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Making wind a reliable source of energy depends greatly on the placement of the wind turbines used to produce electricity. Turbulence is a significant factor as it strains turbine components, making them more likely to fail. Vestas wanted to pinpoint the optimal location for wind turbines to maximize power generation and reduce energy costs.

A growing range of models and ever-shorter development cycles increase the demands on the manufacturing process. As a result, tracking vehicles inside and outside manufacturing facilities is essential for delay-free quality assurance and to provide transparency throughout all manufacturing steps in the automotive industry.

To achieve its goal of doubling production capacity while keeping tight control of costs, major shoe manufacturer PT Chang Shin Indonesia set out to unlock greater efficiencies in its operations.

Customer experience is a key competitive differentiator for airlines, and increasingly depends on digital channels. How could American Airlines meet its customers’ appetite for instant information and services?

Qualcomm’s IT staff found performance and manageability of existing large data warehouses were becoming difficult as data volumes and business demands increased. IT staff was challenged in responding quickly enough to new business projects.

On a daily basis, millions of data records are generated on visitor exhibit and special event preferences and participation in conservation initiatives. Significant visitor feedback is also generated on social channels, such as Facebook, which reveal visitor likes and dislikes and other feedback on overall zoo operations. The zoo needed a lens to focus on the actionable insights that emerge from this massive amount of information.

To capitalize on sales opportunities through deeper insights into customer demand, CCBCC needed to crunch more data without increasing time-to-insight, while meeting existing service-level agreements.With so much additional sales forecasting data to process, CCBCC's nightly batch processes began to overrun—threatening to reduce the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its supply chain processes, and to cause the IT team to miss its SLA (service-level agreement) targets.

Blue Shield of California wants to better support members and boost competitiveness by accelerating the provisioning of new systems while improving IT agility to get new offerings to market fast.

Among the many challenges that Day Kimball Hospital faced included difficulties in performing maintenance on their applications, system hardware and completing backups within an acceptable backup window. It was a challenge to find the downtime necessary to upgrade their firmware.

Increasingly sophisticated malware attacks can leave healthcare providers in a vulnerable position as they confront the critical need to improve security while also keeping IT costs under control. Concord Hospital has worked hard to cultivate a reputation for clinical and patient service excellence.As an example of its progressive approach to automating health service delivery, Hospitals & Health Networks magazine has named Concord one of the United States’ “Most Wired Hospitals” for several consecutive years. In order to maintain this level of operational excellence, Concord Hospital needed a solution to save time and resources while also improving results for software licensing, patch management, asset inventory and security configuration.

Sharing secure and transparent critical network data across shareholder networks is difficult using traditional system. Furthermore, private SMEs lack access to public stock exchange networks or formalized credit structures.

The various local and state associations are independent corporations working together to deliver programs under a Code of Ethics that is over a hundred years old. There is an existing centralized database containing members’ billing information.Engagement information such as volunteerism, professional development and committee service is not shared. While sharing member engagement information is essential, it is difficult to get 1200 organizations to agree to contribute and relinquish control of their data to a single database.

Maintenance of the production line is timely and costly. Knowing when to maintain an asset for peak performance is critical.

Seeking to add value beyond pump efficiency, Armstrong wanted to help customers address the issue of predictive maintenance through continuous learning to improve efficiency and by sharing best practices across industries and buildings.

The Weather Company, an IBM Business, offers the most accurate forecasts globally – more than 25 billion per day – with personalized and actionable weather data and insights. The Weather Company is challenged to accelerate the computations in weather models in order to provide more precise and accurate forecasts.Weather forecasting in the United States and other developed nations is more accurate than in other more remote parts of the world.  The Weather Company  saw an opportunity to advance accurate weather predictions globally by leveraging the IBM GRAF.

Manufacturers are facing risky challenges associated with complex visual inspection activities. Many human inspectors, operators and engineers are needed at each manufacturer. They have a full workload of repetitive tasks aimed at identifying hundreds of defects. This results in major plant labour costs, issues with inspection accuracy and consistency, a need for employee training and potential health problems for inspections in hazardous areas.

Mining companies have a lot of data at their disposal. Sensors are seemingly everywhere in their underground operations. But thus far it has been very hard for mining companies to capitalize on all their data because of the difficulty in making sense of it all.So what’s the most important data for mining companies? The short answer: assets. Mining is one of the most asset-intensive businesses there is. At every point in the extraction chain— drilling, cutting, crushing, screening and removing ore-bearing rock—heavy equipment is critical. And it takes a beating. When equipment breaks down, requiring unscheduled maintenance, production takes a hit, costs rise and a critical measure of capital efficiency in mining—overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)—goes down.

As our country and world grappled with some of the most challenging issues of our time, brands needed to pivot how they were reaching and communicating with their consumers.With this in mind, Mastercard turned to IBM Watson Advertising to educate consumers about their partnership with ‘Stand Up to Cancer’ and their campaign to donate up to $4,000,000 to help fund cancer research.

Global growth, EDI challengesFor The Master Lock Company, fast-paced global growth means onboarding and transacting with more partners each year. How could the company empower its lean EDI team to manage the rising requirements?International expansion can be a powerful tool to drive revenues and increase market share — but it also brings challenges. Operating in new geographies often means onboarding significant numbers of additional trading partners, each with its own specific local requirements.This was the situation facing The Master Lock Company (TMLC), the largest global manufacturer and marketer of padlocks and personal safes. Harnessing both organic growth and strategic acquisitions, the company has launched international operations in new markets across Asia, Central America, and Europe.

Daimler AG was looking for a way to maximize the number of flawlessly produced cylinder-heads at its Stuttgart factory by making targeted process adjustments. The company also wanted to increase productivity and shorten the ramp-up phase of its complex manufacturing process.

Ryerson aimed to distinguish itself from competitors by improving customer service functionality, but supporting IT infrastructure needed an upgrade to deliver on its goals

More organizations are moving to a cloud or hybrid cloud infrastructure. This is also true for small and medium enterprises. Pantheon experiences that themselves, too. After all, the company has many of these small and medium enterprises as their customers. “After years of preparation, we see that the demand for cloud and hosting services has been really on the rise since 2015. Since then, we have delivered about 20 percent more cloud solutions every year”, says Siekerman. “That requires investments in the cloud foundation. For us, it means the purchase of new, scalable servers and accompanying software. ”

In the aspect of streamlined production and product quality inspection, it is sometimes necessary for human staff to observe, identify, and discover errors and omissions in the production process. No matter how strong a person's sense of responsibility is or how concentrated he/she is, he/she may be fatigued, neglected, distracted, not to mention, he may turn a blind eye to the mistakes of acquaintances, causing defective products to flow to the market. At the same time, if the all-manual inspection method is adopted on the assembly line, it is not only heavy work but also quite time-consuming. In a modern production line, such an inspection method cannot be accepted, and more importantly, it does not add any value to the production itself.

KONE already provided traditional maintenance services for its more than 400,000 building owner and facilities management customers, but it sought cloud-based analytics technology to capture and use the vast amount of data generated by its elevator and escalator equipment worldwide to transform its service offerings. “We knew that digitalization was changing the industry, and we wanted to become a forerunner, not a follower in this development,” says Markus Huuskonen, the Director of Maintenance Processes and Connected Services at KONE.

The challenge was to harvest and sift through this data, recognize the patterns that indicate a high likelihood of asset failure, identify the most urgent issues, and get the right information to its engineers with enough lead time for them to take effective action.“Before, we only used between 10 and 12 percent of the operational data we collected, which is the industry average,” comments Benn. “By the time we had searched for, collated and forwarded the right information to the right people, we might respond too late to avoid impact to operations, or have to make last-minute changes to our maintenance schedule, which reduces efficiency. Our challenge was to provide right-time, actionable, effective information proactively, rather than in a reactive or look-back assessment.”“What we wanted was a way to identify patterns in that sensor data that would give us an early warning of asset failure. We saw an opportunity to use analytics technology to extract greater value from the systems and data we already possessed, which would help us to, for example, avoid preventable failures and potentially save millions of dollars.

Simplifying maintenanceHana Financial Group had recently consolidated the infrastructure and resources of 11 of its affiliates at a local IBM data centre. However, the business was left with more than 100 service and maintenance contracts that needed to be reviewed and renewed periodically. These contracts also involved 100 separate bills that Hana Financial Group had to manage. Managing such a large volume of bills was cumbersome and sometimes resulted in late payments. The group wanted to improve efficiency and eliminate the overhead involved with managing these contracts by consolidating its heterogeneous IT systems and data storage systems under more consistent processes.

To succeed in the fiercely competitive LCD manufacturing industry, CSOT must deliver high-quality products within a tight time frame, but time-consuming product inspections have hampered its agility. Quality inspectors had to inspect each LCD screen individually to check for flaws. This takes quite a bit of time.