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Radboud University Nijmegen, an international university with a wide range of courses, was facing challenges in gaining insight into and overview of all hardware components, applications, data, and processes. The university's Group Information Management Department found that information regarding the connection between applications and processes was fragmented, making it difficult to collect the correct information at the start of a project. The business side also required more overview of the work processes. A cohesive process from recruitment to registration and ultimately deregistration of students was needed. The university, therefore, looked for an ICT partner who could provide a product that allowed for better insight into and overview of the connection between IT systems and processes.

The digitalization of everyday life is becoming increasingly prevalent, with big data, cloud, mobile access, social and security issues becoming more intertwined and having a significant impact on business and society. This has forced companies to drastically reconsider and transform their processes. The University of Applied Sciences, Saarland (htw saar) recognized the need to prepare their students for this digital era. They wanted to provide their students with a comprehensive overview of current processes within companies and teach them how to best transform these for the digital era. They also wanted to provide real-life problems that students will encounter in their professional career, that students learn to solve using market-leading software.

The digital revolution has not spared universities. They are affected both in their internal transformation processes and in the content of their curriculums. Universities like the University Bonn-RheinSieg are facing several major challenges: attracting students with new standards in research and education, applying and developing state-of-the-art technologies, responding fast to changing industry demands, and teaching theory through practice. The growing demand for specialists in the fields of digital business makes recognizing opportunities for collaboration with the private sector all the more necessary. Universities and private companies share the responsibility of equipping the market with sought-after talent. The University of Bonn-Rhein-Sieg has been using an earlier version of the Integration Education Package (IEP) from the Software AG University Relations program since 2011 and was excited to use the new one.

MAPFRE, a global leader in insurance, faced several challenges as it expanded its operations. The company needed to improve the functionality and performance of its existing operational management system, increase scalability to support global operations, integrate systems and processes across the enterprise, simplify the development of new business solutions, and improve collaboration between business and IT. The international market was particularly competitive due to the residual effects on prices after the global financial crisis in 2008. As a result, insurance providers were being pressured to become more efficient and do more with less. MAPFRE decided BPM was the solution that would provide the scalability and efficiency needed to get ahead in the global marketplace.

DigitalGlobe, a leading global provider of commercial high-resolution Earth imagery products and services, was looking for ways to avoid waste and build services and APIs faster. They wanted to foster a 'right click/add' development mentality and enable more organizations to leverage their imagery and data. The company was also looking for ways to quickly integrate mergers and acquisitions and decommission redundant systems. They saw a huge potential in exposing their services quickly to the world and were looking for a platform that could help them achieve this.

ATB Financial, a financial institution and crown corporation, was facing challenges in its business lending origination process. The process was slow and inconsistent due to manual data entry and interpretation, which led to human errors and slowed down the process. The subjective interpretation of the approval criteria led to inconsistent outcomes and often resulted in rework. It could take up to three weeks for a single customer to be approved with an average process time of about 11 days. ATB aimed to accelerate the process of onboarding small business and agricultural customers to one day or less. They also wanted to increase visibility to monitor and optimize processes and leverage agile business rules to boost the approval rate.

Openreach, a division of the British telecommunications company, BT Group, was established in 2006 to ensure equality of access to BT’s local network for rival telecom operators. As one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world, Openreach has complex processes and a vast infrastructure. However, the company's systems and processes were siloed and they had issues around end-to-end systems or accountability. Openreach aimed to implement processes and systems that would increase control and also enable effective management of the business going forward. The company sought a more proactive and sustainable solution for managing risks while also working with a consultant firm to define, build and implement a Business Control Framework (BCF) with a five-step life-cycle methodology, covering: risk assessment; documentation of process control; testing; remediation; and sign-off.

P&O Ferries, a leading ferry company in the UK, operates in a highly competitive market where consistent quality of service is crucial. The company's strategic pillars include smart growth, competitiveness, and customer-centricity. However, changing regulations, such as the EU Sulphur Directive, significantly impact P&O Ferries’ overall costs and squeeze operating margins. The company was looking for ways to increase business agility and resilience, reduce dependency on legacy IT systems, and realize new revenue opportunities. On the retail side, P&O Ferries wanted to diversify its offers to accommodate continental European customers’ tastes and provide more value-added services. On the freight side, the company needed to cater to the needs of its customers who operate in a very price-sensitive market and require real-time data exchange and support for digital business services.

Zurich Insurance Group, a leading multi-line insurance provider, had been using ARIS for over 10 years for modeling and documenting business processes in both of its business segments, General Insurance and Global Life. However, as the current version of ARIS was nearing the end of its life cycle, Zurich needed to migrate to the new ARIS version 9. This migration needed to take into consideration different user requirements worldwide and had to be implemented for all of the Zurich Group’s ARIS users worldwide. The migration project also had to ensure the smooth continued operation of more than 50 ARIS databases.

Kiabi, a French retailing powerhouse, was facing a burgeoning customer volume, data overload and inconsistency, and a market-wide transition to omni-channel retail. The company's consistent growth of nearly 9% annually, expansion from 5 to 32 countries, and a customer base increasingly composed of Millennials, a group constantly online, in-touch and communicating, put a strain on their legacy systems. Their website slowed to a crawl and their data was riddled with errors. IT had to align to the company’s business functions—and fast—for Kiabi to turn themselves into the omnichannel business they had envisioned.

Logrand’s vision is to become a customer-centric, Digital Enterprise. To achieve this, Logrand wants to adopt new digital business models and change from manual operations to those that are reactive, predictable and automated. The end game: Increase customer satisfaction.

With the prediction of 50 billion devices being connected by 2020, the Internet of Things is revolutionizing every aspect of life. Wipro Technologies, a leading systems integrator, consulting, and services company, is at the forefront of this transformation with its Looking Glass solution—an Internet of Things solution for smart, connected products. The challenge was to leverage the power of IoT to increase ROI, customer satisfaction, and revenue for enterprises across various industries.

The insurance industry is facing a myriad of challenges including aging IT infrastructure, increasing customer churn, decreasing turnover, protracted time-to-market, disruptive new entrants and a steady stream of new regulations. Additionally, more and more customers are looking for a digital touch point with their insurance providers. In order to keep up in this environment, providers are looking for an easy-to-use digital solution that has a rapid ROI, a low TCO and can be integrated with legacy systems. The solution must also come with a Web portal that’s reliable and customer-friendly for easy online access to services.

Schwering & Hasse (S&H), a Germany-based company, manufactures a large volume of copper magnet wire, a critical component of numerous electrical products. The manufacturing process requires minute tolerances for the insulation, with even a tiny deviation from the specification rendering the wire useless. S&H's mission is to manufacture as much wire as possible with as few errors as possible. However, the company faced challenges in maintaining high quality standards due to rapidly changing customer demands and product specifications. The existing information systems were not equipped to create a factory that was truly “transparent” to both line workers and managers. The company needed a system that could provide immediate and accurate visibility into multiple production quality factors in real time.

Logrand’s vision is to become a customer-centric, Digital Enterprise. To achieve this, Logrand wants to adopt new digital business models and change from manual operations to those that are reactive, predictable and automated. The end game: Increase customer satisfaction.

With the prediction of 50 billion devices being connected by 2020, the Internet of Things is revolutionizing every aspect of life. Wipro Technologies, a leading systems integrator, consulting, and services company, is at the forefront of this transformation with its Looking Glass solution—an Internet of Things solution for smart, connected products. The challenge was to integrate, capture, analyze, and respond to data captured by embedded sensors in remote printers at customer sites. The company needed to understand and act immediately on real-time maintenance data to proactively increase service levels, drive down costs, and maximize asset uptime, utilization, and placement.

The insurance industry is facing a myriad of challenges including aging IT infrastructure, increasing customer churn, decreasing turnover, protracted time-to-market, disruptive new entrants and a steady stream of new regulations. Additionally, more and more customers are looking for a digital touch point with their insurance providers. In order to keep up in this environment, providers are looking for an easy-to-use digital solution that has a rapid ROI, a low TCO and can be integrated with legacy systems. The solution must also come with a Web portal that’s reliable and customer-friendly for easy online access to services. Analysts refer to the market for digital insurance solutions as immature and with lots of potential for growth.

Schwering & Hasse (S&H), a Germany-based company, manufactures a massive volume of copper magnet wire, with 400 production lines producing 140,000 kilometers of wire per day in a 24/7 operation. The wire, which is coated with a thin layer of insulation, is a critical component of numerous electrical products, such as transformers and motors. The tolerances required for the insulation are minute, with even a tiny deviation from the specification rendering the wire useless. S&H's mission is to manufacture as much wire as possible with as few errors as possible. However, the company faced challenges in maintaining high quality standards due to rapidly changing customer demands and product specifications. The company's existing information systems were not equipped to create a factory that was truly “transparent” to both line workers and managers, and did not provide detailed, real-time information about every phase in the production process.

In the financial services sector, the ability to deliver new capabilities daily in a compliant manner is crucial. However, Standard Chartered, like many organizations, was hindered by a multitude of interfaces that impeded agility. The bank sought to innovate faster by reducing interfaces and enhancing quality through the use of a globally federated business process framework.

SKF, a leading knowledge engineering company, was tasked with supporting its customer, Stora Enso, a global provider of paper, wood, and packaging products, with cutting-edge solutions. Stora Enso uses SKF’s cloud-based condition monitoring suite to ensure asset availability and is gearing up for growth. A prerequisite for this growth was establishing an interconnection between SKF’s software and Stora Enso’s SAP® system. In the past, there was no integration between SKF software and SAP. All individual software integrations for customers were developed from scratch.

Since 1952, distributor Casbega has focused on the flow of Coca-Cola products in Spain. Recently, the company took a closer look at the flow of its processes—starting with accounting. Specifically, Casbega wanted to speed up invoice administration and reduce related costs. Document flow between branch offices and departments was too excessive, and email was proving inadequate in driving workflow and managing files. Every year, Casbega’s accounting department processes 40,000 invoices from other departments and regional offices. The invoice approval process varies depending on the office and department. Invoices advance to different levels of approval, enabling the delegation of tasks and the automatic generation of reminders to the responsible employees at each level. All employees who process invoices keep a copy of each invoice as a record. The process is integrated with an accounting system controlled by SAP technology.

California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) is America’s second largest public pension fund and the largest educator-only pension fund in the world. The organization was facing the challenge of reducing operating costs by moving Natural batch to the less-expensive IBM zIIP™ processor. The organization was looking for a solution that would not require any changes to the existing code or modification to batch jobs for the START application. The organization was also concerned that a new product would require more testing and more validation, which would mean more time to realize savings.

Oriflame, a beauty company selling direct in more than 60 countries, faced several challenges. The company's average annual growth of 11 percent over the past 20 years and expansion into more than 40 countries brought many business challenges. This naturally created challenges for Oriflame’s Global Shared Services IT Group as well: to incorporate new markets, adapt requirements and manage disparate business needs. In Oriflame, the one business constant is clearly change. The primary business applications were consistent across Oriflame: the in-house sales application (Orisales), JDA® Platform for supply chain management and IFS Applications™ for ERP. However, the alignment issues were at a more fundamental level.

FortisBC, a fully integrated electric utility in southeastern British Columbia, was facing challenges with its decade-old customer information system. The system, which was used daily by customer service, was out of warranty and needed a language, interface, and database update. The system had proven functionality worth preserving, but replacing it could have cost tens of millions of dollars. The company wanted to modernize the system at a fraction of the cost of replacing it. Other goals included adding a Web front-end, creating a single sign-on environment, improving security and eliminating manual password changes, assuring easy mobile and remote access, building a platform for a next generation of business services, and improving the ability to deliver more self-services to the customer.

Swisscom, a leading telecommunications and IT company in Switzerland, faced several challenges. The industry-wide move to digitalization, a rapidly expanding B2B market, and growing demand for increased system flexibility were among the key issues. The old way of managing transactions, which involved manual input and piles of paper, was inefficient and costly. The company needed a solution that would not compromise data security while improving speed and efficiency. Swisscom also wanted to reduce the number of steps in some processes by half to cut costs and improve turnaround time and quality.

Swisscom, the leading telecommunications provider in Switzerland, was facing challenges with its order process reporting. The company was unable to proactively monitor orders, and the analysis of existing data was either extremely difficult or impossible. This led to frequent, time-consuming internal queries, often triggered by customer inquiries. The lack of transparency and efficiency in the process led to high frustration levels both internally and externally, damaging the company's reputation and resulting in lower sales. Swisscom needed a solution that would allow for the monitoring of all processes with problem alerts, transparent and fast reporting, easy measurement and display of KPIs, direct access to process information for various departments, and comprehensive project documentation.

Alliance Healthcare, a leading pharmaceutical wholesaler in Germany, was facing high competitive pressure and a need to improve performance. The company's inventory system, Wapha, developed with Adabas & Natural, needed to be moved from the expensive mainframe environment to a more cost-effective Linux platform. The company also wanted to align its systems with IT optimizations and protect its long-term investments in its inventory system. The company's IT landscape was diverse and heterogeneous, making the rapid implementation of new requirements time- and cost-intensive. This was not acceptable in a market that is highly rebate- and sales-oriented and subject to frequent legal changes in Germany’s regulated health system.

Accarda AG, a specialist in integrated customer management, is Switzerland’s leader in customer loyalty cards with a payment function. The company manages more than two million customer loyalty cards, with annual card revenues of 2.5 billion Swiss francs. Accarda AG ensures a favorable ratio of costs to benefits for its clients. The company stands for high-performance, individualized business processes and strict adherence to the client’s budget and timing requirements. Consistent process management, with quality assurance in accordance with ISO 9001, is the key to ensuring that Accarda’s clients derive the greatest possible benefit from the growth in sales that can be expected from implementing a loyalty card program. The company was looking for a solution to measure, analyze and optimize business process chains, create dashboards for the online visualization of process measurement results, and provide online access to the entire range of process-related and organizational knowledge.

Gist Limited, a leading U.K. supply chain solutions provider, needed to improve the speed, efficiency, and traceability of its enterprise interfaces. The company's success depends on its ability to consistently deliver superior service 24/7 despite challenging targets. Gist's IT systems had to be as reliable as the rest of its business, otherwise, it would escalate very quickly. If there was an unplanned middleware outage, file or data issue lasting longer than 20 minutes, the business would already be saying, 'Now it's too late. We're going to have to go manual and pick to an estimate.' This increases costs, incurs customer fines, and affects the company's reputation. Gist's supply chain is incredibly fast: A sandwich produced by a supplier in Scotland is available for sale by a store in the south of England, more than 500 miles away, a mere 24 hours after manufacture.

CWS-boco, a specialist in lavatory hygiene, floor mats and textile services, has a clear focus—to always remain the leader in quality and innovation. The corresponding demands on enterprise IT are high. Accurate analysis of processing times are needed for a targeted and rapid increase in the company’s service quality. Estimated times are not enough. In Germany alone, more than 200,000 companies of all sizes and from all industries rely on CWS-boco’s services. A nationwide service network with more than 60 locations, 21 washing and processing plants and more than 600 service vehicles ensures that customer needs are always met throughout the entire service cycle. CWS-boco handles everything from order taking, delivery and all cleaning and repair steps to pick up and exchange of equipment, clothing and consumables.