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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.

Banco Cooperativo de Puerto Rico (BanCoop) is a financial service provider for approximately 115 credit unions across Puerto Rico, processing nearly 28,000 checks and 35,000 Automated Clearing House (ACH) transactions daily. The company was facing a significant challenge in improving security protections across its web channels. The primary concern was the potential for malware and phishing threats on customer endpoints, particularly as most of the company's internet exposure came from its web applications. The IT Manager, Abey Márquez, was not only concerned about BanCoop's security but also about the security of each credit union it served. Despite having several systems and processes in place to protect its infrastructure, BanCoop needed a solution that could effectively identify and block these threats.

Baseline Telematics, a leading global provider of technology solutions to the insurance industry, was faced with the challenge of delivering its innovative usage-based platforms to insurance organizations worldwide. As the company grew, it realized that each customer required its own dedicated private cloud, making security audits complicated in a multi-tenant environment. Additionally, to serve a global customer base, Baseline needed a cloud hosting platform that was scalable, had private, dedicated resources, and offered international data center presence. The company did not want to have to search for a reliable provider in each country it operated in.

Bassett Healthcare Network, a healthcare organization serving a 5,600 square mile region in upstate New York, was facing the complex transition from volume to value-based reimbursement. The organization recognized that its primary care network was a critical point in its strategy. Bassett Medical Group, consisting of over 400 physicians and clinicians, had experienced rapid growth with 43 clinicians hired over the past two years and physical expansion of six clinics. The organization aimed to drive volume to utilize existing capacity, support the pursuit of NCQA Patient-Centered Medical Home renewal recognition, foster overall population health management, and support clinical quality improvement initiatives. However, they needed the 'right volume', not just more. This meant targeting gaps in care, focusing on chronic needs in primary care, pediatrics, and women’s health such as depression, immunizations, and diabetes. Bassett knew that effective patient outreach and engagement was critical to achieve these goals.

BBVA, a multinational banking group, was facing a challenge in providing its trading desks with real-time, accurate insight into counterparty credit risk (CCR) and checking the limits for each trade. The bank's philosophy is that risk is a fundamental part of every business decision, and it wanted to manage risk more proactively by moving from an ex-post to an ex-ante model. This required the ability to obtain a precise valuation of CCR and other risk measures even before closing deals. However, the sophisticated CCR models that BBVA's risk team had been using could only be run in a batch process at the end of each day. For pre-deal limit checking, traders had to use a simpler “add-on” modeling approach, which did not take some important factors into account. Moreover, this model was only used in some geographies, while in others, there was no pre-deal limit checking at all.

Bengt Dahlgren AB, a civil engineering consultancy services provider, was faced with the challenge of ensuring effective collaboration among its six group companies as it prepared to give them greater autonomy for lean decision-making. The group, which specializes in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), fire safety, energy and environmental construction, and building automation, wanted to ensure that the increased autonomy did not reduce the employees’ ability to collaborate across different departments. The group had been relying on shared drives and folders to distribute information on human resources, internal processes, and best practices. However, as they transitioned to a decentralized IT management structure, they realized that this approach would become difficult to sustain. They needed a new way to collaborate across the group.

BH Telecom, a leading provider of communication services in Bosnia and Herzegovina, aimed to become a regional leader in cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) services. They identified a significant market gap for solutions that collect and exchange data to enable smarter environments, optimizing resources like power, water, and lighting. Additionally, they saw an opportunity in providing a robust, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform for enterprise clients. However, the challenge was to deliver these solutions to customers rapidly and at competitive prices. The existing environment could take months to build such a solution, which was not feasible in the face of competition. It was crucial for BH Telecom to accelerate their service delivery without compromising the reliability of their services.

Big Fish Games, a leading producer and distributor of casual games, faced a significant challenge in the highly competitive mobile and online gaming industry. The company needed to identify loyal clients and reduce customer churn to maintain its market position. The transition from a PC-centric to a mobile-centric gaming company brought about a change in strategy. With millions of games available to mobile users and new releases emerging rapidly, the window of opportunity to capture and keep the attention of a player was shrinking. The key to success for Big Fish Games was understanding customers’ changing tastes to deliver the optimal balance between challenging and satisfying gameplay. However, the company struggled to manage escalating volumes of data from tens of millions of players from around the world each day. The large data sets made it difficult to conduct effective analytical exercises without hitting dead ends.

BLOM BANK, a leading Lebanese bank, was looking to expand its market share in Lebanon and the EMEA region. To achieve this, the bank recognized the need to embrace the omnichannel digital banking trend. However, this had to be done without compromising on data availability or efficiency. The bank had a solid track record of profitability and growth in Lebanon and the EMEA region, while following a conservative strategy that includes prudent risk management. The challenge was to maintain this winning approach while providing innovative products and services to customers and staying at the forefront of technology. Achieving this without compromising service quality would require the bank to find a stable technology partner, who could offer a technology mix that would enable growth, efficiency and service continuity as BLOM BANK evolves.

Blue Shield of California, a not-for-profit health plan provider, was facing an increasingly competitive health insurance marketplace following the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The company needed to better support its members and boost competitiveness by accelerating the provisioning of new systems and improving IT agility to get new offerings to market quickly. The challenge was to adjust their offerings as the needs of their members changed, and to deliver a modern customer experience, including access from mobile devices and tablets. The company was also struggling with a lack of automation in provisioning the networking, hardware, and software.

Bonnie Plants, a national plant wholesaler based in Alabama, was grappling with the challenges of manual data processing which made them vulnerable to human errors and long delays. The company was using IBM Sterling's Gentran:Director® for EDI and Sterling Collaboration NetworkSM for their VAN services since 1994. However, the sales data took up to three days to process, leading to a feeling of being overwhelmed with data. The processing of sales orders could take an entire day and was subject to human error. After pulling information across a dial-up modem, Bonnie often discovered the data was incomplete. The company was continuously facing the challenges of trading electronically with little visibility. Moreover, 70 percent of their business occurred between the months of March and May, which required a scalable solution that could handle a large influx of data during a short period of time.

Boston Children’s Hospital, a leading pediatric and adolescent healthcare center, identified a significant challenge in the global healthcare sector. The traditional teaching hospital apprenticeship model was failing to adapt to an increasingly interconnected world, leading to a bottleneck of expert knowledge within the walls of institutions. This created disparities in access to medical education, particularly in pediatric critical care. Countries like China, India, Brazil, and the United States have more than 150 medical schools each, while 36 countries have none. Of these, 26 are within sub-Saharan Africa, areas with some of the highest disease burdens and infant mortality rates. The lack of access to expert knowledge and training in these regions was a critical issue. Dr. Jeffrey Burns and Dr. Traci Wolbrink of Boston Children’s Hospital, both experts in pediatric critical care, research innovation, and medical learning techniques, sought a solution using Internet and social networking technology to share knowledge instantly around the world.

BRD-Groupe Société Générale (BRD), the second largest bank in Romania, identified the need to enhance security protections at the customer endpoint, which was considered the weak link in banking security. Despite not having experienced fraud losses through its online banking channel, the bank's Chief Information Security Officer, Mihai Andries, and his team believed it was crucial to proactively address this increasingly vulnerable area. The bank recognized that the client endpoint was more susceptible to attacks than the bank’s infrastructure due to significant browser and operating system vulnerabilities that could be exploited by criminals to intercept traffic, inject fake pages, and steal credentials. The bank sought an efficient solution that could rapidly detect malware and phishing attacks, and remove any infections.

Brett Landscaping & Building Products, a significant sector of the Brett group, one of the largest independent construction and building materials groups in the UK, was facing a challenge in understanding their own profitability due to a complex revenue and cost structure. The company was forced to perform arduous spreadsheet work to gain true visibility of expenditure. The complexity of cost drivers in the construction industry made it extremely difficult for Brett to gain a clear view of its financial situation. The company was maintaining a huge and increasingly unwieldy set of spreadsheets to manage revenue analysis and costs including rebates and haulage. At 186 million records, their spreadsheet environment was unsustainable and prevented them from gaining a true understanding of the relative profitability of different activities.

Bridgevine, a company that powers customer acquisition solutions through its next-generation technology platform, was facing a significant challenge. The company was struggling with prospective customers not following through with conversions, specifically, calling into the call center to schedule an installation appointment. This was a significant issue as it was affecting the company's ability to acquire new customers, build brand loyalty, and unlock new revenue streams. The company's marketing team, which markets to an entirely B2C audience, was in need of a more effective way to ensure that these prospective customers followed through on scheduling an appointment.

Broadcom, a global leader in semiconductor solutions, faced a significant challenge in managing its sales compensation. The company's compensation plans were becoming increasingly complex, and the lack of real-time visibility into compensation was causing dissatisfaction among its highly skilled sales team. The salespeople, most of whom are qualified engineers, were unable to monitor their performance and predict their compensation, which was affecting their motivation and productivity. The company's compensation reporting processes were manual, labor-intensive, and could only produce reports once per quarter. This lack of timely insight into compensation was affecting the sales team's performance and the company's ability to motivate them effectively. Furthermore, Broadcom needed to make compensation more transparent without significantly increasing the headcount in the compensation team.

Brockenhurst College, a high-achieving academic institution in England, was seeking ways to gain deeper insights into student needs and learning styles. The goal was to use this information to shape a more immersive and personalised educational experience, from application to graduation. The college was also looking for ways to improve student recruitment and retention, and increase its reputation. The challenge was to find a solution that would allow the college to understand each student’s unique style of learning and interests, and continually adapt learning pathways to meet these needs. The college also wanted to improve the way it markets itself to prospective learners and ensure that its educational offerings meet both local learner and employer needs.

BT Sport, a collection of sports channels offered by the BT Group in the UK, needed a high-speed file transfer solution to support ad hoc ingest and distribution as well as power automated data replication to an offsite data recovery center. The vision of BT Sport could only be realized with a new, state of the art broadcast facility. Timeline Television, BT Sport's technical partner, had less than six months to build out the broadcast centre from an empty shell into a 24 hour-a-day operation, including the simultaneous roll-out of a fully automated disaster recovery system. They quickly identified the need for a robust, high-speed transfer platform from a trusted vendor, to power the intense file-based production workflows and meet the project’s aggressive timescale. The platform needed to support secure high-speed transfer at multi-gigabit speeds, allow fully automated end-to-end workflows including ad hoc content ingest, review, approval and distribution, and offer reliable, secure data replication of petabytes of media from BT Sport’s main site in London’s iCITY to the disaster recovery and continuity facilities located at the iconic BT Tower.

BTC, a leading property management and development company in Slovenia, faced the challenge of managing some of the largest commercial and office buildings in central Europe. The company needed to demonstrate its efficiency to clients, find ways to reduce costs, and increase service levels. The lack of real-time, central view of what was happening across all the buildings and assets they managed was a significant issue. The company also lacked visibility of the work done by technicians until they returned to the office and typed up their reports. This delay in information flow hampered the company's ability to respond immediately when something went wrong in the facilities they managed.

Buffalo David Bitton, a leading fashion brand, was facing challenges in analyzing, planning, and forecasting demand and inventory for its wholesale, online, and in-store channels. The company's sales channels were run on different software systems, and its financial data was managed in another system. This disparity made reporting a laborious process, hindering the company's ability to make timely decisions. The company needed a solution that would provide a holistic view of sales trends across all channels, ensuring the right products were always available to appeal to each customer. The existing systems, while efficient for day-to-day operations, had limited reporting capabilities, making it difficult to gain an overall view of the business or to analyze data in detail.

Busan Bank, a retail banking service provider in South Korea, faced a significant challenge in providing efficient and effective services to its out-of-branch customers. The bank's salespeople, when operating in the field, had to carry all necessary forms and information they anticipated they would need. However, if a customer asked an unexpected question, the salesperson had to return to the office to find the answer. Similarly, completed forms also had to be brought back to the branch for processing. This process was not only time-consuming but also left customers with a negative impression due to the delay in service and lack of immediate answers.

Cabify, a Spain-based startup offering chauffeured car transport services, was experiencing rapid data growth as it expanded globally. The company's databases, which stored critical information on vehicle locations, routes, drivers, pricing, and payments, needed to be accessible in real time. Initially, Cabify ran its database services internally using Apache CouchDB. However, as the company grew, managing databases became a time-consuming task that distracted from its core business activities. The company was also grappling with the challenge of balancing the number of servers it could run and the staff time required to maintain them. The increasing difficulty in maintaining in-house databases led Cabify to seek a solution that would reduce operational costs, free up time for core activities, and provide a scalable data services platform to support its ambitious growth plans.