Malaysia’s leading electricity utility is facing rising operating costs and the future risk of market deregulation. The utility generates, transmits and distributes electricity to 9.2 million residential, industrial and commercial customers. However, the rising cost of coal, which accounts for 55% of its power, is eating up the budget. Coupled with unrelenting growth in demand, driving internal cost efficiencies are now critical to business. Furthermore, the utility needs to accelerate service improvements as it faces a second, potentially greater threat: Market deregulation. The utility turned these challenges into an opportunity to flip the switch on for digital business transformation. But where to start? Like many companies, the utility’s view into its IT environment was via nothing more than a few Excel spreadsheets.

Future Intelligence Ltd., a telecom engineering SME based in Greece, was facing challenges with spiraling street lighting costs and the need to improve public safety and protect the environment. The company saw an opportunity to improve municipal operations via the Internet of Things (IoT). Street lighting is an essential community service, but it can consume up to 40 percent of a municipality’s budget. Moreover, in many cases, lighting is not energy efficient, adding to greenhouse gas concerns and pollution. These challenges led municipalities to transform into smart cities, and they found an ideal way to make that change: Future Intelligence built on Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT.

CSBP, an Australian fertiliser and chemical company, was facing challenges in managing inventories and supplies of fertiliser during the peak season. As the main supplier of the preferred liquid fertiliser used in farming grains in Western Australia, urea ammonium nitrate (UAN), it needed to be able to meet the needs of the farmers speedily. The farms are spread over tens of millions of hectares in Western Australia, presenting a logistical problem for fertiliser suppliers. The farmers tend to stock up on fertiliser in April/May and when the rains fall they rapidly deplete their tanks. Some larger farms have several tanks to manage. Traditionally, they had to monitor the floating gauges in each tank, waiting until they were empty to re-order, because the fertiliser can only be trucked in whole tanker loads. Third party trucking companies are scheduled by CSBP to collect the fertiliser from the Kwinana, WA, depot. Sometimes these trucks have to deliver to farms that are hundreds of kilometers away from the Kwinana depot. This all adds to the supply chain complexity, especially as so many farmers run out of fertiliser at the same time.

James Cook University (JCU) in Australia wanted to start an Engineering IoT degree program to educate students thoroughly so that they could get jobs in the IoT industry. They needed to partner with a technology provider that could not only provide the IoT platform, but also work with the university on IoT-related projects, as well as help to educate the students. The university also had to educate students and parents about the IoT and its potential for post-graduation employment. The hands-on part of the course is run by Prithvi Moses, Solution Architect at Software AG. He runs Cumulocity IoT workshops three times during the final year IoT capstone project.

Prinzhorn Group, a European market leader in the packaging, paper and recycling industry, faced several challenges as it pursued its Grow2030 vision to double in size. The rapid growth strategy brought together many different systems that needed to be integrated, posing a major challenge for the company’s IT. The company needed a suitable and flexible IT platform to integrate new facilities and systems quickly. To boost the transforming company’s operational performance, all the apps, devices and systems needed to be linked to create a common data pool for the entire group—a central point of dataflow. Furthermore, this data pool had to allow fast adaptation at any time because new systems were being added regularly, up to ten a year.

Clal Insurance, a leading insurance and long-term savings group, faced a series of challenges that threatened its growth and success. These included growing SLA compliance risks, an aggressive regulatory environment, rising costs, disruption from InsurTech companies, and an overload of internal-external file integration. The company also struggled with a lagging time to market. These challenges were exacerbated by a global financial crisis, aggressive changes to the regulatory landscape, and the challenge of low-to-zero interest rates. The company needed to meet strict SLA compliance or risk major fines, achieve agility in line with the best in InsurTech, and drastically reduce time to market.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services faced the challenge of modernizing their systems to optimize services. They needed to invest smartly in IT to save funds for social programs, build on the stability of proven core systems, be equipped to leverage new innovations, and adapt to changing federal regulations. The systems that were in place were built with Adabas & Natural over 25 years ago. While these systems were reliable in processing data for welfare, economic assistance, payments tracking, and other social programs, they were mainframe-based, which meant that case workers couldn’t easily access the latest data or build new innovations.

TDC Group, the leading telecommunications company in Denmark, was facing a significant challenge with the enforcement of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A specific pain point for TDC was Article 30 of the GDPR, relating to the maintenance of processing activity records. This article lays out the obligations to store records by process controllers and representatives, documents erasure time limits and outlines transfers of data to third parties. It represents a serious compliance headache. TDC had a mountain ahead of it to climb. One of GDPR’s central requirements is for companies to generate ROPA reports detailing data collection, related processes, and uses in a way that makes data protection accountable. Easy to do with the right tools—and documentation—in place. Impossible otherwise.

Metro Bank, the first new mainstream bank in the U.K. in over a century, faced several challenges. As a newcomer in the field, it sought to balance well-established protocols related to process planning, optimization, and efficiency with the demands of savvy customers for excellent service and great products. The looming deadline for enforcement of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in early 2018 added to the pressure. In 2017, it was time to call in the experts, the ones with the best solutions in the business. With Software AG’s ARIS, the team mapped processes at an award-winning rate. Starting from manual, dispersed records, Metro Bank mapped more than 280 processes in less than a year—20 percent of which was regulatory. Over time, this extended to include more than 1000 new GDPR-specific models and 250 OCIR processes in ARIS.

The City of London set an ambitious goal to create the world’s first Ultra Low Emission Zone in central London by 2020. To meet this goal, London needed to know what every single vehicle is doing in real time. The best solutions go further, gathering and parsing data with even better visibility into any individual vehicle’s operating data and module systems. By 2021, more than 5,000 buses in London’s public transport network will be fitted with sensors, such as HJS Emission Technology’s Selective Catalytic Reduction Technology, which uses cutting-edge particle filters and catalytic converters to dramatically reduce emissions. But in today’s world, blind implementation isn’t enough to meet the strictest of emissions guidelines.

Nationwide, a British mutual financial institution, was looking to make business information more accessible to non-process experts. The company wanted to derive value from new ARIS capabilities closer to their release and needed an innovative end-to-end process to support cloud deployment and upgrade. The initial upgrade and move to the Cloud went smoothly, but at the first upgrade, there were major problems. The project was on the verge of failure but Software AG and Nationwide took an all-hands-on-deck approach to find a solution. A new end-to-end Release process was developed and agreed by both Nationwide and Software AG which was then tested at the next release, with small tweaks made along the way.

Over the years, Dean Foods acquired several new businesses which operate as independent business units. This resulted in inconsistent data across its business units for the same products and a lengthy process to find and validate the data that customers needed. Tracking product formulas for all flavors within business units created inaccuracies and complexity that slowed the item maintenance process. As a result of company acquisitions, Dean Foods acquired a challenging number of new and inconsistent SKUs and UPC codes. There was inconsistent data between business units for the same products and a lengthy process to find and validate the data that customers needed. Dean also needed to simplify and homogenize complex product information. There were multiple levels of descriptions for the same product, and tracking product formulas for all flavors within business units created inaccuracies and complexity that slowed the item maintenance process.

After the sale of Findus to EQT Scandinavia, the company realized that a common business and IT platform was required. The IT environment was focused on local operations rather than European operations. Each country worked in a different way. There was a lack of policies and procedures and lack of coordination between different sites – there was no overall IT business model. A platform that could adjust to the constant change the company experienced was needed.

Solaire Resort & Casino, a leading gaming industry player in the Philippines, was facing increasing competition from new resort and casino properties. The company needed to integrate its customer-related applications and provide a real-time customer experience. However, the customer data was stuck in siloed programs, making it costly to access, slow to analyze, and difficult to use. To differentiate itself and provide a truly personalized visitor experience, Solaire needed to digitalize all customer-facing operations from touchpoints to back-office processes.

Stewart Title, a global real estate information and transaction management company, was facing several challenges. The company's disparate legacy systems were becoming increasingly costly to maintain and were showing their age. The company's vast historical insurance data, which had been a significant asset, was becoming a liability. The company was also facing pressure from agile FinTech startups that were unencumbered by legacy technology. Stewart needed to transform its technology infrastructure to reduce costs, increase agility, and leverage its historical data as a strategic advantage.

Lyreco, a global office supply distributor, was facing challenges in real-time stock and sales insight. The company was in need of improving service assurance and driving operational cost savings from restocking and servicing machines. The lack of real-time data was causing inefficiencies in their operations and was affecting their customer service levels. The company was also looking for ways to innovate and take advantage of a connected, digital future. They wanted to embed IoT technology in their products to redefine their relationship with their partners and customers.

Cemplex Group, a leader in the specialty concrete market, was implementing Tableau reporting software for its enterprise needs. The goal was to connect all the data company-wide into one reportable data set. However, Cemplex uses a legacy, indexed file-based, accounting software for accounting, inventory, and payroll. Nine of the different subcontracting Cemplex companies use this legacy software. Each company has its version of the software with the summaries aggregated at the corporate level. To drill down to the employee level requires access to each of the nine legacy accounting software’s indexed files. This complicated structure made reporting tedious and time-consuming.

The U.S. government law enforcement agency was facing a challenge in managing the massive influx of criminal justice records. The agency collects arrest reports, traffic citations, probation files, photos, and other criminal records from federal, state, tribal, and local agencies. As early as 2010, the agency was dealing with 1 million records or roughly 10 GB of data daily. However, the agency's disk-bound databases could not ingest, cleanse, and assimilate the information quickly enough. By 2013, data volumes had exploded 10x to 100GB streaming in daily.

The company, one of the largest telecom companies in the world, wanted a global platform that could scale new services for hundreds of millions of users and countless partners. The first challenge was a new pay-as-you-go global Wi-Fi service that was outstripping capacity. The company had built the service assuming it could sign up 5 million users in five years; it signed up that many in just six months. The runaway success meant the company needed 40 times that capacity—enough for 200 million users—to handle future demand, but scaling its existing infrastructure was far too costly. The company previously stored transactional and billing data in Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), but Oracle wanted $5 million for the kind of expansion the company needed. Worse, Oracle RAC hit a wall at around 150 business transactions per second—way below the company’s requirement of 2,000 per second.

Volvo Trucks, a global truck manufacturer and the world’s second largest heavy-duty truck brand, was facing challenges in implementing standard SAP® processes at its 100 locations. The company was looking for ways to streamline the process setup so that managers could have a clear, consistent view of financial processes. The main objective was to shorten the lead times for these implementations, which would ultimately lead to more efficient operations.

MPWiK S.A., a major water company in Poland, aimed to improve productivity across all operational areas while maintaining the quality of its core services. The company also sought to introduce a management system based on business processes that could be independently audited through formal certification, including ISO 9001 for quality management, ISO 14001 for environment management, and ISO 18001 for workplace safety. In 2010, MPWiK S.A. initiated a process transformation program to enhance productivity and transparency. Information technology was identified as a key factor in the success of this initiative, enabling the company to reorganize and introduce measurable and repeatable processes. This led to improvements in all core operational areas such as water production, network service and maintenance, and water leakage reduction.

As big, fast data proliferates, more and more data streams are being generated in real time from a myriad of data sources, such as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, markets, mobile devices, internal transactional systems and clickstream analysis. Real-time insights must be derived from this data to give a competitive edge to agile organizations that want to act on these insights before they lose their value. To handle billions of these data streams, new software architectures and techniques are needed. These types of software are called “Big Data Streaming Analytics.” Companies need educated specialists to harness the power of big data. The Streaming Analytics Education Package (SAEP) is Software AG´s answer to the growing demand for data science experts. Universities and private companies share the responsibility of training the sought-after talent currently demanded by the market.

Suva, a Swiss insurance company, was facing the challenge of managing its complex and diverse business processes for which no single-source IT solution existed. The company had to manage its heterogeneous software and hardware systems, which were comprised of core prevention, insurance, and rehabilitation solutions as well as various interdisciplinary applications. Suva was also looking for a way to align its business strategy and IT, support corporate governance, and manage its IT architecture in a heterogeneous IT environment.

HealthCare.gov, the official website of U.S. Affordable Care Act, was launched in 2013 to assist millions of uninsured Americans. However, the site was over budget and unreliable, fraught with technical difficulties. Citizens had only from Nov. 1 to Jan. 31 to use the site compare insurance options and sign up for 2014. The unexpectedly high number of visitors began to overload the site’s infrastructure. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scrambled for answers from a variety of sources, including internal government experts, external programmers and industry partner, Software AG. The main challenge was to rapidly improve the performance of the website, assure a stable and scalable platform— especially during peak buying season, and increase site reliability so that no data’s lost.

The global player in the oil and gas industry was spending over $1 billion annually on technology to organize, store, and share information that drives the business. However, the enterprise IT infrastructure had become complicated due to piecemeal construction throughout the company’s business units and a tangled web of legacy systems from mergers and acquisitions dating back to the early 1980s. The company had an estimated 8,000 applications costing over $600 million to run annually. Despite the significant annual expenditure on new systems, there was no alignment to a multi-year road map. Application strategies were inconsistent across the business units, and there was no common architecture or strategy.

The company, a global clearinghouse for online and credit card payments, was facing significant losses due to fraudulent transactions. The existing fraud detection system could only handle 50 rules, but the risk management team wanted to add thousands more to enhance the accuracy of fraud detection. Additionally, the company wanted to reduce transaction time to achieve real-time fraud detection in all cases. The existing platform had an end-to-end Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 800 milliseconds, which was not met 10% of the time, resulting in either approval of the transaction or payment of a fine, costing an estimated $10 million each year.

The company, a $70 billion healthcare giant, was facing several challenges. These included fragmented access to information, manual input and non-standard processes, newly demanding customers, lack of supply chain visibility, and scattered business process development. The healthcare market was also changing, with shrinking margins and regulations forcing strict compliance with constantly changing laws. The company's traditional way of seeking FDA approval was disjointed and required manual consolidation of paper specs. Each region had its own processes, and each framework operated independently. The company was also struggling with a major hurdle - responding to consumer queries in a timely manner. An employee would have to manually search data logged in different formats across different systems, a process that could take months.

Medellin, the second largest city in Colombia, was facing a number of challenges in its quest to become a Smart Digital City. The city's citizens were demanding better public-private cooperation and communication, public services accessible and accountable through the web, and a government able to respond to requests quickly and without mistakes. The existing processes for citizens to interact with the local government were cumbersome and error-prone. A concerned citizen would submit a paper request in person—with no telling how long it would take to get a response, if ever. Without tracking or a coordinated workflow, some requests were lost in a sea of paper.

The company, a top loyalty program provider, was facing a challenge in meeting the aggressive end-to-end Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 500 milliseconds for every transaction, as demanded by large retail prospects. The company's data center took an average of 20 percent longer than that — 600 milliseconds — just to query upwards of 32GB of customer data in a central, disk-bound database. Furthermore, Java-related garbage collection pauses caused unexpected spikes in response times that would have resulted in financial penalties for failure to meet the SLA, and in unhappy customers. In order to win new business from larger retailers, the company realized it had to move its data into fast machine memory.

The company, a global industrial powerhouse, wanted to embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) to drive advances in high-end manufacturing. However, the early versions of its open IoT platform had limited integration capabilities and could only connect their own products. It was impossible to import application data into the IoT platform or to export results into applications. The company wanted to transform its platform into a driver of key digital services business by harnessing data from other manufacturers’ products.