BlueGrace Logistics, a non-asset based 3PL, was launched during an economic downturn in a highly competitive market. To succeed, BlueGrace needed to differentiate itself through technology. The company started with 18 employees in a small office and aimed to grow rapidly. The founder, Bobby Harris, recognized the need for a robust transportation management system (TMS) to enable this growth. He chose MercuryGate TMS, which he was familiar with from a previous venture, believing it could provide the necessary functionality and flexibility.

Evans, a third-party logistics services provider, wanted to modernize its transportation technology to continue providing top-tier customer service. The company recognized the need to upgrade or replace an in-house system that had served them well for nearly two decades. Evans' leadership saw an opportunity to prepare for the future by leveraging advanced technology to support their customers better. They evaluated more than 40 Transportation Management Systems (TMS) over two years to find a solution that could meet their diverse needs and those of their customers.

Beech Hill Freight Brokerage, a premier freight brokerage firm, faced the challenge of differentiating itself in an industry where customer experience is often overlooked. The company aimed to build strong customer relationships rather than just providing transactional orders. To achieve this, they needed the right team and tools to enhance their operational efficiency and customer experience.

Grant Oldfield, General Manager at Wainright Trucking, faced the challenge of scaling the business while managing a lean team. As Wainright Trucking pursued more shipper-direct business, they encountered increased demands for status check-ins and order management. The existing systems were either too limited in features or too expensive, making it difficult to find a suitable TMS that could meet their needs without a significant initial investment. The need for a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution was paramount to handle the growing customer base and the varied demands of new clients.

For Albert Renaud of MX Logistics, the dilemma with their old TMS software was the lack of visibility for customers into their freight, compared to the experience available for consumer deliveries. As the Director of Logistics, he felt frustrated for his customers and sought a new TMS that could provide better visibility and control. The goal was to distinguish MX Logistics among other brokerage firms and use the new TMS as a selling feature to attract new customers.

Steel companies face significant challenges in logistics, including high transportation costs, complex regulatory requirements, and driver shortages. These issues complicate the supply chain and impact the bottom line. Companies like Marmon/Keystone have noted the increasing complexity of logistics and the difficulty in maintaining a reliable driver pool. Additionally, the need for just-in-time delivery and efficient supply chain management has become critical for steel companies to remain competitive.

Ruan faced the challenge of managing a complex supply chain for a client dealing with fresh and frozen protein products. The client required efficient management of 7,500 annual truckload shipments, including 1,300 multi-stop shipments and 2,700 shuttle movements. Additionally, the client needed to ensure compliance with the Food Safety Modernization Act and manage freight claims throughout the supply chain process. The goal was to optimize transfer movements, consolidate costs, and improve overall supply chain efficiency while maintaining high safety and service standards.

Safelite, the largest vehicle glass repair and replacement company in the world, faced challenges in managing their transportation needs due to varying regional demands and shifting work volumes. Previously, they worked with up to seven individual carriers, leading to inconsistent relationships and manual scheduling and measuring processes. Safelite recognized the need for a more efficient and integrated solution to streamline their supply chain and improve overall performance.

Bobcat faced several logistical challenges with its three manufacturing facilities in the United States. The company shipped equipment directly from these facilities to dealers, leading to inefficiencies such as multiple shipments arriving at dealers on the same day, tying up dealer staff. Additionally, Bobcat was limited by the number of trucking carriers willing to bid on work due to the remote locations of its facilities. Deliveries were often late, and tracking the specific location of shipments was difficult. Other challenges included less-than-load (LTL) deliveries, where Bobcat was charged for full truckloads despite the trucks not being fully loaded, leading to increased costs. The system was inefficient, and dealers demanded a better solution to improve service and reduce costs.

Trane faced the challenge of managing complex logistics and inventory needs across multiple locations, including inbound LTL shipments, Mexico shipments, vendor overflow management, and local deliveries. The company needed a reliable partner to handle these logistics efficiently while allowing Trane to focus on its core competencies. Additionally, Trane required a solution that could adapt to seasonal fluctuations in demand and provide comprehensive warehouse management services.

Fair Oaks Farms faced the challenge of reducing their carbon footprint and dependency on diesel fuel for their milk hauling operations. The goal was to transition to a more sustainable and environmentally friendly fuel source. The challenge was compounded by the need to maintain high productivity and efficiency in their milk hauling operations, which required running the fleet virtually around the clock. Additionally, the infrastructure for natural gas fueling was not readily available in many states, including Indiana, necessitating the development of their own fueling system.

HON, a leading office furniture manufacturer, faced challenges in maintaining its own shipping line and ensuring high customer satisfaction. The company needed a reliable transportation partner to handle logistics efficiently, reduce costs, and improve service quality. HON's unique relationship with Ruan Transportation Management Systems evolved over 30 years, leading to increased customer satisfaction, greater driver commitment, faster policy implementation, and lower overall costs.

The grocery industry faces unique challenges in logistics due to the perishable nature of its products. Ensuring that fresh food arrives on time is critical, as delays can lead to spoilage and significant financial losses. Additionally, managing a private fleet involves high costs and complexities, including equipment investment, insurance, driver management, and compliance with safety regulations. Companies in the grocery sector need a reliable logistics partner to handle these challenges efficiently, allowing them to focus on their core business operations.

Ruan faced the challenge of managing a complex transportation network for a client with nationwide deliveries from multiple locations. The client required a comprehensive solution to handle various types of loads, including bulk tanker loads of denatured and pure alcohol, dry van truckload and LTL of food ingredients, and intermodal versus truck analysis for cost optimization. Additionally, the client needed 24/7 customer service support, mode selection, load management, and optimization for carrier rates and service capacity. The challenge also included managing hazmat endorsement requirements and washout schedules based on prior load specifications.

Every office throughout the Flight Centre network in South Africa is made up of dedicated individuals, allowing them to provide highly personalized service in accommodating the travel preferences of their customers. As part of this effort, these individuals regularly travel between offices to lend their expertise and support one another with customer service needs. Moving between offices often created problems for employees since Flight Centre South Africa’s computing network was decentralized with dedicated servers and printers in each office. This disparate computing environment meant that a person going from one office to another had difficulties accessing their user profiles and local printers. To make matters more frustrating for users, logon and logoff times were 40-50 seconds, and any settings from a previous session were not saved. Corrupt user profiles were also an issue, requiring 20-30 minutes per instance to resolve. These issues all contributed to lost productivity among the workforce and a knock on effect to their customer service. Another issue with the decentralized server environment was the time and effort required to launch new applications throughout the network, since each server had to be configured individually. It was ultimately this challenge that led the IT team for Flight Centre South Africa to consider AppSense as they were facing the rollout of a new travel application.

BC School District 67 faced several challenges in maintaining a secure and productive IT environment. The district needed to securely lock down the environment without reducing user capability and productivity or increasing overall IT support costs. Resource-intensive applications consumed excessive CPU and reduced performance. Additionally, the district had to manage security threats from both inside and outside the firewall, as tech-savvy students often ran unauthorized applications, installed keyloggers, and shared computers, exposing sensitive information. The IT department also struggled with managing policies and personalization across Citrix thin clients, desktops, and laptops separately, which was time-consuming and inefficient. Furthermore, the district wanted to optimize its thin-client servers by increasing user load without impacting the quality of service, as several critical applications consumed 100% CPU, resulting in significant performance hits and increased support calls.

With IT a core component of many courses, the requirement for e-assessment at universities across the UK is growing. In the 2003/4 academic year there were just seven assessments submitted through Bradford’s Questionmark e-assessment software package. By 2007/8 this figure had grown to 31,882 and it had become essential to obtain assurances as to the security of the environment and the accuracy of the results. The university’s involvement in the JISC program provided the funding for a project to address the growing requirements in e-assessment and provide a test bed from which other educational institutions could learn. Sara Eyre, Head of IT Customer Services at the University of Bradford and the ITS 4 SEA project lead comments; “Implementing e-assessment on PCs brings a minefield of security issues. It is very difficult to stop ‘escapees’ getting out of the assessment environment and accessing external storage, the internet or other applications. We knew thin clients would bring multiple benefits but we needed to be able to lock them down securely while ensuring flexibility in turning on and off entire applications or functionality.” Bradford needed to find a solution to fast and simple desktop management. Controlling the images published to each client and stripping applications to their bare essentials were key requirements for the success of the program.

The Mechanics Bank faced several challenges in maintaining the security and performance of their IT systems. They needed a proactive solution to protect against harmful executables and ensure their 32 branches could serve customers effectively. The bank's IT team was constantly dealing with unauthorized applications and plug-ins, which could introduce spyware and malware. This required tedious lock downs and time-consuming system maintenance. Additionally, the help desk was inundated with calls due to browser hijackings and altered registry settings, leading to user dissatisfaction. The bank also faced issues with CPU and memory-hogging applications, necessitating either additional hardware investments or better utilization of existing servers.

Auto Trader faced several challenges when transitioning to a purely digital business model and consolidating its offices. The IT team needed to support a major infrastructure change, simplify desktop estate management, improve user experience, and achieve PCI compliance. Responding to change requests was time-consuming, with group policy changes taking weeks to test and simple system changes taking days. The complexity of the existing environment, with nearly 1,000 group policies and 2,500 lines of logon scripts, made deployment and testing difficult. Additionally, the IT team wanted to improve logon performance and simplify desktop configuration and application settings management.

Gard’s IT-department experienced downtime and a lot of time spent on administering servers and clients. When it came to managing their user environment, they were in a challenging situation, and felt that the current IT-staff level could not handle the workload. They wanted the flexibility of roaming profiles, but not the problems typically associated with them; namely corruption, excessive administration, long logon times and inflexible configuration. Gard needed to be able to customize user settings and keep them regardless of where the user logged on from. Gard expects high levels of success from its workforce, so they also needed to ensure the user environment was responsive and stable - to ensure maximum user-productivity.\n\n“We were in desperate need for a solution that could reduce the time I spent on administrating user profiles and individual settings. Since there were no roaming profiles on the Citrix servers, we encountered a lot of challenges. In short; we needed to introduce more flexibility for our users instead of restricting their IT-experience.” said Jan Ove Folgerø, Chief Systems Engineer, Gard.

The central XenApp environment at Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) faced significant security challenges. The bank needed to protect its environment from unauthorized software execution, particularly against malware that could be embedded within email attachments, web browsers, or removable storage devices. Additionally, LBBW required a robust compliance and audit policy to ensure user and group-specific access requirements were met. The bank's IT organization needed a multi-level security solution that could prevent unauthorized software from running on its XenApp server farms, ensuring maximum system security and stability.

Even with a traditional SEG in front of Microsoft 365, employees at Boohoo were receiving credential phishing, invoice fraud, and impersonation attacks, which put funds, data, vendor relationships, and brand reputations at risk. Jonny Concannon, Group Information Security Manager, wanted a better solution—one that improved security, integrated easily, and automated threat detection and response. The team and I wanted an AI-based approach that would look at what normal is, what abnormal is, and patterns of behaviour across the organisation. We have a big team, but we’re a fast-paced organisation, so ease of integration was really important to us. Obviously, integration with Microsoft was a requirement. Tools that could save time on graymail and spam would also help Boohoo keep pace with trends and customer demand, while saving employees time.

Graymail that made it past the company’s Microsoft 365 security was impacting efficiency—for the IT team and the company in general. “We don't have time for someone to watch the email abuse box all day, so we have to be strategic to protect our individual users, our data, and the enterprise,” said Blaine Carter, Global CIO. “Efficiency and automation are key. We wanted an adaptable, automated solution that no one has to babysit.” Carter and his team also wanted a reliable way to prevent advanced credential phishing and vendor email compromise attacks from evading their existing security stack. Said Carter, “Microsoft is very good at filtering threats with malicious elements, but we also needed in-depth understanding of email intent.”

Business Email Compromise (BEC) has been growing at a breakneck pace over the past several years. Today, it represents more than half of all cyberthreat related financial losses according to the 2019 FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report. BEC attacks are sophisticated threats that leverage social engineering to target employees, who then unwittingly purchase gift cards, redirect payroll deposits or pay fraudulent invoices. As a holding company for retail brands, CSC is a primary target for BEC attacks due to its complex supply chain. Invoice fraud attacks, where attackers pose as suppliers, leverage the trusted relationships of external third parties to redirect legitimate invoice payments into an attackers’ bank account. Attackers have turned their focus toward the retail segment due to the sheer volume of suppliers and the fact that business invoices represent significantly greater value than payroll or gift card fraud. Compounding these issues is CSC’s growth strategy that is fueled by acquisition. The integration of new retail brands, their unique business processes and suppliers, create a dynamic that challenges any systems that cannot adapt to a constantly evolving environment. Traditional security policies become obsolete almost overnight.

The retailer was targeted by an attacker impersonating a debt collection agency using a lookalike domain. The attacker also spoofed the retailer's COO to add credibility to the fraudulent invoice request. The attack involved sophisticated social engineering techniques and spanned six back-and-forth conversations over one day. The urgency created by the debt collection pretext led employees to overlook red flags and begin processing the payment.

The telecommunications company (TCC) faced a sophisticated invoice fraud attack where an attacker impersonated a legitimate vendor to redirect a payment of over $700,000 to the attacker's account. The attacker used domain impersonation and engaged multiple employees over two months to build credibility and execute the attack.

After experiencing thousands of credential phishing attacks and a number of successful account takeovers, where threat actors would gain access to employee email accounts, this insurance company knew they needed additional protection for their Microsoft 365 environment. Despite having a secure email gateway and other additional protections, they were still uncomfortable with the number of advanced email attacks bypassing their security infrastructure. They faced missed attacks by Cisco ESA (IronPort) and FireEye, multiple compromised accounts circumventing multi-factor authentication, and numerous BEC attacks impersonating executives. They wanted an additional layer of protection to prevent employees from falling victim to social engineering attacks.

Sentara Healthcare faced significant cybersecurity challenges, particularly from ransomware and phishing attacks. Despite having existing security measures like IronPort and Microsoft 365, spoofing emails and spear phishing attempts were still getting through. The organization needed a more robust, cloud-based solution to enhance its email security and reduce the burden on its cybersecurity team.

Choice Hotels faced significant challenges in protecting their vast email attack surface, which included data from 50 million loyalty members and other guests. The hospitality industry is highly targeted due to the valuable guest data it holds, making it a prime target for nation-state actors and financially motivated criminals. Despite deploying two secure email gateways, advanced threats continued to bypass these defenses, exploiting over 120 of the company's vendors to attempt phishing, invoice, and payroll fraud. The company needed a solution that could prevent these advanced email threats that their current security measures and personnel training couldn't catch.

In 2020, Dudek faced a significant rise in advanced email attacks, particularly credential phishing, which targeted employees and executives. The existing email security measures, including Microsoft 365 detection tools, were insufficient, leading to numerous threats bypassing defenses and creating a heavy workload for the IT team. The CFO and her team were especially targeted, making their jobs more challenging. The IT department spent considerable time manually purging malicious emails, which was inefficient and time-consuming.