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Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) was facing a challenge in attracting and retaining students. The university had previously run studies investigating student retention and graduation trends over time, but these studies focused on a very limited profile of each student. SCSU suspected that it was missing out on crucial information. The university wanted to challenge the established wisdom and look at the bigger picture when it came to understanding why students were not performing to their full potential. It also wanted to evaluate the different ways it can support students who are not thriving either academically or developmentally, and identify the intervention activities that actually work.

SOSCIP aimed to develop an attractive ecosystem that would help to keep research talent and startups in Ontario. The goal was to connect leading academic institutions with small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to provide a competitive edge by accelerating research. SOSCIP and its partners wanted to develop intellectual property such as patents, and support the commercialization of research results through collaborative projects. As the SOSCIP consortium was forming, the organization sought a lead industrial partner to establish the computing technologies and collaborative research and development model upon which the consortium was founded.

Web-based publishing platform SpaceCraft found that as its client base grew, it was spending an increasing amount of time managing its databases, distracting its focus from product innovation. As its user base rapidly expanded, data volumes at SpaceCraft began to rise dramatically. Along with their main focus on maintaining and further developing a great platform for web publishing, the SpaceCraft team had the added pressure of managing the increasing quantities of data while ensuring ongoing high performance for clients.

Standard Life, a global financial services company, wanted to identify, develop, and retain talent across its global operations. To enable meaningful comparisons of employee performance, its human capital management leadership team needed an integrated talent management and compensation solution. The company was using a legacy HR solution that was not efficient in managing core business functions such as payroll. The company needed a solution that would align performance, reward, and talent management processes and provide an integrated view of the workforce across the company.

As one of the leading multiple sclerosis (MS) research centers in the world, researchers at University at Buffalo wanted to identify and understand environmental factors that may contribute to MS. However, gene-environmental research presented researchers with enormous volumes of data for which they needed high-performance processing power and speed to make meaningful, publishable discoveries. A major challenge in gene interaction research is analyzing the explosions of immense data sets at a speed that will help save lives.

The State of North Dakota Department of Human Services (DHS) was facing a challenge in balancing manual and time-consuming administration and data analysis tasks with their primary role of helping those in need. The services provided by DHS require a significant amount of funds, which need to be accurately allocated to deliver the best outcome for each client. DHS wanted to cut administration time, accelerate reports and analyze data more effectively, allowing caseworkers to make better decisions and spend more time helping clients.

TE Connectivity, a global technology leader, was facing challenges with its existing IT system as it was at the limits of its capacity, and there was limited scope to introduce new services, workloads or applications. The company operates 24/7 and relies on a suite of SAP applications to manage its business processes. Some of its largest customers rely on the company to keep to just-in-time delivery schedules, and any downtime to the SAP ERP environment at the core of its production processes was unacceptable. The company needed a new platform that would provide capabilities for high availability, deliver full disaster recovery, and offer scalability for growth.

Following a corporate divestiture, one of Tech Mahindra’s clients – a specialty chemical company with several thousand employees and production facilities on four continents – needed to separate all of its IT systems from its former parent’s infrastructure as quickly as possible. The client’s previous IBM Cognos Business Intelligence environment had been installed on-premise at the former parent company’s data center. However, Tech Mahindra realized that moving to a cloud deployment could have significant advantages. The challenge was to deploy a new analytics environment as quickly as possible.

Tejon Ranch, with its 270,000 acres of California real estate, operates on a grand scale. The size of the property unlocks opportunities that smaller companies can only dream about – and at the same time, the scope of the challenge created by those opportunities can also be vast. The company knew that its ability to build the communities of the future would depend on its ability to harness technology – and in particular, its ability to gather, analyze and understand data. It also realized that analytics could not only help it to design and build its new developments, but could also help it to transform its traditional business lines, such as its hunting and farming operations.

The Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) was faced with the challenge of improving highway safety and reducing accident rates without increasing staff levels. The THP aimed to anticipate and prevent accidents by identifying road accident hotspots, prosecute drunk drivers, enforce the use of seatbelts more effectively, and respond to incidents with the most appropriate resources. The THP sought to enable a new data-driven approach to traffic safety that would look for meaningful patterns in the past and apply them to current conditions to predict future events.

Thames Water Utilities Ltd. in the United Kingdom needed to understand the relationship between flooding and pollution incidents in the utility holes in its wastewater network. The company aimed to create a cleaner environment and avoid costly leakages, unsavory publicity, and dissatisfied customers. The challenge was to identify the utility holes that are most likely to flood and cause pollution problems, especially holes with a history of flooding or located near watercourses.

The City of Edinburgh Council aimed to put citizens at the centre of its processes, and enable a 'channel shift' to help people interact efficiently and consistently with the Council’s services – whether in person, by phone or email, or online via new digital services. The Council wanted to create a hub-and-spoke architecture, where systems would interact via a single central integration bus. This would provide a single point of control, allowing the Council to easily add, remove or replace different systems within the architecture, and orchestrate them into complex processes with a minimum of effort.

Irrigation is essential to grow the crops that feed and clothe the human population – but overconsumption of water is draining the earth’s river basins faster than rain can replenish them. Humanity’s growing water footprint is partly a function of our increasing population; but it is also compounded by the fact that irrigation systems, especially in the developing world, are often extremely inefficient. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization states that even a good irrigation scheme is only 50-60 percent efficient. Poorly built systems can result in the vast majority of the water being lost to evaporation, seepage and other problems before it reaches the fields. Moreover, once it gets there, if farmers choose to irrigate at the wrong time (for example, just before it rains), the water will be wasted and the crops may even be damaged.

TimkenSteel, a leading manufacturer of high-quality steel bars and seamless mechanical steel tubing, needed to ensure that its production lines are operational at all times. Effective maintenance was therefore a top priority. However, the company sought to enhance its maintenance strategy by gaining greater visibility of parts and equipment costs. The challenge was to bring corporate-wide procurement into a single system that would allow for better collaboration between the maintenance and procurement teams to analyze and control costs.

Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD) manages leases for thousands of properties, a substantial proportion of which are 'income leases' for properties that have been sublet to other companies. With the growth of the bank, the number of income leases that TD managed increased. The bank had to find a more efficient way of working or face a rise in costs. The bank decided to automate the management of its income leases using IBM® TRIRIGA®, a solution designed to help companies streamline lease administration. IBM hosts the solution in one of its data centers, and supports the test, development and production environments.

Ultra Petroleum Corp., an independent oil and gas company, was facing the challenge of meeting demanding financial reporting requirements without adding to its headcount. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires public companies like Ultra to file financial statements, including annual 10-K and quarterly 10-Q financial reports. These statements must be tagged using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), a global standard for exchanging business information. For many companies, the XBRL requirement has more than doubled their SEC reporting workload. Ultra began looking for a solution that would return control of SEC reporting to the people who knew the company’s finances best: its accounting department.

United Rentals, a company that supports major construction, industrial, and government projects, faced a significant challenge when a merger doubled the size of its sales team overnight. The company needed a more efficient way to calculate and communicate commission on sales. The sales force had recently doubled in size as the result of a merger, and calculating the commission for all of the reps was becoming a major challenge. The company wanted to find a way to encourage positive sales behaviors, and one of the keys to this was compensation management.

The College of the Environment at the University of Washington collaborates with many external companies and agencies, including a US state government department that manages approximately 2.1 million acres of working forest on state trust lands. The department also manages upwards of 15,000 miles of forest roads statewide, which are essential to enable machinery and people to reach remote areas of the forest for timber harvesting, maintenance or recreation purposes. The College is tasked with researching the best, most sustainable ways to support the department in its complex mission to maintain the forest road network and help timber companies optimize their harvesting processes – while keeping costs and environmental impact to a minimum.

VEKA AG, a leading producer of PVC profile systems for windows and doors, was facing challenges with its existing IT infrastructure due to escalating data volumes. The company's production lines require constant access to data to ensure high-quality production and correct storage. However, the expansion of the company's portfolio led to a significant increase in data volumes, putting pressure on the existing IT infrastructure. Specifically, backup times for business-critical SAP systems were increasing, raising the risk of unscheduled downtime or slow recovery in the event of a hardware failure. Products produced when SAP systems are not available need to be stored somewhere until applications are back online, resulting in unnecessary warehousing costs and delays to deliveries. VEKA AG needed to minimize planned and unplanned downtime to boost output and sales.

Varian Medical Systems, a world leader in medical devices and software for treating cancer with radiation oncology, wanted to change the way it managed compensation to motivate sellers to achieve even higher levels of performance. The company's sales cycles can be long and complex due to the tailored nature of their advanced cancer treatment solutions. This made it difficult to assess the relative contributions of the many employees involved in each deal, and to compensate them fairly.

Verisure, a leading provider of security solutions, was facing challenges in fostering collaboration among its marketing, sales, and product development teams across different geographies. The company was relying on email for collaboration, which was proving to be inefficient. With the number of employees and business partners increasing, Verisure realized that email alone would not be sufficient to ensure smooth operations. The company's product and service offerings were tightly integrated, leading to an extensive partnership network of vendors and manufacturers worldwide. This made the need for an effective collaboration platform even more critical.

Vestas, the world's largest wind energy company, relies on the precise placement of wind turbines to maximize power generation and reduce energy costs. The optimal location for a wind turbine can significantly affect its performance and lifespan. However, the process of determining the best location for a turbine is complex and time-consuming, often taking up to three weeks. This delay is unacceptable in a competitive industry where quick responses and delivering business value are crucial. Furthermore, the cost of placing a turbine in a sub-optimal location can be significant, potentially leading to underperformance, increased warranty costs, and loss of customers.

Attracting and harnessing the energy of innovation — especially in cities — is imperative for economic growth and development. Building the connected ecosystems required to jump-start digital innovation can mean major up-front costs, which is why smaller cities have had a harder time making the business case. Vodafone Spain sought to rewrite that formula by creating a new line of business offering smarter cities services to smaller cities.

WD-40 Company, a global marketing organization, faced a significant challenge in analyzing its profit and loss (P&L) due to data being held in different systems. This lack of a clear view of P&L by customer, region, or stock-keeping unit (SKU) was hindering decision-making. The complexity of the company's internal financial landscape, with multiple international subsidiaries, and customer and SKU data stored at different levels of granularity, made it extremely challenging to analyze P&L in different parts of the business. Gaining an overview of the profitability of a particular customer, region, or SKU was a laborious, manual process – and in most cases, it was simply too time-consuming to perform this kind of analysis on a regular basis.

Transporting valuable cargos around the globe is a complex business: it can take weeks and cost millions of dollars to move a vessel across the world, so it is critical to ensure that available shipping capacity is utilised efficiently. To support effective operational planning, WWL needed an accurate long-term forecasting solution. The company has 3,500 employees and a fleet of more than 60 vessels that serve 18 different trade routes on a fixed schedule. It also operates 11 terminals, 50 processing centres, and an inland transportation network that helps to transport more than three million vehicles per year from factories to point of sale. The company needed to plan its routes meticulously to ensure that it was getting the best possible utilization out of its vessels and maintaining profitability on each voyage.

The Championships, Wimbledon is the longest-established of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, and arguably the most prestigious. Its organisers, the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), recognise that the best way to celebrate and preserve the tournament’s rich heritage is to ensure that it continues to make history, each and every year. In 2014, The Championships took place at the same time as another of the world’s largest sporting events, the FIFA World Cup. With much of the global sports media saturated with soccer coverage, the AELTC appreciated the challenge of winning and retaining fans’ attention. Mick Desmond, Commercial Director at the AELTC, comments: “The key is to engage the fans by giving them unparalleled access to the tournament, wherever and whenever they want to experience it. We not only want to offer the best possible experience for those who are lucky enough to spend a day at Wimbledon – we want to replicate that unforgettable atmosphere for the millions who are watching on TV or following a match online.

Wimbledon, organized by the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), is one of the world's highest-profile sporting events. To maintain its prestige, its digital experience must be second to none. The AELTC set a target of attracting 70 million visits, 20 million unique devices, and 8 million social followers during the two weeks of The Championships 2015. The challenge was to update the digital properties to adapt to a mobile-first world, while still offering the best possible desktop experience. The team also needed to build a special set of websites for the most important tennis fans of all: the players themselves.

YAZAKI Europe, a leading automotive supplier specializing in the production of customized wiring harnesses for car manufacturers, was facing challenges in meeting the automotive industry’s demand for same-day delivery. The company's continuous growth was impacting its ability to analyze performance and complete its end-of-month consolidation and reporting processes for its headquarters in Japan. The company needed to eliminate delays and manual processing in its logistics to ensure extremely efficient operations. The company also needed to boost its data analytics capabilities for its finance and controlling departments to accelerate the delivery of complex financial reports.

eircom Group Ltd., a communication services provider based in Dublin, was facing a significant challenge due to fierce industry competition and the increasing risk of customers easily switching service providers. The company was experiencing an annual loss of EUR1.5 billion due to customer churn. The company needed a solution to identify the factors contributing to unfavorable customer experiences and to identify customers most likely to switch communications service providers.

Publishers face a tough challenge. If they print more copies of a book than people buy, they waste money and are left with excess inventory. But if they print too few copies, they miss out on revenue. To avoid ending up with too many or too few books, media control has developed a state-of-the-art social media listening tool that helps publishers accurately predict demand for each title.