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Pricemoov, a yield management solution provider, faced a significant challenge in handling and cleaning data from old SI systems, Oracle, or MySql. The data was dirty and required a full-time developer to perform long ETL (extract-transform-load) steps in PHP for cleaning. Once cleaned, the datasets were painstakingly entered into a model, as they were custom-built pipelines. The replication and deployment process for the next customer was taking weeks. This slow and inefficient process was hindering Pricemoov's ability to provide optimal pricing suggestions and solutions to its customers in a timely manner.

Veeco Services, a full-service logistics provider, was facing significant challenges with its warehouse lighting system. A lighting audit conducted in January 2019 revealed that the high-intensity discharge (HID) fixtures lighting Veeco’s 615,000 square feet warehouse were inefficient, costly to maintain, and emitted poor levels of lighting. The warehouse, which has 117 dock doors and more than 34,000 pallet locations, had recently upgraded to a new racking system that added more rows and narrow aisles. This change necessitated a revamp and retrofit of the existing HID lighting system to improve safety and efficiency. The challenge was to find a solution that would not only enhance lighting quality but also integrate with IoT technology for real-time adjustments based on environmental and occupancy changes.

British American Tobacco (BAT), a leading tobacco group, was facing a challenge in identifying and employing the best candidates for its management-level vacancies. The company was heavily reliant on third-party recruiters, contracting more than 70 separate agencies each year worldwide. This resulted in a diverse level and quality of candidates, with some regions falling below BAT's expectations. To support its long-term competitiveness, BAT aimed to implement a consistent approach to recruitment across its global operations, enabling it to identify and select the best candidates. The challenge was to encourage the best candidates to apply and to identify top performers in a large pool of applicants, especially in markets where BAT's brand was perceived less favorably.

The frozen food supplier, a leading provider of bakery solutions, was grappling with two major challenges. Firstly, the company was heavily reliant on paper-based processes to record machine downtime and the reasons for it. This method was often inaccurate and difficult to aggregate, leading to a lack of visibility into the plant's metrics. Consequently, line supervisors and plant management lacked the critical information needed to prioritize and address issues impacting throughput. Secondly, the company had to perform cumbersome and time-consuming audits to comply with the stringent requirements of the food and beverage industry. These audits ranged from PPE audits, pre-production checks on equipment, and periodic checks on the metal detector. The combination of these problems resulted in a lack of visibility into the plant's performance and the issues that needed to be mitigated.

Techedge, a company that aids organizations in accelerating their digital transformation, was facing a challenge with its Kubernetes-based services and solutions. The use of public cloud platforms, while initially beneficial, was proving to be costly and barely scalable when operating on a large scale. As their new line of business began to grow, it became necessary to move from the public cloud to a larger platform with more containers. This new platform required special customization, not just for the apps but also for the container-based model in general, in terms of both security and optimization settings, and customer preferences. This level of customization was not possible in the public cloud.

A global manufacturer of aircraft engines, avionics, and other aviation products was grappling with the complexity of managing its supply chain. The company maintains 90 major product lines that require tens of thousands of parts from hundreds of manufacturers spread across the globe. The costs of maintaining inventory were significant, with just two components of its aircraft engines accounting for $600 million in parts inventory, including $400 million in fast-moving inventory. The company was seeking ways to optimize inventory levels to mitigate supplier delays and improve gross margins and revenue.

The mass rapid transit system, with over 20 lines spanning nearly 1,500 kilometers, transports billions of passengers annually across urban and suburban districts. The system relies on specialized industrial networks for railway electrification, signaling, communications, and an extensive building management system (BMS) for station and tunnel ventilation, lighting, and physical security. The rail operator faced challenges in maintaining visibility and control across these networks while adhering to stringent international safety integrity level (SIL) standards. The digitization and connectivity demands of passengers and vendors, who require timely updates and access to OT, IoT, and IIoT assets, posed a significant challenge. The legacy OT systems, designed with isolation in mind, were not equipped to connect and communicate with IT systems and the internet. The rail operator had no visibility into their industrial networks, making response and remediation of system failures difficult. Compliance with SIL standards was mandatory, and any third-party equipment introduced into the network had to work independently from safety-critical systems or integrate without affecting these systems and triggering recertification. The multiple layers of legacy OT systems, designed for a lifespan of 25 to 50 years, added further complexity to modernization efforts.

AgustaWestland, a leading helicopter manufacturer, was faced with the challenge of developing a new safety-critical avionics display for a military helicopter upgrade program. The military helicopter had previously used avionics display control units within the cockpit and cabin of the aircraft. However, the new project aimed to enable the implementation of additional functionality to meet new operational requirements. The challenge was to adopt an innovative approach that would not only meet the current needs but also allow for future upgrades using a standards-based approach. The traditional turnkey black-box approach used by traditional suppliers was not suitable for this project due to its lack of flexibility and adaptability to changing requirements.

Ikon Science, a global provider of knowledge management solutions for subsurface discovery, faced a challenge with its homegrown license generator. The company wanted to offer its customers a wider range of licensing models, including usage or pay-per-use, token-based models, and the option to use cloud-based license servers. However, the existing license provisioning process was outdated and did not deliver the experience that Ikon envisioned for its customers. The homegrown solution was difficult to maintain and required significant engineering resources to improve. Ikon Science wanted its engineers to focus on its core products and decided to retire its homegrown solution and leverage a standard product.

Yieldmo needed to deploy this solution quickly because it wanted to include sessionization capabilities in its soon-to-be-launched data platform.Plans for the capabilities of the new platform included in-depth insights into customer engagements, making campaigns more effective for advertisers, more profitable for publishers, and, ultimately, more relevant for consumers.

Barclays, a global bank operating in over 50 countries and serving nearly 60 million customers, faced a significant challenge in improving and streamlining the customer experience. The bank's relationships with customers were multifaceted, with customers engaging with the bank through various channels such as mobile, online, and branch locations. The bank had identified 400 different customer journeys, and the challenge was to align these across the enterprise and improve them in a way that positively impacted customers quickly. The director of operations at Barclays, Mike Gamble, recognized the need to transform the bank's processes around customer journeys. He aimed to enhance the understanding of how various functions contribute to delivering customer experiences and then expedite the rollout time of these new processes to achieve the end goal for the customer.

In the modern digital era, enterprises and military organizations are facing the challenge of integrating and orchestrating vast amounts of data from various sources such as sensors, computer vision, wearable devices, and other streaming data sources. This data, if properly harnessed, can create situational awareness, improve decision-making, and enable intelligent automation. However, the challenges of interoperability, resiliency, and complexity often hinder the effective utilization of this data. Furthermore, the use of Generative AI and IoT devices often results in data that only ends up on a dashboard, which according to McKinsey, is a sign of failure. The challenge, therefore, is to turn this data into actionable insights that can trigger comprehensive business processes and workflows.

There are endless ways to configure Montana modules. Whatever the room, the customer is able to find the perfect solution and thus fulfill the company’s slogan of ‘creating space for individuality’. The sheer number of available options used to be a challenge for Montana, because in practice the salespeople had to provide considerable guidance. The time from initial interest to final sale was long and involved extensive use of physical catalogs.But according to Jan Axelsen, store manager of Montana Store in Copenhagen, the biggest challenge was that the customer could only imagine what the assembled solution might look like in their own home. Would the color be right? And how would the modular configuration actually work in practice? There are without doubt some customers who were a little surprised when they opened their boxes.

Termotex S.A., an international company specializing in the design and assembly of industrialized insulating construction systems, was facing challenges in coordinating crews, deciphering blueprints, and matching 2D blueprints to the 3D construction at the site. The company had to rely on a project engineer and a quality control inspector on site, but this was often insufficient to avoid mistakes and clashes resulting from incorrect or outdated information. To overcome this, Termotex started creating Building Information Modeling (BIM) designs and switched to tablets instead of paper blueprints on the job site. However, the CEO, Andres Casanova, realized that a good BIM model alone was not enough to increase speed and precision in their construction projects. He sought a combination of technologies and new workflows that would enable automation and data-sharing from start to finish, and wanted to leverage mixed reality to better utilize their BIM models in the context of the actual job site throughout the entire construction process.

The consumer goods arm of a global conglomerate, manufacturing a wide range of products, faced significant challenges in securing its operational technology (OT) environment. The company's manufacturing sites are spread globally, with some being decades old and others relatively new. The company had to manage a multitude of devices and systems, along with remote access for numerous third-party contractors, which added to the complexity of its industrial cybersecurity posture. The company was relying on traditional, IT-centric security tools that were incompatible with its OT environment. This, along with the prevalence of legacy systems, inconsistent documentation of OT assets, and diverse geographies and local practices, made gaining full visibility into its OT environment a daunting task. The company also struggled with unmonitored remote access and misconfigurations, which led to downtime. Furthermore, the company's growth through acquisitions resulted in a patchwork of systems from multiple vendors, complicating its IT and OT security. The company also lacked OT anomaly detection capabilities, which are crucial for quick response to operational disruptions.

A leading cloud-based software company was facing difficulties in achieving the desired efficiencies and scale needed to support consistent growth in terms of accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) functions from its facilities in South America and Central Europe. The company's previous IT service providers' collections data was consistently low, around 60% based on historical records. This led to a cash flow problem and an increase in the aging of outstanding receivables. The company was also seeking standardization across geographies. To address these issues, the company set a goal of achieving 70% collections and reached out to Cognizant, their strategic partner of seven years, for assistance.

AmerisourceBergen, a leading global provider of pharmaceutical products and supply chain services, was facing a challenge with its office expansion at the Fort Mill, South Carolina facility. The expansion included a new parking garage that required the deployment of 23 security cameras and 15 “code blue” emergency phones to enhance the safety of parking garage users. These devices were all Internet protocol (IP) enabled and Power over Ethernet (PoE) capable. The initial plan was to include four intermediate distribution frame (IDF) telecom rooms in the parking garage to support the connectivity requirements for the PoE devices. However, this approach presented a financial and logistical challenge as each IDF would require network equipment, power, HVAC and an uninterruptible power supply, while also consuming valuable space in the parking garage.

Teradici, the creator of the PCoIP® remote display protocol, faced a significant challenge in transitioning from a hardware-based business model to a software subscription model. The company's initial offering was workstation cards that converted high-performance towers, blade servers, or rack workstations into a workstation that delivers high-end images to any remote location over affordable IP networks. However, as CPUs and GPUs became more robust, the company saw an opportunity to port its solution to run on software, offering more flexibility for customers and recurring revenue. The challenge was to implement a flexible licensing system across multiple products, centralize entitlement management for automation and data gathering, and integrate with Salesforce.com and the cleverbridge ecommerce platform. The company also aimed to improve order processing, increase operational efficiencies, and offer an ecommerce channel.

AxFina Holding S.A, an asset and loan servicer focused on Central and Eastern Europe, faced a significant challenge when it acquired Hungarian leasing company Lombard Lízing Zrt. The infrastructure of Lombard had reached the end of its life cycle and needed to be replaced within a few weeks. AxFina, with its ambition to innovate and scale, was also under pressure to meet regulatory requirements. The company had been hosting its IT infrastructure in Hungary with in-house datacenters, but this legacy system was nearing the end of support. AxFina needed an alternative solution that would not only significantly reduce costs but also support its growth across jurisdictions and product innovation. The company was looking at a potential expenditure of about 1.5 million Euros just in Hungary to replace the infrastructure.

Ashurst, a leading international law firm, faced a significant challenge after a major merger that almost doubled its size. The firm's HR function aimed to transform its operations to support the ongoing strategic growth objectives. The merger presented challenges in managing talent, developing skills, and rewarding performance across the global business. Each part of the business had its own systems and processes for managing absences, tracking performance, and rewarding success. This led to increased manual effort and cost, reduced ability to ensure globally consistent definitions of human capital management metrics, and difficulty in generating comprehensive reports. The firm also faced challenges in answering important questions related to employee skillsets, retention, and compensation policies across the organization.

As part of a divestiture agreement with Trinity Industries, Arcosa, a leading provider of infrastructure-related products and solutions, was faced with the challenge of separating its key applications and data while deploying a new infrastructure within a tight deadline. The separation process was critical to avoid strategic distractions, talent departures, and potential changes in shareholder reaction. The divestiture agreement required Arcosa to separate its data, finances, and operational information systems from Trinity with minimal business disruption during the transition. Arcosa entered into a Transition Service Agreement (TSA) with Trinity, stipulating payment to Trinity for ongoing IT services until Arcosa could prove full independence. The task was headed by Arcosa’s CIO, Bob Rosen, who had to stand up all the underlying infrastructure from scratch, a daunting challenge given the aggressive timeframe and ongoing TSA fees.

Low quality of human inspection in EV manufacturing

UBS Arena, a newly built 18,000-seat venue in New York, was designed to host about 150 events annually, with a focus on providing a thrilling yet safe experience for fans. The arena needed a robust cabling and connectivity solution to support its sophisticated sound systems, a 5G network, a distributed antenna system (DAS), New York’s largest scoreboard, and two levels of high-resolution LED ribbon boards. The venue also required a network infrastructure that could support public health and safety measures, such as automated ventilation systems, grab-and-go mobile ordering, and contactless purchases. The wireless network had to support the seamless connection of tens of thousands of devices in the venue’s completely cashless environment. Additionally, smart restroom technology needed to connect to the network to track and report on inventory levels and cleaning needs.

As a multinational technology provider, it is critical for Microsoft’s eCommerce team to keep their global website updated with information and content for all product lines. The content publication process is very complex, involving many levels of approvals and collaboration between resources from several teams to keep hundreds of pages updated across more than 240 regions.For many years, the publishing process was managed via Excel spreadsheets. Content, images, and other publishing information were tracked in different spreadsheets. In some cases, there were 200+ spreadsheets to track updates for a single page on the website. Content approvals were handled manually, often resulting in bottlenecks and delays in the publishing timeline

National Grid, a multinational electricity and gas utility company, had been successful in reducing damages in their downstate New York territory for nearly a decade. However, the damage rate plateaued around 1.6 damages per thousand 811 tickets. The utility was facing challenges in identifying high-risk excavations due to the large volume of tickets, which was around 600,000 per year. Furthermore, the utility was experiencing higher-than-average no call-in damages on Long Island, with 40 to 45 percent of damages resulting from excavators not calling 811 before working. Despite efforts to increase awareness among the excavating community, the utility was still an outlier in the industry. National Grid needed a solution to efficiently identify their highest risk excavations and determine where no call-in damage was most likely to occur on Long Island.

The company wanted to revamp its IT and infrastructure operations strategy. It wanted to bring the functions of the hosting group in charge of computing, storage, and middleware operations under closer in-house management.However, the provider didn’t have the necessary visibility into its operations to determine the scope of these critical processes, which when disrupted would result in huge revenue losses and negatively impact its technology strategy.External management of the provider’s IT infrastructure also left users dependent on manual delivery and provisioning mechanisms, rather than benefitting from automated and self-service processes.

A global business information company was facing challenges with its new customer onboarding process, which is a crucial gateway to its product offerings. The company needed to speed up this process, boost sales through new partnerships, and ensure seamless integration with any partner. The company's match application, which connects each customer's data with a unique identifier, was at the heart of its business process and required modernization and migration to a cloud environment. The company sought the help of Cognizant, with whom it had a long-term relationship, to re-architect and modernize its match application.

A leading US-based provider of advanced network communications and technology solutions was grappling with the challenges of rapid network expansion across multiple locations. This expansion resulted in a complex network with data scattered across various systems and geographies, creating data silos and limiting visibility. The disjointed data hindered the company's ability to gain business intelligence, which in turn affected their decision-making speed and progress. Inefficient resource utilization, ineffective network troubleshooting, and delays in new network rollouts were some of the issues that arose from this situation. The client's situation was further complicated by multiple acquisitions over time, which led to heterogeneous systems that complicated the reporting and analytics of their network data. The scattered data sets from various disjointed systems made it difficult to trace the customizations done on their network systems, jeopardizing the efficiency of their network engineering team, Network Operation Centre, and business users.

F9, an independent business unit of Infor, was facing several challenges with its legacy licensing solution. The solution was not evolving with their needs and was failing to deliver the desired customer experience. The company was looking to modernize its licensing capabilities and add support for new SaaS monetization models. The existing system lacked clear visibility into who was purchasing, activating, and reactivating licenses. Tracking users and the devices F9 was running on was also a challenge. The company was also looking to offer new pricing and functionality within their next major release to strengthen their competitive position. Furthermore, F9 wanted to improve the customer experience by providing a reliable and user-friendly customer portal for self-activation and reducing license-related support issues.

Asahi Beverages, a leading beverage company in Australia and New Zealand, faced a significant challenge when it acquired several Australian beverage businesses. The enlarged group needed to streamline and optimize operations even as further acquisitions joined the family. The company relied heavily on SAP solutions to manage its extended non-alcohol business processes, from manufacturing through to sales and distribution. However, with several new companies joining the group over the past few years, the Asahi Beverages team was keen to reduce system administration effort and maintenance costs. They wanted to use the savings to invest in new business applications and services. The challenge was to cut the number of IT incidents, accelerate the time for resolution of those incidents, and release valuable time for the technical teams to focus on innovation and business development.