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Aditya Birla Minacs, a business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions provider, faced increased competition in the outsourcing market. The company needed to deliver on its promise of ‘timely reporting of results at virtually every stage of the customer relationship lifecycle’ for their clients. This required empowering their frontline team with tools that would enable them to make quicker, faster, and informed decisions. The company had deployed multiple systems across regions for its key operations, each with its own reporting mechanism. Consequently, cross-functional analysis was non-existent. The executive team found the process cumbersome, and weren’t sure of the reliability and accuracy of these reports.

ADO Gardinenwerke, a leading manufacturer of drape material and decorative fabric in Germany, was facing challenges with its existing business intelligence tool integrated in the ERP system. The tool was unable to handle the high volume of data that needed to be analyzed for ADO’s sophisticated reporting system. Questions such as sales trends for specific customers, big sellers in various countries or regions, seasonal deviations in sales, and overall sales trend for individual models could not be answered efficiently. The tool required a massive amount of in-house and outside development to create reports and answer new questions. Additionally, data consistency was not always guaranteed and there was insufficient capacity to process mass data, leading to extremely long response times. The system was also inflexible and slow, failing to provide the necessary benchmarks and reports at the level of quality required for optimum data analysis.

Advantage Pharmacy Group, a successful business in the crowded and competitive market, has always believed in the importance of centralized infrastructure and services. The group manages systems like loyalty and marketing services, group ordering and warehousing, and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage financial services. However, they were missing a business discovery solution to ease the task of accessing, reporting, and analyzing data across all systems. They considered Microsoft SQL Reporting Services but found it limited and costly. They needed a solution that would unify the data for analysis, provide services to their franchisees, and bring together many disparate data sources in a single meaningful report.

Ahlers AG, a leading manufacturer of men’s clothing in Europe, faced challenges in managing and controlling production, storage, and sales due to increasing vertical integration and global competitive pressures. The company needed to provide business data quickly and precisely for decision-making. They required real-time answers to various questions related to sales trends, sales planning variations, stock quantity at the point of sale, and strategic planning of the next collection. The company initially started with a traditional OLAP tool, but it presented many shortcomings in managing high volumes of data, flexible analysis with evaluated dimensions, and speed and performance.

TNT's Corporate Audit Services Department was facing a challenge with their monthly reporting process. The department, which is responsible for internal audits worldwide, had three senior managers compiling reports for the head of the department each month. This process was time-consuming and lacked a consistent structure and uniformity, as each manager had their own method of compiling the reports. This complicated the data-merging process and the compilation of one departmental report. Additionally, all the data was manually inputted, which took a lot of time. The department was looking for a solution that would simplify the consolidation of the decentralized data, accelerate the auditing of data reliability, and present their custom-defined KPIs in a flexible and transparent manner.

Aon Asia’s management needed a clearer picture of the company’s revenue streams, starting with the ability to segment revenue by industry and product. The existing situation made it difficult to gain a true view of the company’s income across different offices in the region or to allocate the correct fees and commissions among their regional directors and country segment heads. Before using QlikView, it was all manual reporting – from regional director to country segment head to country finance. Each step in the chain required someone to manually compile the data and check for errors – a time consuming process involving a lot of following up with different parts of the business. It also lead to the possibility of different versions of data coming from more than one source. The search began for a packaged solution that could automate the process and analyze the financial streams.

Aon Groep Nederland bv, a provider of risk management, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, was facing challenges in fulfilling its Aon Client Promise, which is fully focused on creating added value and impact. The company was spending various man-hours on manually handling information requests using Microsoft Excel and predefined wordbooks in Oracle. The reports generated were sometimes lacking in uniformity. The company needed a flexible, interactive and associative BI solution that could be quickly implemented. The solution was also required to cater for the requirements of the current business landscape.

Arbinet-thexchange, Inc., a leading provider of voice and IP solutions for buying and selling telecommunications capacity, was facing a challenge of limited insight into their daily financial and operational performance. They were primarily relying on spreadsheets to calculate revenue month-to-date for decision making and for revenue forecasting. The company could not pinpoint how minutes were used, pricing of various voice services at current transaction levels, where revenue was made and lost, how traders were performing, or market trends. The requirements to gather data, download to spreadsheets and execute macros were manually intensive. While providing more insight into Arbinet’s true performance, the time required for information analysis still delayed response times to business trends.

Bainbridge International, a manufacturer and distributor of specialty products to marine, construction and recreational markets, was looking for ways to gain a competitive advantage over other companies in its industry. The company had previously utilized IT specialists Blue Rock Systems to stabilize and support its 50-user Microsoft DynamicsNAV (Navision) ERP installation. The success of that engagement led Bainbridge to approach Blue Rock Systems again about other ways to enhance its operations. Specifically, Bainbridge required a sales tool that would help the company track and increase customer spend and profit. They needed a 'finger on the pulse' solution that could provide valuable insights into customer behavior and product appeal.

BBS Food B.V., a producer of frozen and chilled convenience chicken and pork meat products, was facing challenges in tracking and tracing its entire business process. The market demanded transparent information on their entire production process, from purchasing to marinating and from cooking to packaging. Customers required insights into the origin of the raw materials used, the core temperature to which each piece of meat has been cooked, and the amount of time the production process has taken. This information was crucial for food safety and was also used for labelling products. BBS was legally required to provide information on the origin, acceptance tests, and shelf life at any given moment. The company was using Microsoft Excel and Word for data collection and reporting, which was a time-consuming and inefficient process.

The Brussels Capital Region, one of three regions in Belgium, was tasked with developing a joint budget for the eight cabinets of the Brussels Regional government and the thirteen semi-public institutes in the area. Previously, all institutes developed their own budgets. This consolidation created the need to find a solution that could simultaneously process a series of extra information flows coming from very diverse data sources. This was particularly challenging as the Cabinet was suffering a shortage of staff at the time. The Cabinet needed a solution that could fit all of the (financial) data from the various data sources, including Excel, Oracle and Access, quickly and easily into one screen.

Blyth HomeScents International (BHI) was facing challenges with its manual approach to reporting and analysis, which was inefficient and hampering the company's growth. The lack of visibility in sales performance was causing significant frustration. Multiple reports were coming from various sources, making it difficult for executives to focus on the numbers themselves. Additionally, by the time actual sales were reported for the previous month, it was too late to make necessary adjustments with suppliers or shift promotional programs. Marketing couldn't gauge the sell-through of product lines, and the company accumulated significant excess-and-obsolete (E/O) inventory. These issues were directly impacting BHI’s bottom line.

CIBER, a global IT services and system integration provider, was looking for a new software application to add to its exclusive stable of preferred software applications. The company was already a Microsoft Gold Partner and the leading Microsoft UK CRM vendor in 2008/09. However, it was looking for a tool that could be deployed at client sites in a matter of days, rather than months or years, and that would allow users to execute complex queries on huge data sets in seconds, without having to involve IT. The company was also looking for a tool that could be integrated with its existing software applications, including Sage, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics AX.

COPARTS Autoteile GmbH, a distributor of automotive parts and business services catering to repair shops in Germany and Europe, was faced with the challenge of managing its complex network between members, partners, and industry. The company needed a detailed overview of all sales, value-added services, and expenditures to provide members greater transparency of COPARTS services and leverage in negotiations with suppliers and service partners. The aim was to combine sales figures in different formats from industry, partners, and members, and compare them with the information on the different value-added services, their ranking, and expenditures of COPARTS in time-line comparisons. Previously, these figures were processed in Excel, which was time-consuming.

Crédit Agricole CIB's fixed income markets monitoring & control (FIM M&C) business unit faced the challenge of optimizing the use of reports produced by market and credit risk teams. The team needed to deploy tools to help consolidate data from various Crédit Agricole CIB risk teams. Prior to QlikView, the FIM M&C team received Microsoft Excel spreadsheets containing information on different fixed income market product lines by email. Consolidating and analyzing such data volumes was a challenge, but there was the added challenge of all the different file formats. Each product line had its own front-office and back-office system. Terms used, file formats, and information sending frequency were all different. This made it difficult for the FIM M&C because it needed to obtain a transversal and consolidated view of the data. The objective was also to compare historical data, which was difficult with the previous system.

Diakonhjemmet Sykehus, a private, non-profit hospital in Oslo, Norway, was struggling to meet regulatory reporting requirements on quality statistics. Their existing systems could only export data files that had to be manipulated within Microsoft Excel to generate basic analysis. This process was time-consuming and did not provide much visibility into the underlying data. The hospital was also facing issues with employee absenteeism and patient admittance scheduling failures. They needed a solution that could handle the complex needs of a hospital without being too costly or resource-intensive.

Dienst Stadstoezicht, an independent public service in Amsterdam, was facing fierce competition from private companies in the fields of supervision and safety. To maximize its efficiency, it decided to automate as much as possible. It scans the number plates of parked cars and checks them against a database to determine whether the owners have a parking permit. This procedure also generates information about payment patterns in the various neighborhoods. However, the organization had six databases that were not linked, leading to considerable obscurity. They needed a solution to link these databases and transform the data into meaningful information.

In 2006, East Branch Engineering was growing rapidly. The shop had more customers, more jobs, and more administrative tasks than they had ever had before. For years East Branch had used a software platform to manage scheduling, estimating, and other important functions. However, with the increasing volume of business, the shop found that the software’s limitations were too much to handle. Data wouldn’t transfer between modules so there was a lot of data entry and time-wasting administrative work. They decided pretty quickly that they needed a new solution.

Eagle Grinding and Plating, a long-time user of the E2 shop system, faced a situation where a customer needed repairs done quickly. However, the person who handled the order had passed away and their records were incomplete. The customer was hoping that Eagle Grinding had the necessary information on the job. This was not an isolated incident, and similar situations had occurred on several occasions.

HJ Machine and Pattern, a machine shop that provides solutions for complex problems, was in need of an update. The company's phone system and computer design had not been updated for a few years. When Gurjinder Jammu took over as President and CEO, he decided to modernize the company's operations, including its ERP software. The company considered several ERP software options before settling on E2 in 2017. The decision was based on the simplicity of E2 and its efficient information flow. However, in mid-2020, the company decided to upgrade to E2 SHOP on the cloud.

GUESS was relying on Adobe Scene7 to manage images for its online store. However, Scene7, a Flash-reliant product, made workflows and modern technology updates more challenging. With modern browsers phasing out Flash, GUESS developers struggled to deliver the high-quality web experience it wanted to offer customers. The system being used by GUESS was so volatile that it created regular bottlenecks. Image uploads would fail, photo editors would have to crop photos with extra white space to ensure they’d appear appropriately on the site. Sometimes images wouldn’t look as crisp and high-fidelity as the original once they rendered on the web. These challenges weren’t just a big deal for the development team. They frustrated potential customers as well. Heavier images meant slower page load times, and unnecessary bandwidth usage by visitors.

Creative and marketing teams often face challenges in managing digital assets across multiple channels. The process of tagging, cataloging, resizing, and downloading and reuploading rich media assets for optimal distribution can be time-consuming and inefficient. Furthermore, these teams often have to search, download, and license stock assets on a separate website, then save the chosen assets to their computers or to a cloud storage solution like Google Drive, DropBox, and Box. In order for these assets to be available in their DAM system for other team members, each asset along with its metadata needs to be individually uploaded.

James Hardie’s Australia services many customers through its network including the likes of hardware stores, builders, property developers and architects, as well as connecting directly with consumers. Consequently, it has a large and complex network of sales and marketing teams dedicated to serving the varied needs of these disparate audiences. The one thing that unites all James Hardie Australia partners and customers is the need for high quality, constantly updated imagery and other marketing content showcasing the company’s products and usage in building projects. From a consumer and brand perspective, it’s crucial that the company’s online channels are kept up to date with all the latest interior and exterior design trends. For trade audiences in particular, an engaging and innovative product portfolio is a must. Often, the company would have multiple photo shoots taking place at various locations, with no central repository for all the images nor any shared filing system or naming convention. The marketing team would regularly be tasked with finding images featuring a certain product and spend hours manually searching through disparate folders to find them.

As a digital-first lifestyle brand, MADE.COM’s customer journey begins and ends online. While shoppers can visit one of MADE’s seven showrooms in the UK and Mainland Europe to experience its furniture and homewares in person, they still need to make the final purchase through the brand’s website. Showcasing products stylishly through strong lifestyle photography is one of MADE’s strengths. However, as the company grew, some of the original decisions about things like how to orient and size images became out of date. Product listing pages couldn’t show highresolution images, due to pixelation. It became difficult to upload assets in multiple sizes. The MADE team decided to address these issues in March 2020, as well as ensure the mobile version of the website—fast rising in importance as an acquisition channel—was fully optimized: critical, as mobile is now more than half of all MADE traffic.

Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, a leading provider of state-of-the-art services and technologies for the global digital media and entertainment industry, faced several challenges. The company was experiencing an increasing demand to access and share high-resolution post-production workflow content on a global scale. The massive storage requirements and rapid growth created a surge of Big Data. The company's legacy tape-based archives proved insufficient in meeting fast turnaround and high-performance throughput expectations. Deluxe Creative Services sought an improved architectural underpinning that would enable selectively replicating data globally for easy and fast access by remote users. The company's traditional model of local SAN storage wouldn't scale out to a global footprint. Using NAS storage to move content from New York to London also would be too slow, leading to performance bottlenecks.

Anyang City Hall in South Korea launched a major initiative to tackle urban street crime, slash traffic congestion, and beef up the city’s disaster response capabilities. The first step was to combine the city’s crime prevention and disaster management systems into a single infrastructure, deployed and managed in the city’s brand new Integrated Operations Briefing room. The challenge was to deploy a massive intelligent video surveillance system across Anyang’s entire 23-square-mile metropolitan area, with hundreds of high-definition digital video cameras linked to scores of servers running network video recording software and sophisticated pattern recognition analytics. The system links all cameras to the video management infrastructure in the Integrated Operations Briefing room at Anyang Police Department headquarters, complementing and enhancing the city’s police presence and rapid response capabilities. Anyang City Hall uses the same surveillance infrastructure for traffic management and forest fire prevention.

Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE) wanted to create a central media repository to store and archive all of its digital broadcasting workflow, from production and ingest through editing, post-production and play-out. The storage system needed to support a wide variety of devices and software packages, including ingest devices, editing stations running Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid, as well as play-out servers from Harris. The solution also needed to integrate with a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution which would be implemented during the second phase of the project. The solution not only needed to enable full connectivity and content sharing between heterogeneous systems, but allow them to work simultaneously, at full speed, without dropping frames or causing delays.

Nice Shoes, a full-service, artist-driven design, animation, visual effects and color grading studio, was facing challenges due to the explosive growth of resolutions, file sizes and performance requirements. The company was dealing with tight deadlines, complex workflows and multiple stakeholders. Their previous storage system was inefficient, leading to wasted creative time, unpredictable performance, and high cost and complexity of managing multiple systems. The company was also dealing with the increasing demand to deliver content in multiple formats to multiple devices, which traditional storage systems were unable to handle effectively.

Fox Network’s Engineering & Operations team was tasked with designing a file-based workflow solution for SPEED, specifically addressing the requirements to move from SD to HD content throughout the process, ingesting content directly into the Storage Area Network (SAN), creating low-res copies for easy editing, production and advanced editing, supporting Dalet transfers to and from video servers – while enabling 75 concurrent Dalet users to go about their everyday tasks, from logging content to rundown preparation. The team quickly began to leverage their experience from other, similar, projects and turned to high performance DDN® storage and Dalet for the key workflow components. The biggest challenge was timing – only a few weeks after signing the PO the entire system had to be on air in a brand new, purpose-built, 55,000 square foot facility.

WRN Broadcast, an international broadcast managed services company, was experiencing a 30% year-on-year growth. However, their underpowered storage was running slower than many of the systems accessing it, which was hurting productivity. They needed to replace their existing storage solution with a more flexible, scalable, and secure infrastructure. The company had grown 30% year-on-year, over the last two years alone, and it more than doubled the number of television channels that it serves. In order to facilitate such rapid growth, and also plan for future expansion, WRN Broadcast needed to replace its existing storage solution with something more flexible, scalable, and absolutely secure, with an important additional criterion of being a leader in its field to match WRN Broadcast’s own standards of excellence.