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SerenaGroup, a global healthcare management company, was facing challenges with its financial structure. The company operates across multiple locations, each of which is considered a separate cost center. This structure required the creation of a full profit and loss statement for each individual site every reporting period. The company's existing solution, QuickBooks Enterprise, was capable of producing the individual P&Ls, but it did not support the consolidation of these into a summarized report. The workaround involved a time-consuming process of exporting and merging spreadsheets in Excel, which took 2-3 days every month. This process was prone to errors and did not allow for precise forecasting. Additionally, SerenaGroup needed to allocate overhead expenses to individual facilities, which added another layer of complexity to the process.

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a non-profit trade association, was facing significant challenges with their budgeting and planning solution, Microsoft Forecaster. The software had several shortcomings that were critical for CompTIA to address. Internationally based users were frequently locked out of the software on the server in Chicago, struggling to simply access or record their budget numbers. The application couldn’t roll forward prior budgets or utilize actuals. CFO Brian Laffey lamented, “You always had to build budgets from the ground up.” Creating unique reports consumed Laffey’s finance team every month. Specific parameters that each manager wanted to see had to be identified monthly for the report view to be created. The process involved downloading data to Excel, filtering and sorting the data, and then individually creating each report.

Mountain View Hospital, a healthcare facility in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was facing challenges with its budgeting and forecasting process. The hospital, which has over 1,000 employees and more than 60 departments and cost centers, was using Excel for these processes. However, as the hospital continued to grow, Excel became increasingly difficult to use, especially when adding new acquisitions or modifying projections. Simple modifications posed significant risk of errors due to the necessary changes in formulas and formats. The hospital's expansive budget spreadsheet had grown to over 40 tabs, making it impossible to perform meaningful what-if scenarios or analyze the data in a detailed manner. If the hospital continued to use Excel and continued to grow, it would likely have needed additional staff.

Four Star Freightliner, a freightliner dealership with seven locations throughout Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, was struggling with its budgeting process. The company's financial team relied heavily on the budget to monitor the business's health, track progress towards goals, and provide early warnings if actuals were off and adjustments were needed. However, the process of creating the company's budget using spreadsheets was cumbersome and time-consuming, taking up to two months to build and an additional week to manually enter into the ERP system. The lack of adaptability of spreadsheets hindered the company's ability to reforecast each quarter and assess how well they were tracking towards their goals. Budgeting for employee expenses and keeping up with revenue and cost of sales by location was also challenging. The company's rapid growth, from six to seven dealerships and from 130 to 200 employees, compounded these challenges.

Heartland LLC, a private equity sponsored business in the commercial landscape maintenance, property enhancement and snow removal sector, was facing a challenge in supporting its aggressive growth strategy. The company's strategy was both M&A and organically focused, acquiring founder-owned commercial landscape and maintenance companies to provide them with financial backing and a systems architecture. However, the company was struggling with its existing FP&A platform, which was not able to support the company's growth plan. The company had two companies, one of which used QuickBooks, and the other used Asset, a platform designed for the landscape business. The company needed a more straightforward and scalable solution to support its growth and provide a single source of truth in terms of the budget, forecast and actuals.

Amwaste, LLC, a full-service waste and recycling company, was facing challenges in managing its budgeting process due to its complex organizational structure. The company is a collection of multiple entities, each requiring its own budget and forecast. Additionally, an overall budget and forecast is needed for the parent company, Matter Management Enterprises. Each service offered by Amwaste has unique business drivers that shape the companies. For instance, in the residential pickup business, revenue is driven by the number of homes under contract or serviced, while expenses are driven by days in the month. Roll-off customers are charged based on the number of services provided, while commercial front load customers are charged a fixed monthly fee, but the longer the month, the higher the labor costs. Initially, Amwaste had just three entities, each of which had its own QuickBooks database and budget. To create an annual budget, Amwaste’s CFO, David Carlisle, pulled data from the three QuickBooks databases and manually re-entered it into three separate Excel spreadsheets. Once the spreadsheets were completed he rolled them up to a single budget for the company.

Wakeland Housing and Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization that develops affordable housing communities, was facing challenges with its financial forecasting. The organization's major revenue stream comes from developer fees, which are built into the financial structure of each development. These fees are earned based on triggered mechanisms such as when the development team completes construction, closes permanent financing, and receives form 8609 from the IRS. Prior to discovering Centage, Wakeland was using an Excel spreadsheet for its pro forma budget, which was difficult to update and manage on an ongoing basis. The spreadsheet was not providing the analytic information needed and forecasting future cash was a difficult process. The accounting team was also responsible for managing the effects of Wakeland’s pipeline, which required them to project cash flow, balance sheet, and P&L. If a milestone was late, the team had to recreate the forecasts in their spreadsheets, which was time-consuming.

Price Family Vineyards & Estates, a family of vineyards and wineries in Sonoma County, California, was facing challenges in consolidating the financial statements of each of its entities and preparing individual budgets for each LLC. The business was growing and the existing system, which relied heavily on Excel, was proving to be time-consuming and prone to errors. Additionally, the company was looking for a new accounting software to replace the winery-specific system it had been using, one that its sales teams would find more intuitive and user-friendly. After considering several options, they decided to switch to QuickBooks Premier due to its ability to integrate with multiple third-party software platforms that the sales teams were actively using.

Carroll County Memorial Hospital (CCMH), a 25-bed Critical Access Hospital with over 250 employees, was facing challenges with its budgeting and planning process. The hospital was using Excel for these tasks, which proved to be cumbersome due to manual data entry and broken formulas. One of the significant issues was the inability to involve different departments in their portion of the budgeting process. This lack of involvement led to a lack of accountability and collaboration, which was detrimental to the overall budgeting process.

Equitas Health, a regional nonprofit community healthcare system, was facing challenges with its budgeting and planning process. The organization, which has over 500 employees across 21 offices and 25 different departments, was using Excel for budgeting and planning. The budget would be created in Excel and then uploaded into their accounting system, Abila, to run their monthly reports. This process was long, complex, and prone to errors. The complexity was further compounded by the fact that department heads within the organization would create their own initial versions of their department budgets. These budgets would then be submitted as separate spreadsheets to the Finance team who would add them to the larger company budget. Given the number of departments and the multiple people that were working on the individual budgets, version control and errors were common, and the consolidation process was time intensive and cumbersome.

The Housing Authority of Snohomish County (HASCO) is a nonprofit, government agency that provides housing solutions for the people and communities of Snohomish County in Washington state. HASCO has two primary sources of revenue – reimbursement they receive from “HUD” – the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development – for the Section Eight housing vouchers they administer and rental income from the properties the organization owns throughout the county. Prior to discovering Centage, Jenny Barker, senior budget manager at HASCO, and her team had been using Excel for their budgeting and planning. However, due to the complex requirements of being a government entity, especially when it came to managing and tracking multiple allocations, Excel was not powerful enough to meet their needs.

The Wildlife Gallery, the largest tannery for the taxidermy industry in the United States, was facing challenges with their annual budgeting process. The organization, which offers tanning, skinning, trophy room design, and fine woodwork services across six locations in Michigan, Texas, and Alaska, was using a combination of Excel, QuickBooks, and NetSuite for their financial planning. However, these tools were not ideal for their needs. The process of consolidating spreadsheets and uploading them into their ERP system for reporting was time-consuming and prone to errors. The CFO, Nate Walters, described it as a very manual process. The company needed a more sophisticated solution that would integrate with NetSuite and provide a faster, more streamlined process.

Helvetia, a Swiss insurance company with over $39 billion in assets under management and more than five million customers across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, relies heavily on its IBM mainframe for all of its core applications. These applications support the company's underwriting, policy management, and financials. However, like many companies, Helvetia faces a two-fold challenge when it comes to these core mainframe applications. The first part of the challenge is a declining supply of skilled, experienced mainframe developers. This declining supply has not yet become a major crisis, but in five years or so, it may be. So Helvetia has to prepare now for that future shortage. The second part of the challenge is the relentless demand on mainframe applications. Those applications must be constantly updated and modified to provide customers with the insurance products and service experiences they demand. So mainframe development has to be fast, reliable, and ready to perform at scale in the production environment. This means Helvetia needs to empower fewer developers with potentially less mainframe experience to deliver more consistent, quality work faster than ever.

The bank, one of Europe's largest private banks, is facing a common IT management challenge. The bank has stopped developing new mainframe applications and allowed its mainframe development staff to shrink by about 30% through attrition. However, the bank's mainframe development needs are increasing. The use of the bank's mainframe applications and data by new and existing distributed, web, and mobile applications is increasing. Developers no longer build new COBOL applications but must constantly modify mainframe code to assist non-mainframe applications. The bank can't wait forever for coding changes to be completed. Competition in the financial services market is intense, making time-to-benefit important, whether for customers' mobile experiences or new capabilities for staff, and putting pressures on the mainframe software development lifecycle. That lifecycle has to produce defect-free code. The bank's mainframe applications are critical to everything it does and everything customers and regulators expect. Mainframe test/QA must be rigorous and fast. If the testing process uncovers a problem, it must be rapidly and accurately diagnosed, fixed, and tested again.

A Global Health Service Company (GHSC) was managing an enterprise-wide DevOps initiative that included mainframe applications teams. The company wanted an integrated IDE for mainframe developers that included program analysis and an intelligent editor that could provide immediate feedback on code changes as developers edit the code. The GHSC is a licensed user of SonarSource products for distributed source code syntax checking. Their management desired similar capabilities for their mainframe DevOps efforts. Quick and immediate feedback on code errors would reduce rework, reduce the number of compiles and improve the quality of COBOL programs released to production. They also wanted their mainframe developers to use similar capabilities and tooling as their distributed systems counterparts.

The Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PFCU) is a globally operating financial institution with over $15 billion in assets. It serves more than one million members of the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, defense-related companies, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The institution relies heavily on Hogan financial applications, primarily written in COBOL with some Assembler code, for its day-to-day operations. However, PFCU faced a challenge when it planned to upgrade to newer releases of the z/OS operating system. The provider of its debugging tool could not guarantee that the software would continue to work properly with the proposed upgrades. Additionally, the debugging tool had several quirks and idiosyncrasies that developers had to contend with, such as not accepting 'Go Back'—a common coding statement used frequently in the Hogan application.

A major multinational financial services company was undergoing a digital transformation to meet new customer demands for innovative services. However, the company's mainframe was siloed, operating with Waterfall-based processes and antiquated tools, which caused delays in major projects. The mainframe developers were still using 3270 emulators for coding, which lacked the benefits of modern tools. The mainframe team had no automation in place, requiring multiple people and teams to move code from check-in to deploy and from development to production. There was no automated testing in place to handle online and batch testing, and there was a lack of testing frameworks as well as lack of integration with automated testing tools. The mainframe team had too many disparate systems involved in the process, so a developer/release manager would have to jump from one system to the next. With minimal change management integration, tracking changes end to end was a manual task.

Hapag-Lloyd, a leading global container shipping company, needed to create a realistic and production-like environment for core IT applications without disclosing any potentially competitive information. The company tests new application functionality using real data, a practice that helps ensure that issues are eliminated before any changes are put into production. However, due to the high level of integration of Hapag-Lloyd’s IT environment, which consists of its mainframe and a range of distributed systems, this was a challenging task. A new challenge arose in 2014 when Hapag-Lloyd prepared for a potential merger. This made it necessary to extend existing training materials and create up-to-date live training data. The challenge was to create a realistic and production-like environment for core IT applications without disclosing any potentially competitive information. As a result, Hapag-Lloyd realized it needed a test data privacy/optimization solution that would allow it to securely share this information with a huge number of new employees around the world, while remaining compliant with its high standards of data protection.

Comerica Incorporated, a financial services company headquartered in Dallas, offers three strategically aligned business segments for its customers: business banking, retail banking and wealth and institutional management. It is imperative that the online documentation system that backs up account and document withdrawals, deposits and other account activity works efficiently for a multistate network of more than 500 branch, lending and investment offices. At the heart of the company’s documentation process is the vendor-supplied Comerica Online Documents (COLD) application that archives, restores and retrieves these types of reports electronically. When this application was originally installed, the company started backing up a month’s worth of statements on a mainframe disk drive. Any request for account statements from over a month, however, was backed up on tape. To improve application response time, Comerica moved a year’s worth of account statements from tape to the mainframe disk drive. The company expected to see better response time, but that wasn’t the case. The system took the same amount of time to retrieve the account statements as it did before its IT team implemented the change.

A software company faced a challenge when the only employee who knew the intricate details of the company’s mainframe SCM solution—a homegrown Assembler application built around IBM Source Configuration and Library Management (SCLM) for z/OS—announced his retirement. The company's development occurs on the mainframe, requiring a team with decades of niche technical knowledge and skills. However, the software development team is small, and the loss of even one developer significantly impacts productivity. The company planned to hire a replacement for the retiring developer, but it quickly realized it would be unreasonable to train someone new to support an antiquated Assembler-SCLM tool that wasn’t core to the company’s business. The Assembler-SCLM tool impeded the acceleration of application development and delivery, a crippling disadvantage in a digital age where the pace of a “dinosaur” has long been superseded by industry-disrupting Agile “unicorns.”

Standard Bank, a major international financial services group based in South Africa, has been focusing on driving Agile, DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to grow strategic digital, digitization, infrastructure and application software engineering capabilities. The core of Standard Bank’s portfolio, which includes corporate and private banking, sits on the mainframe, accounting for 80 percent of processing. As the system of record, it’s also the foundation for much of the bank’s frontend digital transformation. However, as Standard Bank’s digital transformation process matured, the mainframe had to be repositioned to mitigate risks between it and the rest of the Agile and DevOps framework supporting CI/CD. There were several cultural, process-related and tooling impediments to integrating the mainframe into that framework.

The company, a major communications industry service provider located in the United States, was struggling with Source Code Management (SCM). Their existing mainframe code management tools were outdated and could not keep up with the pace of change in today's world of agile development and rapid programming styles. The in-house developed SCM processes were inefficient and inconsistent, resulting in unnecessary errors. Deployments would slip out without all of the correct software changes and updates incorporated. Old and new versions of software were being deployed in error. There wasn’t a standardized way to implement changes. Procedures for version control and verification processes were not standardized. As a result, ‘clean-up’ of existing libraries was inconsistent, so that old versions of software would remain in ‘updated’ libraries. Changes could be made at any level making auditing, repeatability and traceability difficult.

The Global Health Service Company (GHSC) was managing an enterprise-wide DevOps initiative that included mainframe applications teams. The company wanted to execute COBOL source code security and syntax checking for every mainframe product release from its claims processing team. The company performs security and code syntax scans on their distributed and mobile apps and needed to duplicate that process for the mainframe teams. The company also needed the ability to manage mainframe and distributed code releases in a similar manner. This would provide quick feedback of issues to development and give management a common dashboard (SonarQube) for analyzing application code quality. These scans are critical for Continuous Integration practices for the enterprise DevOps effort.

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. (CHT), a leading telecommunications company in Taiwan, was facing challenges with its existing billing system. The company, which provides services in fixed line, mobile communications, and data communications, has a subscriber base of 23 million. The billing system, based on an IBM mainframe, tracks billing for calls, collates monthly statistics relating to telephone charges, bill consolidation, bill delivery, clearing, bill collection, suspension, resumption and the stopping of phone services, refunds, arrears tracking and bad debt management. With an annual bill turnover of about NT$180 billion, it is Taiwan’s largest telecommunications billing system. However, the increasing competition in the industry and the launch of many new businesses and services, including ADSL, home broadband and MOD businesses and related services, were putting a strain on the billing system. The company needed to enhance its billing system to meet the growing needs of its value-added business development services.

IT Solutions Austria, the IT services branch of the Erste Group, a leading financial services company in Central and Eastern Europe, was tasked with maintaining the quality and cost efficiency of the Erste Group’s data center operations. In 2012, the company decided to outsource mainframe operations, which led to a re-evaluation of all its mainframe vendor relationships to see if it could reduce costs by further consolidating with other vendors. IT Solutions Austria was already using Compuware Strobe to analyze the behavior of its mainframe applications, and it valued the capabilities Strobe provided. However, the company considered migrating to a competing solution to save money.

Royal Bank of Canada’s Information Technology division needed to make sure its test data management software was efficient enough to handle the bank’s ever-expanding list of financial services for its customers, and that all new applications interfaced well with existing ones. The bank’s IT division needed to make more efficient use of its resources, while performing test data management projects more quickly and affordably. Faced with increasing customer expectations, the IT organization had to ensure that the bank’s growing list of financial service offerings would function properly and efficiently, and that its new applications would complement existing ones.

The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) faces the challenge of maintaining and improving its infrastructure, including nearly 6000 miles of paved roadway, bridges, and other surfaces, amidst increasing population and urbanization. The state's unique geographical and demographic characteristics, being the 9th most urban state in the U.S. and 12th largest by land area, add to the complexity of the task. UDOT also has to comply with federal legislation such as MAP-21 and the FAST Act, which have implications on how funds are allocated. The department needed a way to gain better insights into the performance of their assets to make more informed decisions and get higher value returns on their investments.

The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) in Washington State Government is tasked with ensuring that the state's annual IT budget of over $900 million is spent in a way that advances the governor’s policy objectives. The projects must either improve revenue or reduce costs and have a direct and positive impact on citizens or public safety. In 2013, State agencies proposed 86 different projects that were either level 2 (medium risk/complexity) or level 3 (high risk/complexity) IT projects. The projects ranged from settling tax boundary disputes to tracking marijuana from seed to sale to Medicaid shopping plans. The challenge was to analyze these complex IT projects and provide a set of easy-to-read recommendations that even technophobes can understand. The legislature asked the OCIO to create a prioritized list that ranked the projects as high, medium, or low.

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is a non-profit organization that serves as the nation’s Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). Over the last 25 years, the number of organ transplants performed in the U.S. has doubled, but there are still people on the waiting list. The current system for matching donated organs to potential recipients includes a classification system with dozens or hundreds of characteristics for each organ. This system has hard boundaries on the different classifications, which can result in unfair allocation of organs. For example, someone who qualifies for an organ 251 miles away is lower on the priority list than those who are only 249 miles away, even if other attributes were comparatively more urgent.

ClickTale is a leader in Customer Experience Analytics (CEA), providing businesses with insights into their customers’ online behavior. Over 35,000 businesses rely on ClickTale for optimization of their website’s performance, improving usability and increasing conversion rates. As an analytics suite, ClickTale needs to generate a lot of reports, many of which require charts. The company was looking for an off-the-shelf charting component that would allow the development team to focus on the primary product, rather than reinventing the wheel. They needed a solution that could provide customers with meaningful reports of behavior inside their webpage by aggregating thousands of visitor sessions. These reports would help them in optimizing their website which ultimately translates into increased conversion rates.