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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the face of global challenges, brands were required to adapt their communication and outreach strategies. Mastercard, a global technology company in the payments industry, was no exception. The company needed to educate consumers about their partnership with ‘Stand Up to Cancer’ and their campaign to donate up to four million dollars to help fund cancer research. The challenge was to effectively reach and engage consumers, and to do so in a way that would resonate with them and encourage them to take action.

The Master Lock Company (TMLC), the largest global manufacturer and marketer of padlocks and personal safes, was facing challenges due to its fast-paced global growth. The company was expanding its operations in new markets across Asia, Central America, and Europe, which meant onboarding significant numbers of additional trading partners, each with their own specific local requirements. TMLC’s retail business depended on electronic data interchange (EDI) to effectively communicate with its global base of trading partners. However, with an average of 40 new trading partners to onboard every year, the company’s lean EDI team was approaching its limits. The company was aware that they would soon need to add at least three full-time equivalents (FTEs) to the EDI team just to keep up with the increasing complexity. The challenge was to find a way to manage the rising requirements without driving up costs.

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.

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.

Pantheon, an independent software vendor (ISV) based in the Netherlands, was experiencing rapid growth and an increasing demand for its information and communication technology (ICT) services. The company provides custom ICT solutions, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resource management (HRM), and customer relationship management (CRM) software for wholesale and manufacturing companies. As more organizations, particularly small and medium enterprises, were moving to a cloud or hybrid cloud infrastructure, Pantheon saw a significant rise in demand for its cloud and hosting services. This required investments in a robust cloud foundation, including the purchase of new, scalable servers and accompanying software.

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.

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

Hong Kong Shue Yan University (HKSYU), a liberal arts school, was faced with the challenge of teaching non-technical students how to use advanced technology to enhance their studies. In September 2020, the university launched three laboratories for the study of big data, virtual reality, and robotics with the aim of reinventing liberal arts education and staying relevant in the digital age. The Big Data Laboratory was designed to facilitate studies and support research projects requiring data analytics, machine learning, and data visualization. However, the challenge was to equip the lab with technology that both students and faculty could easily learn and use. The students and faculty members were interested in using technology to support their studies and research but found it complicated to start with.

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.

Advent Health Partners, part of the Powered Health group, was facing a significant challenge due to rapid changes in healthcare regulations in the United States. The re-introduction of the Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) program and the move to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) had left many hospitals struggling to keep pace. This resulted in inefficiencies in the healthcare revenue cycle, with billions of dollars tied up in insurance claims denials. The situation was further complicated by the fact that hospital data, both structured and non-structured, was generally stored in siloes, with a lack of communication between different departments. Some processes were still heavily reliant on paper records. With claims-related data scattered across different locations and stored in multiple formats, it was very difficult for analysts to bring together all the information required to review a denied claim and decide whether there was a case for appealing the decision.

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.