands from employees, customers, and suppliers; the need to support new technologies; rising cost pressures; and growing competition.

Banco Galicia, one of Argentina's top three private banks, faced a significant challenge in improving the time-to-market for new financial products and services. The bank's legacy IT applications and systems were unable to support the rapid changes required to stay competitive in the market. The bank's existing software, which had been in place for over 20 years, was largely developed in-house and designed to meet past banking needs. However, the proposed new services required a customer-focused approach, and the older software could not be extended or adapted rapidly enough to provide the necessary capabilities. The bank serves a large client base, from individuals to large corporations, each with specific requirements. The existing IT systems were not flexible enough to differentiate the bank's approach to each client. The challenge was to modernize the IT infrastructure to meet the requirements of a 21st-century bank and compete with the world's major banking corporations.

A Benelux bank, providing banking, savings, investment, and pension products and services, was facing a significant challenge due to the increase in malware-based attacks in its region. The bank was particularly concerned about man-in-the-browser and man-in-the-middle attacks against its customers. While the bank had not experienced a fraud loss from these attacks, the executives were worried about the potential damage these attacks could cause to the bank and its customers. The bank had previously invested heavily in perimeter security, such as intrusion prevention systems, to prevent criminals from accessing the bank's network. However, as fraudsters began targeting bank customers through malware attacks, the bank executives realized the need to expand their security capabilities to the endpoint. The bank was only able to learn about a fraud attempt when a customer reported an issue with their account balance. Therefore, they sought an additional layer of security to gain an early warning of malware-driven attacks.

Brazil’s Ministry of Justice, specifically the Department of Assets Recovery and International Legal Cooperation, was tasked with the challenge of identifying and investigating the illicit proceeds of criminal activities such as corruption, organized crime, drug trafficking, and money laundering. The department created the Technology Laboratory Against Money Laundering (LAB-LD) to support complex investigations into corruption and money laundering. As of 2014, there are 43 laboratories across Brazil, which make up the Federal Laboratory Network Against Money Laundering (REDE-LAB). These laboratories analyze a vast amount of data to uncover and freeze illicit assets. However, the process of analyzing the data was complex and time-consuming, often taking months and thousands of person-hours. The challenge was further compounded by the fact that 60 percent of the data came from structured sources such as databases and spreadsheets, and the remaining 40 percent from unstructured sources, such as social media and email.

Bugaboo, a Dutch company known for its trendy pushchairs, was facing challenges in generating accurate financial and sales forecasts in a timely manner. The company's rapid growth had led to changes in planning and forecasting requirements, and the existing system, IBM Cognos Planning, was reaching its limits. Performance-related issues were causing disruptions, and any changes to the planning model required the entire system to be halted. The model was split into four geographic regions to facilitate management outside office hours, but this meant that each change had to be implemented four times. Furthermore, Bugaboo wanted to broaden its planning and forecasting to include more than just financial and sales forecasts. For instance, the Innovation Department wanted to monitor costs at every stage of a project, from development through to production.

The California Franchise Tax Board (FTB), a part of the California Government Operations Agency, was faced with a daunting task. They had a list of over three million delinquent or non-filing taxpayers and were struggling to determine where to start the collection process. The traditional methods of relying on experience and anecdotal evidence were no longer effective, and state revenue was suffering as a result. The board was grappling with a multibillion-dollar gap between the amount they collected and the amount they were owed. The challenge was to find a more efficient and effective way to prioritize nonpayment cases and increase revenue collection.

Canadian National Railway Company (CN), a major economic player transporting over CAD250 billion worth of goods annually, faced a significant challenge in its financial reporting process. The company's accounting team was burdened with increasingly complex accounting standards and internal demands, making financial reporting labor-intensive. The team was responsible for generating a variety of reports, including quarterly and annual regulatory reports, internal monthly statements, and executive analysis. However, many of these processes were spreadsheet-based and had reached their limits. The team was spending more time on low-value activities such as data collection and performing repetitive tasks, which was inefficient and took away from more value-added tasks like analysis.

CarrefourSA, a leading multinational retail group, set an ambitious revenue goal of USD 2.7 billion by 2016 in Turkey. To achieve this, the company aimed to more than double its retail footprint by opening at least one new store every day for an entire year. However, the existing processes and systems meant it took an entire month to set up a new store. The company faced the challenge of expanding its store landscape rapidly to connect with prospects ahead of its competitors. The process of making a new retail store operational involved onboarding new employees, installing and connecting the point-of-sale systems, adding new delivery points to the stock distribution network, and more. The company relied on multiple different business systems to manage these business processes, which were complex and time-consuming due to limited integration between the systems.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is tasked with managing an enormous data archive of 100 petabytes, a volume that nearly doubles as 13 large data centers worldwide receive partial copies of the data. The data is generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, which is used to reconstruct the first moments of the universe to gain a better understanding of physical laws. The LHC generates more than 25 petabytes of data in the four main LHC experiments, even with drastic data filtering protocols in place. CERN does not have the computing capacity required to analyze the data, so it relies on a distributed environment consisting of 160 different computer centers located in 45 countries to distribute data to its scientists. The biggest challenge is the constant influx of data, more than a gigabyte per second, which needs to be stored, preserved in the long term, and made accessible to several thousand physicists worldwide.

Chamberlain Group, Inc., a leading connected products company, recognized a gap in the market where consumers wanted to use their smartphones to control and monitor their garage doors from anywhere in the world. The company developed an innovative solution, the MyQ smartphone app, which quickly gained popularity with a monthly growth rate in user numbers hitting 15 percent. However, the existing system architecture was not robust enough to withstand the pressure of this growth rate for long, and the risk of impact on performance and availability was constantly rising. The company needed to ensure that the app was highly reliable and responsive for consumers, especially when it controls something as important as the security of peoples’ homes. The challenge was to make the existing architecture more robust and scalable, so that it could support future peaks of up to one million concurrent consumer actions.

ABT Power Management, a family-owned company that provides engineered solutions for DC powered applications, was facing a significant challenge. As the company grew and took on new customers, it realized the need to increase its headcount. However, the transfer of technical knowledge to new employees, essential for delivering exceptional customer services, posed a significant hurdle. In the early days, institutional knowledge was stored in the minds of company experts, who had vast experience working in the industry. As the company expanded, it needed a new way to store and share institutional knowledge effectively with new members of its team. The challenge was to find a solution that could bridge the gap between classroom learning and professional learning, enabling new employees to get up to speed on the industry faster and more efficiently.

Agriauto Stamping Company, a Pakistan-based manufacturer of die and sheet metal components, was facing a significant challenge. The company wanted to capitalize on a surge in demand for sheet metal parts and seize a larger market share. To do this, they aimed to offer speedy delivery options to their customers. However, their existing manual systems and processes were not adaptable enough to accommodate rapid changes in production to meet new orders. The company's reliance on manual calculations and spreadsheets for production planning was causing delays, bottlenecks in obtaining raw materials, and wastage of spare capacity. The manual processes also increased the risk of human error, leading to mistakes in data and potentially incorrect parts being manufactured and sent to customers.

Alleyoop Inc. was presented with a significant challenge by a government organization in Japan. The organization required the creation of a website designed to facilitate sports camps and, in anticipation of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, to support visiting sports teams and tourists. The website needed to be multilingual and agile, capable of accommodating a fluctuating number of visitors from locations worldwide. The challenge was not only to create a website that met these requirements but also to find a hosting solution that was cost-effective and capable of handling the expected traffic without compromising on performance.

Alliance Tech, a provider of event technology solutions, was seeking to enhance the scope and timeliness of its event reporting and analytics solutions. The company wanted to exceed the expectations of its customers, who are primarily event organizers. Alliance Tech's solutions integrate analytics and marketing automation tools to provide actionable and insightful leads from data gathered about attendees as they journey through an event. The company was the first to offer RFID badge readers and online schedules to track attendee interests and preferences at conferences. However, Alliance Tech wanted to make the insights gathered from these tools available to its business customers each night so they could take action based on attendees’ behavior that day.

AMC Networks, a leading cable television network, was facing the challenge of understanding customer behavior in a rapidly evolving multi-channel world. Despite its success with critically acclaimed shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, the company recognized the need to appeal to a new generation of millennials who consume content in very different ways. The traditional reliance on ratings data and third-party analytics providers was proving insufficient. The company needed to take ownership of its data to get a richer picture of who their viewers are, what they want, and how to keep their attention in an increasingly crowded entertainment marketplace. The challenge was the sheer volume of information available – hundreds of billions of rows of data from various sources such as Nielsen, comScore, AMC’s TV Everywhere live web streaming and video on demand service, retail partners like iTunes and Amazon, and third-party online video services like Netflix and Hulu.

andagon GmbH, a renowned consulting company specializing in software testing, process and test automation, often encounters clients who have identified quality issues or performance bottlenecks during the implementation phase of their applications. These clients turn to andagon to analyze the difficulties and develop a customized test plan to efficiently address the performance issues. In typical commercial environments, software testing is often delayed until the end of a project, increasing the pressure on the testing team and process. To assess the performance of a complex application quickly and effectively, efficient tools are required to create and execute the relevant test cases. Thousands of companies rely on SAP software to run their core business processes, and need to make sure that application errors do not disrupt business operations. Particularly for manufacturing companies, system downtime can cause significant financial damage. If software quality and performance issues are spotted at a late stage in a development project, the costs and delays incurred by corrective work damages companies’ abilities to reach their goals.

AppAdvice, a Los Angeles-based company providing a comprehensive range of iPhone and iPad application reviews, news, and app discovery services, faced a significant challenge in managing its variably structured data. The company needed to store this data in its application catalog in a way that was not only easy and inexpensive to start with but also capable of handling potentially massive future growth. Given the nature of the data, a relational SQL database was not a viable option for the platform. As an early-stage company, AppAdvice was looking for a NoSQL database that was easy and inexpensive to get started with, but built for growth.