X

Severstal, one of the world’s leading vertically integrated steel and steel-related mining companies, has built one of the largest SAP ERP environments in Russia over the past seven years. The SAP landscape is constantly evolving to meet new business requirements, such as introducing SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer for supply chain management, and SAP Mobile Platform for anytime, anywhere access to SAP applications. However, introducing these new functionalities, increasing the user-base and gaining deeper insight into operations all come at a price. The volume of data in the SAP environment was increasing rapidly, and performance was beginning to suffer. Severstal was faced with the challenge of designing a storage landscape that would scale to meet its future needs, while avoiding the expense of replacing all its existing storage systems.

Somnopro Group, one of the largest mattress makers in China, realized that it needed tighter control over logistics to meet customer demand for faster delivery. The company serves a customer base that stretches across the length and breadth of China. To guarantee more timely processing of customer orders, Somnopro Group wanted to expand the reach of its production network by opening new factories, ensure that it was manufacturing the right amount of each product at the right location, and orchestrate the logistics process to ship orders in time. Achieving this required clear insight into all aspects of operations and tight integration between different business functions. Yet without an easy way of monitoring and managing group-wide activity, Somnopro Group struggled to provide decision-makers with the information they needed to shape an effective manufacturing and distribution strategy.

SunTrust, a leading retail bank based in Atlanta, GA, recognized that the changing regulatory environment presented both a challenge and an opportunity. The bank had to move quickly to meet a range of data-driven reporting requirements, including liquidity capital, risk-adjusted return on capital (RAROC), comprehensive capital analysis and review (CCAR), Basel III and more. One of the challenges identified was the separation of finance and risk communities in the organization. Because each community had traditionally used its own systems and processes for reporting, there were often different definitions for similar metrics, even if the underlying data for the calculations was derived from identical source systems. The result was a different version of the truth in each business area—leading to a reporting process that was complex, time-consuming and error-prone.

Sutlej Textiles, a major producer of textiles in India, was facing increasing competitive pressures and needed an integrated ERP environment to improve efficiency, flexibility, and speed of response. The company lacked a single, clear view of processes and performance across its diverse and complex operations, which was hindering its plans to win market share from competitors. To keep pace with rapid changes in the global textiles industry, and to meet the challenge of its revenue growth targets, Sutlej Textiles needed to improve efficiency across its end-to-end business processes. The textiles sector is highly competitive, and there is constant pressure to cut costs while improving quality and time-to-market for an increasingly diverse range of products. Sutlej Textiles recognized that implementing an integrated ERP solution could both help it achieve these goals and enable improved business control and transparency.

TF1 Publicité, the advertising sales division of TF1, France’s largest free-to-air broadcaster, was facing challenges with its invoicing processes. The company had to handle client billing in multiple systems, which led to delays, inflexibility, and inefficiency. This prevented the agency from meeting client expectations for automated electronic invoicing. Without a single, standardized process for invoicing clients, TF1 Publicité could not optimize billing processes or meet client expectations around automation and the introduction of electronic billing. To maintain its position in the French market, the company needed to rationalize and simplify the invoice-to-cash cycle, automate its processes, and enable greater flexibility and granularity in invoicing.

Technopolis, a leading consumer technology and domestic electricals retail chain in Bulgaria, was facing challenges with its online sales. Despite the growing popularity of online sales, customers were frustrated by poor web performance as the back-end systems struggled under high demand. Marketing teams were unable to connect online and instore promotions, resulting in missed sales opportunities. The company wanted to introduce true omni-channel retailing, enabling customers to browse and buy from both online and offline stores interchangeably, with integrated marketing and promotions. However, its current software and systems landscape could not deliver the required omni-channel capabilities.

Teikoku Databank, Ltd. owns data on millions of companies. To stay competitive, it wanted to analyze this proprietary information in combination with “big data” gathered from the Internet. However, information published on the Internet has been starting to have a significant effect on company business, so responding to this situation has become an urgent task. They have detailed knowledge of corporate information that has been investigated and combined in order to answer questions such as ‘That company is what kind of company?’ and ‘How much can they be trusted?’ They haven’t kept information similar to what is found on the Internet, about the kinds of products owned or how products are evaluated in the market. However, customers have been asking them to present corporate information that includes such Internet information.

The Chefs’ Warehouse, a specialty food distributor, was facing challenges in integrating new foodservice businesses rapidly and meeting the company’s high service, payment, and on-time delivery standards. The company had several ERP and best-of-breed solutions in place, but they were not sufficient to support the company's growth strategy. The company needed a solution that would provide visibility to inventory management, financial integration, process automation, and improvements for operating business units.

The Co-operative Food, a large retail chain in the UK, needed to develop a more unified approach to patch management to improve compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and enhance security across its retail network. The company manages an extensive network of endpoint devices, including tills, servers, and back-office workstations, which are essential to the smooth running of daily business. As a company in the retail sector, it is vital for The Co-operative Food to maintain compliance with PCI DSS, which requires all retailers accepting payment cards to comply with a number of standards, one of which is ensuring that all endpoint devices have the latest security patches installed. All critical security patches must be installed within one month of release.

Five healthcare facilities were all looking to establish themselves as fully functioning Patient-Centered Medical Homes (PCMH). The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) PCMH recognition program is the most widely adopted model for transforming primary care practices in ways that mutually benefit patients and providers while improving outcomes. Organizations that achieve PCMH recognition establish the foundation to succeed as accountable care organizations and clinically integrated networks, earn reimbursements such as Medicare’s new Chronic Care Management (CCM) fee, and qualify for financial incentives from commercial and government payers. Increasingly, clients of Watson Health™ are large healthcare systems or provider organizations that have entered value-based contracts with payers and employers to deliver on explicit Triple Aim metrics. The principles, competencies, and activities of the PCMH model are widely accepted as the bedrock of provider-driven population health management, and essential for practice transformation and sustained performance.

Kutxabank, a Spanish bank, faced a significant challenge after a four-way consolidation among rival financial institutions. The bank needed to integrate IT for all four banks, rationalize datacenters, and enable mobility, all while ensuring no data loss and no downtime for core systems. This integration included the core systems as well as the technology that touched customers and employees. The bank’s 8,000 workstations and 2,000 ATMs needed to be integrated with no disruption to the 6,500 employees or 2.8 million customers. Furthermore, all the bank’s technology had to be geared to a data-dependent future.

UmbraGroup, an Italian manufacturer, is a strategic supplier to aerospace companies globally. The company's clients depend on UmbraGroup’s high-precision mechanical components to keep their aircraft in the air and their machinery running. In today’s operating environment of just-in-time supply chain management, these companies demand a lot from their suppliers. UmbraGroup needed to ensure its resiliency as a key supplier. The importance of resiliency for UmbraGroup took on added urgency as it began acquiring new operations, including two manufacturers in Germany and one in the United States. The company had to ensure the worldwide availability of their systems across multiple time zones, well beyond their headquarters and main datacenter in Foligno. In addition to the usual resiliency challenges, earthquakes are a fact of life in central Italy. UmbraGroup needed to be sure that even an earthquake won’t stop production and shipment to clients.

The University of South Australia (UniSA) was looking for a way to gather innovative ideas from the university community to help shape its long-term strategic plan. The university wanted to involve as many members of the community as possible in this process. The challenge was to find a platform that could facilitate this large-scale collaboration and idea generation.

The border control organization of a nation with over 60 million people and approximately 200 million annual border crossings was faced with an aging IT infrastructure and an obsolete identity card and fingerprint system. This compromised border security by hindering effective analysis of immigration information. The organization was tasked with providing border security during a global sporting event that would draw over half a million visitors. The event provided both the opportunity and necessity for the organization to hasten a comprehensive transformation of its security system. The event would also provide the first major test of the system’s efficacy, when more than 380,000 participants, family members, and staff would undergo identity verification and security checks.

WDR mediagroup (WDRmg), one of the largest integrated media service providers in Germany, needed an efficient way to manage its complex workflows for processing content from multiple file formats for content digitizing, archiving and delivery, as well as marketing and advertising services. Serving as the media arm for German public broadcasting institution WDR, WDRmg also digitizes historical programming – often originating in outdated formats – from WDR’s 40-plus year broadcasting history to prepare it for streaming services. WDRmg sought a high-performance transfer and automation solution that could swiftly manage high-volume processing workflows while maintaining a high level of security, reliability, and ease of use.

Huntsville Hospital Health System, located in Huntsville, Alabama, realized it needed to change the way technology was being used across its five primary care practices and 21 PCPs that comprise the Huntsville Hospital Physician Network. The organization was preparing for value-based contracts and aiming to earn patient-centered medical home (PCMH) recognition from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). However, they faced challenges in incorporating population health management (PHM) principles, which required reviewing the information contained in electronic medical records (EMRs) and verifying documentation from both internal and external providers is accurate and up-to-date. Another issue was the way patient data was being entered into the EMR, which was not standardized and led to inaccuracies in measurements. These issues needed to be resolved to set the organization on the right course for value-based contracts and PCMH recognition.

The social services organization for a German city was facing challenges in managing child welfare services as demand grew in size and complexity. Much of its case management work was still paper-based so if a child moved, or a case manager left the organization or went on vacation, paperwork might not be transferred, or the case could be lost. Service provider selection was based on case manager experience and intuition rather than on systematic matching of providers with children’s needs. A lack of integration between case management and provider payment systems meant that payments might continue long after service provision stopped or after a child had moved or left the system.

A social services ministry in Canada administers programs that protect children, help low-income families become economically independent and assist individuals with intellectual disabilities. They needed a solution that would establish an integrated electronic repository to securely capture, track, and report on data, provide an automated workflow, provide secure access to updated placement and other provider-related information, and easily integrate with incumbent systems and be implemented without delay.

A state government agency in Asia Pacific provides services and supports for nearly 18,500 disabled people and their families. The department launched a transformation project aimed at improving service levels and ensuring more effective funding. The existing information system could not automatically share information across the department’s 130 sites, which made it difficult for staff members to serve clients. Clients were required to fill out multiple applications and undergo multiple assessments to determine eligibility across programs. Matching individual needs with available services was difficult without real-time information and automated rules-based processes.

The Clark County Department of Social Service (CCSS) was facing a challenge due to fragmented information which prevented them from tracking the outcomes of social assistance programs. This lack of insight into the way they serve citizens was hindering their ability to connect clients to the right services at the right time. Additionally, they needed to ensure compliance with regulations, including HIPAA, and maintain strong data security.

BCS Group, a company with three production plants in Italy and a global sales and distribution operation, was concerned about the increasing prevalence of successful cyber attacks worldwide. The company wanted to understand the security exposures that existed in its network and applications and how to fix them. They were looking for a solution that could probe their network, servers, and PCs for vulnerabilities or configuration errors and try to exploit them. The goal was to identify potential risks and implement corrective procedures to improve their security posture.

POST Luxembourg, the country's largest provider of postal and telecom services, was seeking to enhance their business agility. The company wanted to unify access controls and create a single-sign-on portal for access to multiple services. This was a significant challenge as it required a comprehensive solution that could seamlessly integrate with their existing systems and provide a streamlined user experience for their customers.

The public sector organization was unknowingly under attack. An attacker was attempting to stealthily exfiltrate confidential information from a highly sensitive asset that was not considered at risk. The organization's log-based security information and event management (SIEM) solution from its managed security services provider was incapable of detecting such stealth attacks. This posed a significant challenge as the organization was at risk of losing confidential data and was vulnerable to further undiscovered activity by the attacker.

The regional bank was facing a challenge with its existing managed security services provider, which had misidentified an attack as a high external network threat. This misidentification revealed the bank's need for an advanced solution that could detect insider threats. The original investigation consumed 3 hours and produced 300 alerts, 100 emails, 3 phone calls, but no resolution. The bank needed a solution that could accurately identify and resolve security threats in a timely manner.

du, a rapidly growing communications provider in the United Arab Emirates, faced a significant challenge in protecting its network resources and client data from unauthorized access. With a largely outsourced workforce, the company needed an efficient way to enhance the user experience, boost productivity, and help reduce fraud. The process of granting new users access was time-consuming, taking up to two weeks, and integrating a new application into the Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform could take up to three months. Additionally, the company was dealing with a high volume of help desk tickets related to access management.

Catalyst Investors, a private equity and venture capital firm, was challenged by the task of combing through multiple content sources to find investment opportunities. The firm differentiates itself by applying a rigorous, research-based approach to investing and by employing experienced technology analysts to proactively recognize important trends in its key sectors. However, keeping up with the constant news alerts and ever-changing information about its markets and target companies proved challenging. The amount of unstructured, digital content is growing exponentially each year, making it a painstaking process to sift through volumes of online content to find and evaluate potential business opportunities.

Intesa Sanpaolo, an Italian banking group, was facing a challenge in its risk management infrastructure. The bank's trading decisions on Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives were based on multiple modeling techniques. Traders either had to run overly conservative add-ons or call risk teams for internal model results. This process was time-consuming and resource-intensive. The bank wanted to help front- and middle-office teams work together more effectively by enabling its trading desks to access the same approved internal models for counterparty risk that its risk management team was already using. This would empower traders to gain deeper insight into the total exposure to a given counterparty much more quickly, helping them understand the limits before making a trade, and avoid the risk of breaching those limits.

Jefferies, a leading financial institution, was under pressure to defend its market share and sharpen its competitive edge in challenging times for the Prime Broker industry. The company aimed to enhance its offering by providing hedge-fund clients with deeper, more accurate insights into risk across their portfolios at lower cost. The company was looking for ways to improve its reports detailing the risk exposure across their portfolios, by incorporating more detail and raising accuracy. The company was also looking to reduce its reliance on its incumbent market-data provider.

Amica, a mutual insurer providing auto, home, and life insurance, was facing issues with its software deployment processes. The company's environment included numerous web services, multiple web apps, and core applications. With dozens of developers checking in code, deploying the correct version of each service and application to multiple test, production, and backup environments had become extremely difficult. The process of ensuring the proper version of the right code was installed correctly on each environment had become a logistical nightmare. When issues arose with the deployment, they were often caused by application inconsistencies, rather than a code defect.

Capgemini's Accelerated Delivery Center (ADC) in Utrecht, the Netherlands, wanted to establish a more predictable and repeatable approach to agile development to keep up with customer demand. The center sought a solution that included strongly defined processes that incorporated set guidelines, templates, checklists, preferred practices and flexibility. The ADC also needed the solution to comply with its quality-control standards and Maturity Level 3 of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) process-improvement approach. Finally, the business wanted a solution that could run in the Capgemini Rightshore global-delivery-model environment.