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.

The bank, founded in 2010, faced several challenges as it grew rapidly to over 1.2 million customers and 55 branches in just a few years. The high barrier to market entry, consumer stickiness, and extraordinary growth were some of the challenges. The bank also lacked a unified process management system and had to deal with looming GDPR regulations and manual documents. As a newcomer in the field, the bank sought to find a balance between well-worn protocols related to process planning, optimization, and efficiency, and the demands of savvy customers for legendary service and great products. The looming deadline for enforcement of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in early 2018 only added fuel to the fire.

The company, a stalwart in the U.K. financial services sector, was facing the enforcement deadlines of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The regulation required breaches to be reported to regulators within 72 hours of detection, and users must be given the ability to request their data or have it permanently deleted. Non-compliance was not an option, with staggering penalties on the line. The company was also dealing with strict regulatory oversight, rapid growth, rising costs, and manual processes and documents.

The healthcare company was facing growing regulatory pressures, slow business responsiveness, stifled innovation, and frustrated employees. It was difficult for them to adopt new technologies and keep up with business demands. The company's manual and paper-based internal Approval for Product Release (APR) process was taking between five to six months to release a product. The company urgently needed to identify a certain ingredient in its products, the app took just two clicks and a couple minutes to identify every applicable product worldwide.

ADEO, a conglomerate with 75,000 employees at 27 companies in 13 countries, embarked on an enterprise transformation project. The goal was to offer new ways of providing services to customers. However, the scale of operations posed a significant challenge. The company needed to integrate all systems of record and new sales systems across its vast network of companies and brands. The challenge was to handle millions of messages between the central systems and sales systems every day and speed up communication between them.

Exltech, a solutions integrator and telecommunications data distribution expert, identified a gap in the Australian IoT and big data market. While there were plenty of sensor vendors, IoT platforms, big data solutions, and apps, there was no single company that could integrate them all. Customers were seeking end-to-end industry-vertical IoT and big data solutions and needed help solving business problems with their data. They wanted solution partners that deliver a case study driven IoT and big data approach. Exltech aimed to fill this gap by building an ecosystem of reliable, secure, and case study driven sensors and data platforms for its customers.

Dataport, a pioneer in providing IT and communication services for government agencies in Germany, was facing several challenges. The company was tasked with digitalizing public administration, which was a significant undertaking. Additionally, they were dealing with ongoing high costs associated with throttled processors. The utilization of mainframe capacity was increasing, and there was a growing demand due to new customers. The company was also considering accepting Saxony-Anhalt as a new customer, which would further strain their mainframe capacity.

IndusInd Bank, a leading innovator in India's booming FinTech industry, faced several challenges due to its rapid growth and the acquisition of a credit card business. The bank needed to optimize its internal systems and processes to stay lean, fast, and innovative. The challenges included increasing competition and thinner margins on traditional products, rapid business growth and the fast pace of innovation, back-end process inefficiencies, growing regulatory requirements, and the need to make the business future-ready. To continue outcompeting rivals and hitting growth targets, IndusInd Bank knew it needed to shorten innovation cycles and improve its already industry-leading level of personalized services and customer-support speed.

Echo, a casino in Australia, was facing a challenge with their VIP customer service. The process of releasing funds for VIP customers was complex and manual, taking up to 20 minutes. This was causing inconvenience for the VIP customers who had to wait for a long time before they could start playing. The company wanted to transform this process into a fast and convenient experience for their VIP customers.

Sichuan Languang Development Co., Ltd. (BRC) had a massive amount of documentation, over 8 million words across 8,000 separate documents for its 390+ properties. This made finding the right documents a monumental task for BRC’s employees and keeping them up to date in a timely manner was equally challenging. This started to put processes at risk for HR, finance and supply chain systems alike. For example, new employee training was a complex and overwhelming process that often required additional trainings or a slow start in their new positions. The company decided it needed to find a process management solution to support its business design, starting with the 8,000-plus documents.

The Sacramento Kings, a popular U.S. basketball team, was facing the challenge of enhancing the fan experience both in the stadium and at home. They wanted to create a unique perspective of the game for fans, enhance the arena with fan-focused facilities and services, and boost online mobile ticket sales. The team was also looking to provide a personalized, immersive experience, blending physical action with digitally provided context and involvement. They wanted fans to feel a part of the game and not miss important moments.

Digital Dubai, the government office responsible for the city's smart transformation, faced several challenges. These included the need for digital transformation, growing operational costs, vendor lock-in, numerous customer experience initiatives, and the global pandemic and lockdown. The city had dozens of independent apps offering a wide array of services, but lacked the architectural platform to allow interconnectedness on the backend, smooth user journeys, and faster adoption of new technologies. The need for a unified integration backbone was evident to enhance services on streamlined mobile apps, self-service kiosks, and more.

SOKA-BAU, a service provider for the construction industry, was relying on a series of legacy systems that had grown over time to manage its tasks. Although this environment could still meet demands, it was not able to provide fast and cost-effective IT support for new service offerings over the long term. Even small adjustments already took a great deal of effort. Furthermore, the IT infrastructure did not offer centralized data storage, so massive amounts of data needed to be stored and managed redundantly—also consuming major time and effort. For that reason, SOKA-BAU decided on a fundamental modernization to build its IT on a futureproof, scalable basis.

Angostura Limited, a leading Caribbean rum producer, was facing challenges with its manual, paper-based sales process. The process was creating delays in getting orders and related information into SAP. The salesperson had to physically print the customer’s current data before a customer visit and orders and payment receipts were handwritten and manually entered later into SAP. This required the manual intervention from at least four separate departments multiple times along the process. While in the field, the salesperson could not directly answer customer questions regarding available stock and account balances, and would need to phone the related area to inquire.

In the financial services industry, information is expected to be immediate, relevant and actionable. End-of-day events processing is no longer adequate. Financial institutions have to become thoroughly Digital Enterprises and need to understand events as they happen.

Royal Dirkzwager, a European leader in providing information and communication technologies to the maritime-logistics market, was facing a data overload due to the continuous stream of information from 120,000 ships transmitting every two seconds. The company was struggling to cope with the overwhelming data volumes, growing demand for precision ship tracking, and increasing customer functionality requests. The traditional ship-based transponders were limited to communicating data only when a ship came in to port and were unable to reach further than 40km offshore. The company needed a solution to exploit the data for added functionality and reduced costs.

Hillsborough County in Florida, with a population of 1.2 million citizens, operates an Information & Service Center (ISC) to provide a reliable source of information to citizens, businesses, visitors and internal departments. The county aimed to become the “Next-Generation County” and the centralized call center was a significant part of this plan. However, before the implementation of the call center, the county used aging, unmaintained and unsupported on-premises customer relationship management software. Incoming inquiries were handled by “call taking groups” and there were no recorded performance metrics. This led to inefficiencies and a lack of transparency in the handling of customer inquiries.

In the digital age, banks are looking to present personalized offers to online customers as soon as they log in at a response time of two seconds or less. Offers must stay active for 30 minutes for tracking and processing reasons—all while millions of other customers may be accessing the same applications at the same time. The challenge was to develop a real-time personalized marketing promotion system for a leading retail/corporate bank that provides an optimal, secured, feasible, reliable and robust mechanism for presenting eligible marketing offers based on the user/visitor, channel and situation.

AXA’s goal is to become the preferred company for all of its stakeholders and customers. This requires a strong focus on the customer and fostering employee involvement by building a culture of trust and SLA achievement. In claims management, in particular, AXA France wanted to identify the cause of SLA issues to increase customer satisfaction and optimize the claims management team. In the end, AXA wants its claims management organization to have a process optimization mindset.

The infrastructure at Zurich Airport is highly complex and must meet the requirements of a wide array of user groups: passengers, airlines, ground crew, customs, security services and air traffic control, to name just a few. Vastly different systems are used for these tasks, requiring millions of data to be transferred among them every day. Until a few years ago, scenarios like this in which data from one system needed to be made available quickly to several other systems posed a major challenge for Flughafen Zürich AG as the airport operator. The interaction between these applications constantly needs realignment as well. But the file export provided in most cases means that nearly every change or new development requires pulling in 30 to 40 IT service providers to achieve a one-to-one integration among the affected partners.

DB Netz AG, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn AG, is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure for rail operations. The company's IT infrastructure was complex and many applications were developed independently from one another, leading to data being managed in different databases and functionalities for realizing requirements being developed redundantly. This resulted in higher costs and longer project durations. The company sought to develop an innovative IT toolbox system as part of a service-oriented architecture that would structure and harmonize the development process for all IT applications within the company. The goal was to automate processes from technical requirements through realization and documentation.

The Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) in Kuwait had been relying on the stable architecture of Adabas and Natural for its core civic information systems and applications for almost three decades. However, personnel changes over time, along with inadequate standards and controls, led to a fragmentation of key business and technical knowledge. This was upheld by just a few seasoned agency employees. As a result, production changes were increasingly unpredictable and the risk was high that new decrees from the Kuwaiti government could not be implemented in time. The agency needed to regain control over its IT assets and business process information, expand knowledge throughout the organization and be able to plan for and make changes safely once again.

The Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality (EMM) unified 20 cities, townships and local councils in the East Rand region of Gauteng into a single municipality. However, services were not unified across the municipality—each of the 20 Customer Care Areas (CCAs) and various departments had their own processes and procedures. The lack of transparency and standardization led to duplications, information silos, uncoordinated efforts, months-long approval times and hampered city planning. Part of EMM’s challenge to solve was that service processes were mostly manual and paper-based, handwritten forms were physically sent from one department to another. Manual entry of the same information in multiple systems cost time, effort and increased errors. Forms could be lost and it was difficult to determine where a particular application was in the process flow.

GAZ-SYSTEM S.A. was established in 2004 from six formerly independent Regional Pipeline Operators (RPOs). Despite the similar nature of their services, each of the entities used a different set of procedures and a unique mix of IT tools. With the EU accession Poland became involved in the process of the European gas market liberalization. The prospects of an open domestic market, providing equal access to gas networks for all market players and, eventually, the interoperation of the gas exchange posed new challenges for gas transmission in Poland. It was GAZ-SYSTEM S.A. whose role it was to prepare the country for the upcoming gas market liberalization in terms of technical, organizational and business capabilities.

Smals, a leading Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services organization in Belgium, had invested years of development in 42 specialized COBOL applications. Once Smals had created a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the organization needed an efficient way to establish communications between the SOA and these core mainframe applications. Effective communication between the systems of the CBSS and Smals is crucial for a swift processing of millions of transactions. “When one of our members wants to process a declaration—for example for registering a new employee in their system—they send an electronic message to the CBSS that uses an IBM mainframe,” Vanneste said. “Formerly, this message was passed through to Smals’ BS2000 mainframe, where the request was processed by one of the 42 specialized COBOL applications and answered.

The Automated Regional Justice Information System (ARJIS) mainframe is relied upon by over 11,000 law enforcement officers, adjudicators, investigators, and analysts at 81 agencies. However, the public safety committee of the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) wanted ARJIS to improve how information was integrated, shared, and re-purposed. The mainframe-based system was costly and hard-coded, making it difficult to adapt to the dynamic needs of law enforcement. The challenge was to move off the mainframe to a service-oriented, process-centric Web-based solution that could increase information accuracy, timeliness, and availability at less cost.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) started to develop its digital delivery channels during the past decade. HMRC became the first customer for the Government Gateway, a system that provides the pan-government building blocks for secure and efficient transactions. As the number of digital services and transactions at HMRC grew, it became apparent HMRC’s interface to the Government Gateway (known as DIS) needed to be more resilient and accompanied by more responsive support services.

GEWOFAG, a company that manages around 30,000 housing units in Munich, was faced with the decision of whether to maintain its buildings in-house or to outsource the work. The current trend in the real estate sector is to outsource maintenance services to external providers, who can perform the services more cheaply than internal staff on a case-by-case basis. GEWOFAG has its own technical workshops unit (mainly for corrective and preventative maintenance), which employs around 60 tradespeople, including garden workers to look after green spaces and parks. The company sought an objective expert opinion on the most cost-effective approach.

Fast-growing Costa Crociere wanted to improve its booking process to handle more service options and more reservations than ever before. Travel agents and customers needed to be able to make a reservation through any channel. Behind the scenes, corporate systems needed to be integrated into the booking process. With such a large number of travelers to serve, the group’s booking system is equivalent to the ordering system of a large manufacturer. Costa’s ERP system must guarantee efficient functionality to reduce the time it takes to manage bookings, and it must constantly adapt to new business developments. The system stores and manages all the essential information about the cruise holidays chosen by customers: the itinerary, cabin type, personal details and additional services, such as flights, transfers and hotels. The job of managing this huge amount of information is further complicated by the fact that the booking system also offers options for purchasing cruises and associated ser- vices that are open for varying periods, prior to booking confirmation. If a booking is not confirmed, all cabins and other options must be made available in real-time to other potential customers.