For Ekornes, the scarcity of skilled workers and high labor costs mean other ways have to be found to reduce costs and enable the company to remain competitive and keep manufacturing in Norway.

Due to their customers’ ability to change interior design specifications during completion, Dassault Falcon Jet needed greater flexibility to meet customer requests faster and more efficiently. Design for manufacturability is a major consideration due to aggressive cost targets and a chief reason behind the company’s digital specification-to-delivery process—the most advanced in the industry. The Little Rock upholstery shop has recently undergone significant reorganization to align the production of aircraft interiors with the digital specification-to-delivery process. After first streamlining its design studio with DesignConcept® 3D design and costing software, Dassault Falcon Jet turned once more to Lectra to revolutionize its cutting room with acquisition of a Versalis® digital leather cutting solution.

As manufacturers seek to meet customers’ demands for quiet, comfortable, stylish interiors, seat systems have become complex and more difficult to manufacture. New features such as adjustable bottom seat cushions, occupant detection systems, seat heating and cooling systems, and advanced entertainment systems are now built into seats. Side-impact air bags are also packaged inside seats, and they must be able to burst through the seat’s trim cover seams at precisely the right time. Product development schedules have also shortened—the time between initial concept and prototype is now approximately four weeks, or about half of what it was just a few years ago. In the past, Toyota Boshoku America engineers developed prototypes by digitizing foam seat shapes and developing patterns, which were then hand-cut from leather, vinyl, or other materials. This approach was time consuming and lacked the accuracy required to meet the automotive industry’s stringent tolerances. Cutting a single trim cover could take two to three hours. As Toyota Boshoku America seeks to continuously improve its development processes, it looked for a cutting solution that would enable engineers to accelerate prototyping and ensure that the patterns developed would work the same in production as they did in prototyping.

Trayton Group faced challenges with their manual fabric and leather cutting process, which heavily relied on operator knowledge for accuracy and quality control. This method hindered production flexibility and was impractical due to difficulty in finding skilled operators, rising labor costs in China, and increased pressure on prices and delivery times.

Les Enphants, a Shanghai-based childrenswear company, faced significant challenges due to the pressures of the fast-fashion marketplace and increased consumer demand following China's new two-child policy. The company needed to speed up its process and produce a wider variety of styles while keeping costs low to avoid pricing itself out of the market. The impact of fast fashion and e-commerce had put the company under increasing pressure, making it difficult to maintain its commitment to providing playful designs and functional clothing that prioritize quality and comfort.

Build out a cloud infrastructure to support rapid company growth. Ease the transition to cloud with single sign-on to Office 365 and other apps. Include two-factor authentication for stronger security. Protect and manage company smart phones with EMM. Nearing the end of a contract that outsourced the community services ELC supervised, the company decided to bring the services in house and offer them directly to the public. It was a large undertaking that would require nearly 100 new employees and the opening of new satellite offices. Success would depend on an environment that could support the company’s 300% growth projections. “We didn’t have the infrastructure or services necessary to handle the anticipated increase in employees,” says Luis Mena, Director of IT at Early Learning Coalition. “So we were under a tight deadline to roll out an entirely new infrastructure.” Mena decided to leverage the cloud to the greatest degree possible. “We considered building out our own on-premises infrastructure, but that approach would have required initial hardware costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and significantly more time and IT resources than we had available,” he says. “The ease and speed of building out a cloud-based environment made it a better choice. But we needed a strong solution that would help us in the transition.” ELC began looking for a solution that would provide authentication and single sign-on for the cloud services they were evaluating. Security would be a top consideration in any solution, as well as compliance with state and local government regulations similar to HIPAA. Strong, two-factor authentication for remote users would also be required. And if they could locate a complementary solution to securely manage their mobile devices, it would be ideal.

Simply Healthcare faced significant challenges due to rapid growth, including the need to transition to Office 365 and provide single sign-on (SSO) for various SaaS applications. The company aimed to minimize help desk tickets for password resets and reduce the time and effort required for IT to onboard new employees. The infrastructure team was overwhelmed with tasks ranging from server and network maintenance to help desk requests and employee onboarding. The decision to switch from on-premises Microsoft Office to Office 365 was made to alleviate some of these pressures. However, the team needed a solution to help with identity federation and to support the company's continuous efforts to remain HIPAA-compliant.

Find a single sign-on solution to dramatically reduce complexity, minimize calls for password assistance, increase security and help keep users engaged and using key apps. Designed to act as a portal for growers, packers, exporters and local marketers, the NZ Avocado system provides access to highly-specialized apps including a Spray Diary to log essential information about growing activities, as well as an AvoTools app and associated websites used to ensure compliance to international regulations. In order for New Zealand growers to export overseas, they must register with the association and record all use of sprays on their orchards. This is an essential component in assuring quality, guaranteeing that international standards are met and protecting a multi-million dollar industry. But with over 1350 members, NZ Avocado was having significant issues with users logging into their applications and online tools. Each app required its own set of credentials for access and that meant users had to remember multiple passwords. Compounding the issue was the fact that each orchard required its own user name and password as well, so owners of multiple orchards often found themselves managing dozens of passwords. As a result, the NZ Avocado team was frequently inundated with calls for password assistance. The problem was so great that the organization resorted to keeping user names and passwords on a spreadsheet that was available to most of the office staff. Lacking its own IT department, NZ Avocado contacted IT consultant Andrew Nimick with Point Concept, and enlisted his help in finding a solution that would dramatically reduce complexity, minimize calls for password assistance, increase security and help keep users engaged and using the apps.

With more than 400 employees, password expirations and resets at Grupo Argos had become a significant strain on IT resources. Traveling was another challenge for staff, as logging into SAP and other apps from outside the office was difficult, impacting productivity. Employees frequently had different passwords for each SAP app, and managing passwords for both privileged users and end users had become cumbersome. Concerns were raised about security because users were re-using passwords or keeping them in unsafe locations. Macs presented an entirely different set of issues, being managed locally without IT oversight. Additionally, the company had limited visibility into third-party managed servers, which was crucial for SOX compliance and troubleshooting outages.

Since its launch, Quanta Services has acquired over 200 businesses and amassed 16,000 endpoints dispersed around the world. That growth, while welcomed, has created a major privileged access management (PAM) challenge for the company. Richard Breaux, senior manager, IT security at Quanta Services, outlined the problem, “As we acquire companies, the challenge is to integrate them – taking their privileges, their computer systems and how they operate – and to make them part of our own ecosystem and to keep everything secure.” Alongside this, Quanta also faced issues common to many businesses. Breaux stated, “We have the same challenges around privileged access that many companies do, whether with local administrative rights on a desktop or laptop, or privileged access for server administration and web application development. We’re all confronted with a similar set of issues.”

A leading provider of online services to the automotive industry planned to implement a robotic process automation (RPA) solution from Blue Prism to streamline business operations. Blue Prism’s unattended digital worker robots require privileged credentials to access IT resources and automate functional tasks. In the wrong hands, these privileged credentials can be used to wage attacks or steal confidential data. The company sought to safeguard its RPA implementation without complicating security operations or slowing down the RPA rollout.

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) aimed to become the world’s most digitized bottler, launching multiple initiatives to increase efficiency and customer engagement. However, this digitization also brought challenges, particularly the growing risk of cyberattacks. To address these risks, CCEP's Australian, Pacific, and Indonesian operations (CCEP API) developed a three-year roadmap to enhance security measures. A critical component of this plan was improving privileged access management processes to gain better oversight and control over elevated credentials. The goal was to mitigate risks of both unintentional and malicious harm, while also reinforcing compliance with standards like PCI DSS and the NIST framework.

Icertis faced the challenge of managing rapid growth and the proliferation of administrative rights across the company. Almost every user had some degree of elevated access credential, which posed a significant security risk. Additionally, there was skepticism within the business about the performance impact of security products due to past poor experiences. Sood, the general manager of IT infrastructure, needed to find a solution that could support the company's business needs, systems, and operational environment while addressing these challenges.

The IT services unit of Erste Digital oversees critical business systems and banking software for nearly 2,200 users across multiple locations in over 10 countries. One of their key responsibilities is supporting the bank’s SWIFT infrastructure, which enables secure and efficient information exchange with other financial institutions globally. The challenge was to adhere to SWIFT’s Customer Security Controls Framework (CSCF), which requires monitoring the activity and credential usage of hundreds of users managing multiple passwords across various systems. Some applications required SWIFT certificate passwords with extraordinary length, making manual password management cumbersome and resource-intensive. Additionally, elements of the SWIFT infrastructure were not compatible with single sign-on (SSO) protocols, further complicating the management of privileged credentials and compliance with the framework.

Santander Bank needed to integrate a broad and complex logistics network to distribute paper currency. The network included various entities such as bank branches, ATMs, stores, main depots, central banks, and security transportation companies. The existing process was highly manual, involving hundreds of people, thousands of emails, and various versioned spreadsheets, making operations slow and non-secure. The commercial bank aimed to make its operations more efficient and protected, as the manual process made near real-time tracking and monitoring almost impossible.

The Weir Group needed to integrate its corporate systems including payroll, ERP, MES, Ariba and SAP with its local systems in Brazil in a fast, reliable and secure way. The Group had a lack of resources (budget and skillful internal assets) to build and manage multiple integrations in multiple platforms. The Weir Group needed an agile and flexible process to cope with its business needs and make its systems flow in a reliable and secure way.

PGi faced a highly competitive landscape with both established legacy players and nimble upstarts. The company needed to evolve its marketing strategy from traditional demand generation to an account-based (ABM) approach to improve win rates, increase deal sizes, and accelerate pipeline velocity. The core challenge was to reach the right buyers at the right time, especially in a crowded market where timing and prioritization were crucial. PGi needed a sophisticated data-driven approach to prioritize which accounts to target from thousands of potential accounts in their CRM.

OneSource Virtual faced several challenges in their sales and marketing processes. They had a limited Total Addressable Market (TAM), which meant that every account received the same marketing messages, leading to contact message fatigue and poor quality of CRM contact data. Additionally, there was a lack of understanding of account stage progression. The marketing and sales teams were disjointed, with marketing-generated leads (MQLs) not being viewed as relevant by the sales team. The company also struggled with Account-Based Marketing (ABM), as they were unsure who to target within their small TAM and whether they were too small to run ABM successfully. Sales teams did not understand how to define targets or what to do with them.

The communications industry has undergone significant changes, with network overbuilds leading to a rapid decline in prices. This has forced companies to pivot towards software solutions and content to capture value. Additionally, the global pandemic accelerated digital transformation, pushing organizations to adopt remote-friendly and touch-free solutions. Enterprise selling strategies have also evolved, with a shift towards virtual interactions and the need for modern sales tools and MarTech investments. Buying habits have changed, with a significant portion of decisions made before engaging with a seller, making it crucial for companies to adapt their strategies.

Code42 faced significant challenges in generating a sufficient pipeline through their demand engine. Their audience segmentation was based on security maturity and assumptions about risk posture and data protection needs, but there was no real way of knowing who was in the market. Their LinkedIn and display promotions had a limited audience size, and content syndication resulted in too many disparate leads that did not move down the funnel. Web personalization efforts were also limited, with only 3% of web traffic de-anonymized and receiving personalized content. These issues highlighted the need for a more effective and targeted approach to demand generation.

The company faced a significant challenge in terms of new ARR bookings. They needed to shift their strategy from selling low to selling high, moving from being a 'nice to have' to a 'must have' solution. The existing approach involved casting a wide net and relying on MQLs via email nurture, which was not yielding the desired results. The company needed to reset its strategy to focus on a single platform brand, target high-value personas, and use a more focused approach to segmentation and campaigns.

The American Girl Customer Sales & Services Team and the Customer Insights group process and respond to upwards of 300,000 emails per year. They sought a solution to help them better understand the voice of their customer, accurately interpret the sentiment behind the words in emails, and analyze and understand trends in customer emails for the betterment of their brand, products, and customer experience. American Girl needed a tool for analyzing and grouping mass volumes of emails, post-response, to help them identify evolving sentiment and better understand the voice of their customer.

The bank had been tracking banker behavior using a CRM software that logged millions of client interaction entries per year across thousands of bankers. This CRM system housed a large amount of valuable data, including banker activities (e.g., client calls, visits, etc.) and details about prospect leads that the bankers were pursuing. The bank was unsure about which outreach tactics and leads were most beneficial for each banker, and since these bankers were pursuing high margin deals, a slight reallocation of their limited time could translate to millions in profit improvement. Previous attempts to analyze the data had resulted in inconclusive results. Moreover, the results were largely skewed by naturally successful bankers; the bank couldn’t measure how much of their success was attributable to their choice in activities and how much was not controllable. The bank needed to understand the true incremental impact of a banker changing activities and reprioritizing leads to identify which bankers should receive specific recommended outreach tactics.

A top ten auto manufacturer often deployed incentive programs to its dealerships, but given the inherent variability in its daily vehicle sales, struggled to understand their effectiveness. In one example, the company sought to answer key questions about one of its incentive programs, including: Does the Mid-size Sedan incentive program have a net positive impact on profit, after accounting for previously planned purchases and potential cannibalization of nonincentivized models? Which incentive structure among the two formats tested (Fixed Incentive or Stair-step Incentive) is most effective? In which regions should we offer the incentive program to maximize its profitability?

In order to foster growth at both the employee and business level, the firm had recently invested a substantial amount in sales trainings for its business bankers. While most bankers had gone through the initial training, some had also taken part in a follow-up advanced training course. Management hoped that the training would provide their bankers with higher satisfaction and sales on behalf of the business, but was not sure how to allocate the remaining budget of the training to maximize the impact.

The CEO of a major US apparel retailer, with over $5 billion in annual sales, recognized that their existing promotional strategy was underperforming. The retailer had been running 45 circulars per year without holdouts but could only analyze a small subset of these circulars. Circular sales accounted for 20% of total store sales, making it crucial to optimize their performance. The CEO tasked the management team with leveraging data-driven analytics to make informed decisions on which items to promote and how to promote them.

A leading US retailer wanted to understand the effectiveness of its promotions by department over the past year. Specifically, the retailer wanted to evaluate its housewares promotional strategy and sought to understand key questions, including: 1. Which categories were the most effective when promoted? 2. Within the highest-performing categories, which promotions were the most effective? 3. Where should they focus within the best housewares categories? 4. Where are there missed opportunities within housewares?

Executives at a telecommunications company were already convinced that test vs. control analytics were the best way to make decisions. However, due to their manual process and highly complicated and biased analyses, they often struggled to accurately evaluate all of their initiatives, and were rarely able to derive the maximum learnings from each one. Further, their test vs. control analyses were limited to initiatives where they conducted a purposeful holdout experiment; for all other initiatives, they relied on regression-based approaches, which could not isolate the true incremental ROI of that action. As one example, the organization struggled to identify the cause-and-effect relationship between the rate increase at the end of a promotion and churn. Without understanding how rate increases caused churn, executives could not confidently change their post-promotion pricing strategy to maximize profitability.

A leading global airline introduced a new inflight service model for its flight attendants in a subset of its flights. The company sought to answer two key questions: Does the new service model drive an increase in revenue? Is passenger satisfaction improved as a result of the new service model? However, the airline struggled to eliminate the bias that existed in the group of flights that implemented the new service model. Flights where the new service model had been introduced generated higher than average revenue per flight. In addition, analysis was not straightforward because of the multitude of entities (e.g., flights, customers, employees) involved. These challenges made it difficult to understand performance of the new service model and if it should be expanded to additional flights.

A leading international airline introduced a new seat class, Premium Economy, for a subset of its flights, hoping to bridge the gap between Economy and Business Class cabins for cost-conscious travelers and generate incremental revenue. The airline sought to answer two key questions: Would significant trade-down from Business Class occur? Would the investment in Premium Economy pay back across our flight network? However, the airline faced several challenges to reaching actionable insights. Given the inherent noise in its daily revenue data, the airline found it difficult to isolate the impact of this single change. The company also struggled to eliminate the bias that existed in the group of flights that received the new seat class – flights where Premium Economy had been introduced generated lower than average revenue and carried a higher than average percentage of business passengers. In addition, analysis was not straightforward because of the multitude of entities involved – flights, aircraft, customers, etc. Further, the airline was unsure of how to incorporate operational complications (e.g., last-minute aircraft changes) into analysis. These challenges made it difficult to understand performance of the Premium Economy introduction and if future investment was justified.