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Brazil’s Ministry of Justice, specifically the Department of Assets Recovery and International Legal Cooperation, was tasked with the challenge of identifying and investigating the illicit proceeds of criminal activities such as corruption, organized crime, drug trafficking, and money laundering. The department created the Technology Laboratory Against Money Laundering (LAB-LD) to support complex investigations into corruption and money laundering. As of 2014, there are 43 laboratories across Brazil, which make up the Federal Laboratory Network Against Money Laundering (REDE-LAB). These laboratories analyze a vast amount of data to uncover and freeze illicit assets. However, the process of analyzing the data was complex and time-consuming, often taking months and thousands of person-hours. The challenge was further compounded by the fact that 60 percent of the data came from structured sources such as databases and spreadsheets, and the remaining 40 percent from unstructured sources, such as social media and email.

Bugaboo, a Dutch company known for its trendy pushchairs, was facing challenges in generating accurate financial and sales forecasts in a timely manner. The company's rapid growth had led to changes in planning and forecasting requirements, and the existing system, IBM Cognos Planning, was reaching its limits. Performance-related issues were causing disruptions, and any changes to the planning model required the entire system to be halted. The model was split into four geographic regions to facilitate management outside office hours, but this meant that each change had to be implemented four times. Furthermore, Bugaboo wanted to broaden its planning and forecasting to include more than just financial and sales forecasts. For instance, the Innovation Department wanted to monitor costs at every stage of a project, from development through to production.

The California Franchise Tax Board (FTB), a part of the California Government Operations Agency, was faced with a daunting task. They had a list of over three million delinquent or non-filing taxpayers and were struggling to determine where to start the collection process. The traditional methods of relying on experience and anecdotal evidence were no longer effective, and state revenue was suffering as a result. The board was grappling with a multibillion-dollar gap between the amount they collected and the amount they were owed. The challenge was to find a more efficient and effective way to prioritize nonpayment cases and increase revenue collection.

Canadian National Railway Company (CN), a major economic player transporting over CAD250 billion worth of goods annually, faced a significant challenge in its financial reporting process. The company's accounting team was burdened with increasingly complex accounting standards and internal demands, making financial reporting labor-intensive. The team was responsible for generating a variety of reports, including quarterly and annual regulatory reports, internal monthly statements, and executive analysis. However, many of these processes were spreadsheet-based and had reached their limits. The team was spending more time on low-value activities such as data collection and performing repetitive tasks, which was inefficient and took away from more value-added tasks like analysis.

CarrefourSA, a leading multinational retail group, set an ambitious revenue goal of USD 2.7 billion by 2016 in Turkey. To achieve this, the company aimed to more than double its retail footprint by opening at least one new store every day for an entire year. However, the existing processes and systems meant it took an entire month to set up a new store. The company faced the challenge of expanding its store landscape rapidly to connect with prospects ahead of its competitors. The process of making a new retail store operational involved onboarding new employees, installing and connecting the point-of-sale systems, adding new delivery points to the stock distribution network, and more. The company relied on multiple different business systems to manage these business processes, which were complex and time-consuming due to limited integration between the systems.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is tasked with managing an enormous data archive of 100 petabytes, a volume that nearly doubles as 13 large data centers worldwide receive partial copies of the data. The data is generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, which is used to reconstruct the first moments of the universe to gain a better understanding of physical laws. The LHC generates more than 25 petabytes of data in the four main LHC experiments, even with drastic data filtering protocols in place. CERN does not have the computing capacity required to analyze the data, so it relies on a distributed environment consisting of 160 different computer centers located in 45 countries to distribute data to its scientists. The biggest challenge is the constant influx of data, more than a gigabyte per second, which needs to be stored, preserved in the long term, and made accessible to several thousand physicists worldwide.

Chamberlain Group, Inc., a leading connected products company, recognized a gap in the market where consumers wanted to use their smartphones to control and monitor their garage doors from anywhere in the world. The company developed an innovative solution, the MyQ smartphone app, which quickly gained popularity with a monthly growth rate in user numbers hitting 15 percent. However, the existing system architecture was not robust enough to withstand the pressure of this growth rate for long, and the risk of impact on performance and availability was constantly rising. The company needed to ensure that the app was highly reliable and responsive for consumers, especially when it controls something as important as the security of peoples’ homes. The challenge was to make the existing architecture more robust and scalable, so that it could support future peaks of up to one million concurrent consumer actions.

ABT Power Management, a family-owned company that provides engineered solutions for DC powered applications, was facing a significant challenge. As the company grew and took on new customers, it realized the need to increase its headcount. However, the transfer of technical knowledge to new employees, essential for delivering exceptional customer services, posed a significant hurdle. In the early days, institutional knowledge was stored in the minds of company experts, who had vast experience working in the industry. As the company expanded, it needed a new way to store and share institutional knowledge effectively with new members of its team. The challenge was to find a solution that could bridge the gap between classroom learning and professional learning, enabling new employees to get up to speed on the industry faster and more efficiently.

Marty Rollinger, the Director of Flight Operations at a small, privately held company based in the United States, was faced with the challenge of ensuring the company's Dassault Falcon continued to have access to US airspace in 2020 amidst looming mandates. His role involved overseeing all flight department activities, including scheduling, maintenance, training, security, and customer satisfaction. The challenge was to find a comprehensive solution that would not only meet the mandates but also provide additional safety features for the aircraft.

Detecting and containing infection clusters and controlling community transmission is vital to alleviating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on human health. Isolating affected populations and restricting social interaction, travel, and the intermixing of people have long been used as remedies to the spread of contagious illnesses. Today, local, state, and federal initiatives are using similar approaches with cutting edge technology to gather and share data and decrease the toll of COVID-19. Public health officials need quick and accurate information to identify cases and they control transmission using strong, clear, and effective communications.

Executing the pick and place processes for simultaneous delivery and quality control of raw materials and finished components on the production line.

Meeting Mission-Critical ServicesMany services offered by companies to their clients are critical and must be available 24/7/365 to meet quality standards. Teldat offers the 5Ge and the new M10-Smart as router or 5G gateway solutions that adapt to all client scenarios and meet their technical requirements. In addition, there is the “last mile problem” for service providers. They can find a solution with Teldat’s fixed wireless access (FWA) products.Teldat has a physical presence in several countries, especially in Europe and Latin America. It has collaboration agreements with partners that allow it to participate in projects worldwide.

Keltour Controls, a company specializing in control panel manufacturing, faced several challenges in their operations. The company was struggling with time-tracking limitations that required accounting and payroll to re-enter staff hours after they were submitted. This process was not only time-consuming, resulting in several hours of additional work every week, but also caused a one-week lag in job labour costing and reporting. Additionally, Keltour needed a better system for tracking and real-time monitoring of their manufacturing data. The company also sought to improve their visibility of Work in Progress (WIP) and project invoicing by integrating it with their accounting data.

A leading service provider in North America was grappling with inefficiencies in their field service operations. Approximately 60% of their installation orders necessitated a site survey, and out of these, 18% required repeat surveys. The manual collection of field data was leading to numerous errors and incomplete information. The traditional methods of sharing information, such as emails, printouts, spreadsheets, phone calls, and text messages, were proving to be time-consuming, error-prone, and repetitive. The lack of field information, intelligence, and insights during site surveys resulted in poor performance, repeat site visits, and extended delivery times. The client needed to transition from a traditional to an intelligent and connected field service approach to enable field technicians to deliver significant business value.

Timed deliveries are a core part of Office Essentials’ service offering, and its customers rely on the business to supply products in a timely and efficient manner.Office Essentials made the decision to bring on a telematics provider in order to gain more control over its vehicles, in particular delivery vehicles, to ensure deliveries were running as efficiently as possible and time was not being wasted on unnecessary trips.The company’s sales reps had previously been using call sheets to record daily visits, often missing information, so there was also a requirement for a more effective way to collate and manage these reports.

Agriauto Stamping Company, a Pakistan-based manufacturer of die and sheet metal components, was facing a significant challenge. The company wanted to capitalize on a surge in demand for sheet metal parts and seize a larger market share. To do this, they aimed to offer speedy delivery options to their customers. However, their existing manual systems and processes were not adaptable enough to accommodate rapid changes in production to meet new orders. The company's reliance on manual calculations and spreadsheets for production planning was causing delays, bottlenecks in obtaining raw materials, and wastage of spare capacity. The manual processes also increased the risk of human error, leading to mistakes in data and potentially incorrect parts being manufactured and sent to customers.

Alleyoop Inc. was presented with a significant challenge by a government organization in Japan. The organization required the creation of a website designed to facilitate sports camps and, in anticipation of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, to support visiting sports teams and tourists. The website needed to be multilingual and agile, capable of accommodating a fluctuating number of visitors from locations worldwide. The challenge was not only to create a website that met these requirements but also to find a hosting solution that was cost-effective and capable of handling the expected traffic without compromising on performance.

Alliance Tech, a provider of event technology solutions, was seeking to enhance the scope and timeliness of its event reporting and analytics solutions. The company wanted to exceed the expectations of its customers, who are primarily event organizers. Alliance Tech's solutions integrate analytics and marketing automation tools to provide actionable and insightful leads from data gathered about attendees as they journey through an event. The company was the first to offer RFID badge readers and online schedules to track attendee interests and preferences at conferences. However, Alliance Tech wanted to make the insights gathered from these tools available to its business customers each night so they could take action based on attendees’ behavior that day.

AMC Networks, a leading cable television network, was facing the challenge of understanding customer behavior in a rapidly evolving multi-channel world. Despite its success with critically acclaimed shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, the company recognized the need to appeal to a new generation of millennials who consume content in very different ways. The traditional reliance on ratings data and third-party analytics providers was proving insufficient. The company needed to take ownership of its data to get a richer picture of who their viewers are, what they want, and how to keep their attention in an increasingly crowded entertainment marketplace. The challenge was the sheer volume of information available – hundreds of billions of rows of data from various sources such as Nielsen, comScore, AMC’s TV Everywhere live web streaming and video on demand service, retail partners like iTunes and Amazon, and third-party online video services like Netflix and Hulu.

andagon GmbH, a renowned consulting company specializing in software testing, process and test automation, often encounters clients who have identified quality issues or performance bottlenecks during the implementation phase of their applications. These clients turn to andagon to analyze the difficulties and develop a customized test plan to efficiently address the performance issues. In typical commercial environments, software testing is often delayed until the end of a project, increasing the pressure on the testing team and process. To assess the performance of a complex application quickly and effectively, efficient tools are required to create and execute the relevant test cases. Thousands of companies rely on SAP software to run their core business processes, and need to make sure that application errors do not disrupt business operations. Particularly for manufacturing companies, system downtime can cause significant financial damage. If software quality and performance issues are spotted at a late stage in a development project, the costs and delays incurred by corrective work damages companies’ abilities to reach their goals.

AppAdvice, a Los Angeles-based company providing a comprehensive range of iPhone and iPad application reviews, news, and app discovery services, faced a significant challenge in managing its variably structured data. The company needed to store this data in its application catalog in a way that was not only easy and inexpensive to start with but also capable of handling potentially massive future growth. Given the nature of the data, a relational SQL database was not a viable option for the platform. As an early-stage company, AppAdvice was looking for a NoSQL database that was easy and inexpensive to get started with, but built for growth.

Apria Healthcare, a leading provider of home respiratory services and medical equipment in the United States, was looking to expand its high-quality care services into new markets. However, the company faced challenges in identifying cost centers due to its manual forecasting system. The company's spreadsheet-driven forecasting system made it difficult to understand the true cost of operations, which was crucial for a healthcare organization of their size. The company gathered a lot of data about the market for their specialist products, but the inconsistent and inaccurate data capturing and usage made it difficult to focus on the most promising opportunities. The company needed a solution that would help them understand their true operational costs, increase efficiencies, control costs, and build more competitive pricing models for their services.

Arch Health Partners, a multi-specialty group with over 90 providers at 13 locations in San Diego County, was facing a challenge with its hypertensive patient population. The group's hypertension statistics were below their expectations, and they were struggling to improve the health of these patients. The first step in driving better outcomes was identifying at-risk patients from within a large and growing patient population, which proved to be a more difficult challenge than originally expected. As the organization continued to grow, managing clinical data and improving quality scores became increasingly difficult due to manual processes. The organization realized that to increase the quality and frequency of patient engagement, they would need to automate some of their processes.

athenahealth, a leading provider of support services for doctors and healthcare providers across the United States, was facing a challenge in its internal approach to data analysis. Following a period of rapid growth and multiple acquisitions, the company's existing analytics and reporting solution was falling short of its needs. The company relied on data from multiple sources, including financial and operational data from its own systems and external data. However, the process of gathering data was laborious and technical, leaving little time for actual analysis. The company's analysts were spending too much time manually gathering data, and business leaders had to wait for analysts to generate reports on their behalf. The company needed a more flexible approach that could help it respond faster to changes in rules, regulations, and demands from its customers.

The case study revolves around the challenge of managing high-volume Service Parts Management (SPM) requirements in a competitive environment that demands greater efficiencies. Companies with complex SPM requirements are under pressure to integrate their manufacturing, inventory, and logistics systems more effectively to achieve significant cost savings. The challenge is further compounded by the need for a solution that can adapt to a dynamic, constantly changing environment, provide worldwide accessibility and visibility of information, and support operations ranging from small to very large service parts. The case study also highlights a specific request from a major German automotive manufacturer with a critical load requirement for order fulfillment.

The automotive company, based in China, was struggling with the efficient scheduling and management of a large number of jobs within multiple software environments. The company had numerous jobs with complex dependencies running on multiple platforms. The limited capabilities of the company’s proprietary scheduling software and the largely manual processes in place for setting job schedules, monitoring job statuses and importing job attributes and dependencies within the company’s SAP ERP, database, Java and IBM InfoSphere® DataStage® software environments posed a significant challenge. The company was in dire need of an automated workload-management solution to increase operating efficiency.

Avea, Turkey’s youngest and fastest-growing mobile operator, was facing a significant challenge in managing its rapidly growing subscriber base and the associated data volumes. The company was finding it increasingly difficult to deliver prompt service and meet service-level agreements due to the growing volumes of subscriber data. The existing content management systems were struggling to keep up with the increased volumes of data, causing long delays in accessing information. This delay was affecting the company's ability to respond to customers promptly, risking customer satisfaction, potential loss of business to competitors, and non-compliance with government regulations. The company needed to process all mobile number portability requests within 48 hours and send out invoices at least seven days before the payment due date, which was becoming a challenge with the existing systems.

Aviation Technical Services (ATS), a leading provider of maintenance, repair, and overhaul services for commercial and military aircraft, faced a significant challenge in managing labor costs and maintaining profitability. The company operates in a highly competitive industry where clients demand the best service at the lowest price. The challenge for ATS was to balance the need for highly skilled labor, which comes at a high cost, with the need to keep labor costs as low as possible. The company was also struggling with a complex, manual, spreadsheet-based forecasting process that was holding back its finance team. The challenge was to find a more efficient way to allocate resources, manage aircraft maintenance projects more cost-effectively, and gain deeper insight into labor costs.

Avnet Technology Solutions, a specialist in the Benelux region of Europe, was seeking to offer new customer financing solutions. The company wanted to provide tailor-made financing packages to resellers who were looking to adopt a managed service provider model and other end users who were seeking affordable ways to adopt analytics, mobile, and cloud-based technologies. The challenge was to find a way to accommodate these needs without putting their own working capital at risk. They also saw an opportunity to increase sales and customer satisfaction by expanding their finance solutions portfolio to include customer financing offerings.

Baldor Electric Company, a global manufacturer of industrial electric motors, mechanical power transmission products, drives, and generators, faced a significant challenge when it acquired a major competitor. The acquisition brought with it approximately 200 heterogeneous stand-alone servers, running various operating systems and applications. This increase in server numbers and system complexity threatened to considerably increase IT costs. Baldor, which continually aims to reduce IT costs as a proportion of sales revenue, needed to integrate the two organizations as rapidly and cost-effectively as possible. The company also wanted to continue driving down operational costs in its virtualized SAP Business Suite software environment.