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Culinaire International, a hospitality management company, was dealing with a large volume of paper flowing through their central accounting office. Each of their remote locations was sending a weekly FedEx package with copies of accounts receivable and accounts payable documents for processing. This workflow was inefficient and costly. After evaluating outsourcing accounting functions or finding a basic digital document repository, Culinaire realized what they really wanted was a more robust solution that had search functionality, optical character recognition (OCR), digital workflow, and the ability to automate indexing and eliminate paper filing.

Elit, a Romanian meat business, experienced significant growth in recent years, leading to an increase in daily deliveries and the creation of over 4,000 delivery slips and outgoing invoices daily. The customer confirms receipt of the goods on these documents, which are then returned to the company. For the company’s invoicing department, this process meant a lot of work. Before using a document management system (DMS), employees had to check each signed document individually and manually. Especially in disagreements, the manual approach was especially negative: sometimes several weeks passed before the money was received. In addition, a productivity test revealed that hundreds of invoices remained unpaid every month - resulting in a correspondingly large number of follow-ups and time wasted.

Before the introduction of a Document Management System (DMS), each branch of the Arab Islamic Bank (AIB) had its own paper archive. This led to inefficiencies as customer service staff often did not know which customer documents were already available and which ones were still needed. This resulted in customers often being asked multiple times for the same information or the documents had to be requested externally. Given that AIB conducts hundreds of transactions every day, this led to significant delays. Another challenge was the approval of documents across departments. Contracts and applications are reviewed by various departments, and the shifting around of paper documents, especially between a branch and their headquarters, was inefficient.

Mosscare Housing Ltd. is a charitable, not for profit housing association committed to providing a high quality, high value housing service to communities and individuals in Greater Manchester. This includes the City of Manchester, Tameside and Trafford. Mosscare was founded in 1967; today the association manages around 3500 buildings and apartments. All administrative maintenance for managing the properties are handled by the 100 employees of Mosscare. Many of the buildings were previously the property of the city. Before introducing a Document Management System (DMS), about 150,000 pages of paper had been collected in their paper archive. Every Mosscare employee must be able to comprehensively advise potential tenants. To make this possible, all of the company’s documents must be easily retrieved and viewable by multiple employees at the same time – without spending valuable time on copying or searching for documents on a colleague’s desk. Their existing software, Link2 (a housing property management system), should remain in place, and documents should be readily accessible from within this system. Employees work on about 70 computers running Windows 2000. They planned on storing all kinds of information about real estate properties and existing and interested tenants in the DMS system. This means that many different types of documents from a variety of sources would need to be processed. Multiple employees working in different departments would also need to access the information.

ADM Investor Services International (ADMISI) was facing challenges in managing and storing customer-relevant documentation. The process of creating new documents was cumbersome, involving filling out different Word templates and then printing them out. The company also had to deal with the authorization of letters by financial managers, which required manual intervention. Retrieving information was a time-consuming process, with employees having to search for hours in the paper archive. The company also had to comply with data protection regulations (GDPR), which was difficult due to documents being stored in different file cabinets or server drives.

Marcon International, a marine vessel brokerage company, specializes in transportation vessels including tugboats, barges, crew and supply vessels as well as ocean towing and smaller passenger ferries. The company maintains a vast amount of information about vessels worldwide. Although only about 3,000 vessels are available for rental or sales at a given point, Marcon actively tracks about 17,000 vessels and barges. Marcon also retains information on about 26,000 archived records for vessels that have gone off the grid. The company maintains a customer database of over 12,000 records and has three people dedicated to adding, updating and achieving this information. Due to the volume of information, Marcon always used an electronic data management system, which was a precursor of DocuWare.

Shelter Products, a distributor of lumber, plywood, and other building materials, was facing challenges with its accounts payable system. As the company's operations grew, so did the need for an efficient accounts payable system. The company was missing out on early payment discounts due to lost or incorrectly routed paperwork. The company had to process around 100 invoices a day, and paper processing took hours to route invoices to the appropriate trader assistant. The company needed a solution that could streamline its accounts payable processes and improve efficiency.

Chicagoland Fat Loss Camps, a company offering nutritional counseling and exercise programs in the Chicago area, was facing challenges with its paper-based client enrollment and tracking system. The company held kickoff events every six weeks, with 50 to 70 attendees at each location. Attendees interested in the program would fill out paper forms, which often resulted in incomplete or illegible information, requiring employees to follow up. This caused delays and presented barriers to converting event attendees to clients. Additionally, staff kept track of weigh-in numbers, supplement orders, and referral bonuses on paper. Employees worked long hours to input data into the company’s ERP system, costing about $3,000 per event.

Corestruc, a South African conglomerate active in the concrete, real estate, and agricultural industries, was struggling with paper-based administration due to the geographical distribution of its subsidiaries. The decentralized employees only travelled to the headquarters in Polokwane once a month, leading to an average processing time of four weeks for incoming A/P invoices. Urgent documents were sometimes scanned and forwarded by email, but this often led to a loss of control as it was unclear if the copy of the invoice had been processed or not. Additionally, when a document was filed away at their headquarters, subsidiaries were dependent on their colleagues in Polokwane to look through the documents to answer an inquiry. This required documents to be retrieved, copied, and sent out repeatedly.

Community Action Agency of St. Louis County (CAASTLC) was facing a significant challenge due to its paper-intensive programs. The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), for instance, received up to 500 applications during peak times, generating about 20,000 paper files. Each application required proof of income, a utility bill, and other personal information, which were rarely submitted together. As bills and other documentation arrived, staffers had to retrieve the physical files and add new information. When the state’s requirements for LIHEAP grew stricter while the number of applicants increased, CAASTLC became buried in paper. Another challenge was CAASTLC’s drug and alcohol education program that stored some older files offsite, which cost money to retrieve.

Josep Bombardó's textile company, based in Sabadell, Spain, had been using electronic document archiving for some time. However, they encountered problems with using Windows folders, especially when collaborating on documents or assigning editing rights. Stricter data protection regulations led the management to look for more professional solutions. The lack of security in the storage of personnel documents, which were still in paper form, was a significant concern for the management. They needed a solution that could not only store documents digitally but also optimize previously manual and time-consuming work processes.

The All Service Group for Facility Management, a company that offers comprehensive services in the field of facility management, was struggling with an inefficient invoicing process. Every month, around 800 work slips for services signed by the customer were collected and sent by the branch offices to the financial accounting department in Bad Homburg. The invoices were then created and printed out in their Sage ERP system. Work certificates were sorted, manually stuffed into envelopes and sent. A lot of time and many documents were lost in the mail. It could take up to 30 days before a service was invoiced. At the same time, the flood of paper was immense, with 30 binders filled every month.

Daviess County Public Schools (DCPS) in Owensboro, KY, was facing challenges with its traditional method of collecting and exchanging information with parents via paper forms. This process was time-consuming, inefficient, and frustrating for both parents and staff. Parents with more than one child had to fill out the same information on multiple forms, which was inconvenient. Additionally, the school had to keep track of document retention schedules on paper, which was a daunting task due to different document types being purged on different schedules. For instance, attendance data had to be kept for 20 years while health information obtained by school nurses was kept for only five years.

The Porter County Sheriff’s Department was facing challenges due to budget cutbacks and the need to manage a large volume of documents including warrants, case reports, tickets, and jail documentation. The process of storing and retrieving these documents was inefficient and time-consuming. For instance, warrants were stored in file cabinets and had to be verified by dispatchers who were also handling emergency calls. Case reports were typed, printed, and re-keyed into a law enforcement management program, taking up to six hours a day. The department was also dealing with a large volume of jail records and a county requirement to store a copy of every ticket issued for 10 years.

Rebel Refrigeration, AC & Plumbing, a service provider based in Las Vegas, was already partially paperless with its contractors using iPads and digital invoicing in some business areas. However, certain aspects of the operations still required printing invoices on paper. When the lockdown order due to the coronavirus pandemic was issued, the company's office had to close. The employees were working from home, but they couldn’t access the paper documents in the office, and processing fell behind. The company needed a solution to switch to digital to ensure business continuity and operational integrity.

Interlázaro, a family business producing fresh fruit in the Saragozza region of Spain, faced logistical challenges due to the geographical distance between their fields and administrative office. They had to handle up to 60 invoices and delivery notes per day, which were sent back and forth between the office and the orchards. Documents were often forwarded with a time delay or were lost completely, especially when several people were involved. This posed a significant challenge for internal approval processes, as the employees responsible were also working in various fields.

Horizon Underwriting Managers, a leading insurance company in South Africa’s marine and shipping industry, was facing challenges with its document management process. The company had to deal with individual insurance issues in shipping, which meant that the time and effort required to prepare each contract was high. Employees had to repeatedly rework drafts, print them out, sign them, and then send them to the customer. In addition, many customers requested copies of the contract, which meant that the printed documents had to be scanned and sent to the customer by email in addition to the actual contract being stored in a fireproof archive. The double burden of managing a high volume of email on the one hand and meeting involved statutory requirements on the other proved to be untenable for the company in the long run. Plus, the workload for employees was barely keeping pace with the strong growth of the company.

A.B. Martin Roofing, a fast-growing building supply company, was facing challenges in managing its supplier chain. The company deals with multiple vendors from whom they regularly purchase steel, hardware, lumber, machine parts, nails, screws, and other materials. The paper invoices that arrived from these vendors were hard to track or verify that the merchandise billed for had already been delivered. The company had no system in place to know where an invoice was or on whose desk it was. This lack of organization led to a time-consuming process of sorting out the invoices.

EquiPro Investments, a firm that buys account receivables and recovers money owed to credit card companies, was struggling with its old software which was too slow to handle the volume of transactions. The company needed a faster setup to keep up with the fast-paced industry. The complex operations required swift and precise communication between EquiPro and vendors involved in the recovery process. The company was also dealing with a large volume of work that required a lot of manual labor in document distribution.

Beachcomber Tours, a South African subsidiary of Beachcomber Resorts & Hotels, had been using a cloud-based document management system to support its various departments. However, as the company grew, the existing system could not keep up, especially in terms of email archiving and shared document access. The company tried switching to a file sharing platform integrated into the Office suite, but this did not yield any improvement. The company was unable to find a satisfactory solution for email archiving, which was a critical task for them.

EBB Truck Center, a specialist in the commercial vehicle sector, was facing challenges with its accounting processes. The company's decentralized structure, with several branch offices, meant that receipts were often in transit for days and sometimes even lost. This led to delays and inefficiencies in the processing of incoming invoices. The company was also looking to digitize its entire sales process, which was typically accompanied by more than 100 pages of documents and records. These were previously collected in 30 binders, making the process cumbersome and time-consuming.

The Company wanted to be more data-driven. The executive team demanded more analytics and reporting. End users were tired of waiting around for IT to deliver reports. Objectives were to provide executives with a holistic view of company metrics, enable organization with self-service analytics to make data-driven decisions, and scale analytics with minimal IT resources. The technical challenges included hundreds of disparate metrics and reports spread across the organization and the need to replace Oracle OBIEE solution.

The Company is a rapidly growing online publisher serving the wedding market. It offers wedding-related content, planning tools, and online registry services through its various websites. The Company also produces branded video and mobile content and magazines. The Company needed an agile way to support both internal employees and external clients across multiple revenue streams. The objectives were to support self-service analytics for both internal users and clients across all lines of business and understand the performance of advertising and registry transactions across different web properties. The technical challenges included distinctly different data models and calculated metrics across multiple lines of business, strict performance SLAs for data processing & incremental loads, and UX requirements: dashboards, pixel-perfect reports, embedded analytics, and Tableau integration.

The company, a leading sales and marketing services provider in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, wanted to provide value-added data services to its clients. It aimed to offer analytics on product types, brands, regions, campaigns, inventory, and sales. The objectives were to create value-added services for its clients, give manufacturers visibility into sell-thru rates, and give retailers visibility into product sales, fit, propensity to buy, etc. The technical challenges included managing data relationships between various factors for 1000+ brands across 10,000 stores, the need for near real-time intraday data processing, and catering to 1000+ end users who need easy-to-consume information.

The company, which sells diagnostic and medical equipment to veterinary offices and labs, as well as information management and EMR software, faced a challenge in integrated billing and financial reporting due to the diversity of its product lines and sales models. It struggled to measure customer value and product profitability across three different business units. The company aimed to deliver a simplified billing process so that each clinic, lab, or veterinary facility receives one bill, gain roll-up of revenue metrics as well as drill down across disparate sales channels, and understand lifetime value by customer.

The Company was unable to react quickly to changes in production rates, labor and down times. It relied on disjointed data warehouses to manage multi- million dollar well sites. After 35 acquisitions, the company needed to integrate its acquired systems and applications to more efficiently manage its operations. The objectives were to provide analytics on well management such as production rates, downtimes, labor productivity, forecast vs. actual, etc. and to fully integrate data across all acquisitions. The technical challenges included multiple disparate acquired systems and applications from 35 acquisitions and 7 disjointed data warehouses.

The company faced a significant challenge in gaining visibility into purchasing analytics across more than 200 ERP systems. This was due to its growth through mergers and acquisitions, which resulted in data being siloed across these disparate systems. The company aimed to consolidate and optimize $10B in spend on products, components, and raw materials. It also sought to build a Global Analytics Platform to identify savings opportunities and enable more regular and accurate negotiations with suppliers. However, the company faced technical challenges such as the need for a rapid go-live in a highly complex environment against 200-source ERP. The company's global M&A agenda was also expected to drive further data complexity. Furthermore, the company required true self-service with centralized governance across a complex data landscape.

The Company has grown at a tremendous rate over the years. With hundreds of offices worldwide, it needed consistent and maintainable metrics and definitions across the global organization. Additionally, it wanted to provide advertisers with individualized, value-added insights from their respective ad campaigns. The objectives were to have consistent metrics and definitions across a worldwide network of agencies and sub-agencies, provide individualized, value-added insights to advertisers, and scale analytics with current IT resources with end-user self-service data analytics. The technical challenges included the complexity of global and local disparate data sources and the need to replace IBM-Cognos while augmenting Tableau and Excel.

The Company underwent a significant transformation from print to digital, with a new business model focused on subscription revenue replacing advertising revenue. The Company sought a solution to democratize Business Intelligence (BI) across the organization and drive the Company in new directions. The objectives were to transition from an ad revenue-based business to a subscription revenue model, enable a deep understanding of the subscriber base, and provide the organization with self-service analytics to make data-driven decisions. However, the Company faced technical challenges, including a highly customized “spaghetti” of legacy applications in place and the need to replace SSRS and Jaspersoft reporting solutions.

The Company, a top 10 financial data services company, was facing a challenge with its sales forecast due to its large sales organization of over 1,000 reps and an ever-growing selection of products. The executive team had difficulty aligning and agreeing on priorities due to the lack of a clear outlook on the sales forecast. The company had hundreds of reports on sales, product performance, orders, deals, products, etc. for over 1000 sales people. They were looking to replace their existing BOBJ and Cloud9 reporting solutions.