X

Hunter Industries saw an opportunity to leverage cellular connectivity to deliver new features and services to irrigation controller customers, but ran into operational challenges related to managing SIM activations, data plan management and billing. This became even more complex with every new geographical market and wireless carrier network. All of this complexity made it more difficult to quickly scale their business and required more of their focus to be pulled away from their core business operations of building and selling irrigation products. 

Eurowind Energy, one of Europe's leading developers and operators of photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbine projects, faced a significant challenge in establishing a comprehensive cybersecurity infrastructure that could adapt during periods of rapid business growth. The company needed to prevent malicious cyber-attacks from impacting its IT infrastructure and protect the critical energy business and industry from downtime. The growth of renewable energy from a niche investment to a critical piece of national infrastructure has increased the need for robust cybersecurity measures. As national energy grids become smarter and more international, the flow of data and touch points increase, thereby expanding the potential attack surface. Eurowind wanted to establish complete visibility of its security posture across its network, cloud, and mobile environments. It sought immediate protection and prevention, as well as an understanding of new threats.

AESI, a company providing engineering and consulting services to electric utility generation, transmission, distribution, and independent system operators, faced a significant challenge in securing its hybrid cloud environment. The company needed to reduce time and costs associated with security infrastructure management and gain flexibility for quick response to threats and other events. AESI operates in a highly regulated industry and is subject to stringent reliability and security requirements, making it crucial to maintain a highly secure IT infrastructure with high-availability, next-generation security capabilities, and a full range of controls. The company had moved from premises-based infrastructure to a hybrid cloud environment, and when support costs escalated for its previous firewall solution provider, the Technology team began looking for a new solution.

Glotel, a specialized supplier of workforce and project management solutions for wireless solutions and IT/data network industries, was facing significant challenges with its legacy system. The system was slow, server-based, and offered very little insight into the recruiters’ activity. The reports generated were comprised of arcane files and were not user-friendly. The reporting process was time-consuming, complicated, and only yielded basic metrics. Managers needed insights into their recruiters’ activities and efforts to gauge efficacy. Glotel also wanted a system that could easily integrate with other solutions, such as CRM. The company was in dire need of a solution that could improve its reporting capabilities and overall efficiency.

Zoro, a subsidiary of Grainger, is a supplier of industrial tools and MRO products to small businesses and individuals. As the company expanded its e-commerce business to include larger enterprise businesses, it faced new integration requirements. Zoro had acquired several large business customers with different procurement requirements from its original customer base. IT Director at Zoro, Kiko Stefanov, was tasked with integrating these customers with Zoro’s ERP. The challenge was to find an integration platform that could support varying integration needs, including full EDI support, orders via Excel or CSV files, and e-commerce platforms. The solution had to be user-friendly enough for non-technical customer service agents and junior developers to monitor, maintain, and build integrations to meet the requirements of new customers.

Raycom Sports, a production and marketing company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, faced the challenge of meeting the high expectations of fans for game day broadcasts. The company, which produces live broadcasts of 140 football and basketball games for the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) each year, needed to deliver an immersive, fast-paced, and entertaining experience across multiple media platforms. The challenge was not only to capture the game but also to generate compelling content from it. The increasing demand for content and the need to keep up with consumption demands required a robust and efficient technology solution. Furthermore, Raycom Sports had to manage the escalating need for storage due to the increasing content creation and the urgent requirement to preserve ACC history, which was recorded on 25,000 tapes dating back to the early 1980s.

The Futuristics, a songwriting and production duo, faced the challenge of creating and composing a diverse range of music genres, from pop to hip-hop to dance records. They needed a flexible, powerful Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that could handle their creative demands and allow them to focus on their artistry. The duo, Alex Schwartz and Joe Khajadourian, had a diverse musical background and tastes, which they wanted to incorporate into their music production. However, the challenge was to find a technology that could seamlessly integrate their diverse styles and help them evolve from beat makers to hit makers.

CampusGuard, a cybersecurity and compliance organization catering to campus-based entities such as higher education, healthcare, and state and local government, faced a significant challenge in 2022. The team at CampusGuard was seeking to update their content to stay competitive and capture the attention of their learners. However, they needed to ensure that their content redesign not only engaged their audience but also met strict accessibility standards. These standards were based on WCAG 2.0 VPAT version 2.4 compliance, which required careful attention to detail and a deep understanding of accessibility requirements.

Ekahau, a global leader in wireless network solutions, was facing a significant challenge with their data management. Despite serving more than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies, they were not satisfied with their current standing. They were aiming for a highly segmented growth strategy, but their existing database was filled with non-standardized, duplicate, and outdated data. There were also significant gaps in account information and corporate family trees. This poor data quality was hindering their ability to analyze and understand their current customers, segment their market, and assign related accounts within a family tree to a single representative. This was preventing them from making strategic decisions about their target market, hiring, and account assignment decisions. Furthermore, they were unable to effectively serve and grow their large corporate and enterprise accounts. The onset of the pandemic and the shift to remote work further complicated their situation.

Lacework, a cloud security platform, was looking to establish an account-based marketing (ABM) program. The company had a very targeted ideal customer profile (ICP), making ABM a suitable strategy. To build this program, Lacework hired Mandy Hanson, Director of Global Account-Based Marketing. Her task was to create impactful campaigns for Lacework’s top strategic accounts. However, the existing ABM platform was not delivering the desired results, prompting the need for a more effective solution.

Chubbies, an ecommerce company specializing in men’s shorts, faced significant challenges as its wholesale arm grew rapidly. The company had to increase its workforce to manage the complex orders and maintain EDI compliance, particularly when dealing with large retailers like Nordstrom. Chubbies initially tried to address its growth by replacing Quickbooks with NetSuite and selected Celigo’s Shopify-NetSuite integration app to automate the order-to-cash processes. However, the company still struggled with EDI compliance and faced difficulties integrating their EDI solution with NetSuite due to mismatched field structures. The EDI solution also did not support automatic updates for transactions in NetSuite, making it virtually impossible to manage from a manual perspective. This resulted in infractions that significantly ate into their profit margins.

In 2014, Extreme Reach, a marketing and advertising company, tripled in size due to an acquisition of a larger company. Over the next couple of years, they outgrew their previous ERP provider. They experienced a lot of cash application problems, issues with collections, and a huge transaction volume that wasn’t as visible as it needed to be. This led to the decision to switch ERPs. After moving forward with an ERP migration, the team was facing a challenge of manually processing checks. They were processing checks the old fashion way, just printing checks, putting them in front of their CFO and having someone sign every single check. This was a time consuming and manual process. With having a high volume of invoices and payments, manual processes had to be replaced with automated strategies.

FXR Racing, a global supply chain leader in high-performance apparel for competitive motocross and snowmobile racing, faced significant challenges with its ecommerce operations. Initially, the company used the Magento 1 Community platform for its ecommerce operations and had developed a custom integration between Magento 1 and NetSuite through an agency. However, this custom integration was constantly breaking and required continuous maintenance. Additionally, the Magento 1 storefront was not meeting the company's needs, prompting a decision to migrate to Shopify. Furthermore, the company faced challenges with large B2B orders coming via NuOrder, which sent the entire catalog of over 65,000 SKUs and six different currencies every time it was updated. This often resulted in orders being skipped or going missing during the process. FXR also had issues with a global EDI provider, who didn’t provide the flexibility and customization needed for their operations.

GetBusy, a software company specializing in document management and productivity apps, was facing challenges with their homegrown ERP/CRM system. The system was inefficient, making it difficult to access data, especially when salespeople were on the move. It was nearly impossible to find invoices or see what products each customer used, leading to a lack of visibility into the state of each customer and prospect. This was a significant challenge to GetBusy's business model, which operates on custom configuration, where product and pricing are individualized for each customer. To modernize their operations, GetBusy selected Zendesk for Support and Customer Success management, NetSuite for their ERP, and Salesforce for their CRM. However, simply migrating to these new applications wouldn't solve all their problems. They needed complete data synchronization across these applications, meaning customer invoices and billing from NetSuite needed to be accessible in Salesforce to accurately assess custom pricing for each deal. Additionally, recurring billing from other product lines and SaaS business models processed on Chargebee also needed to be integrated with NetSuite.

Kevins Worldwide, a company specializing in custom promotion and apparel products, faced a significant challenge in managing orders from 40 different ecommerce sites hosted on the 3dcart platform. The process of manually importing each order from the ecommerce platform to the ERP for fulfillment was time-consuming and prone to errors. This manual process was diverting staff from focusing on customer relationships and product development. To address this, Kevins Worldwide switched to Acumatica as their ERP for a cloud-based solution that could scale their business. They partnered with InfoSourcing Inc. to build a custom integration solution that automated sales order and fulfillment processes between 3dcart and Acumatica. However, they wanted to support other ecommerce platforms to enhance their industry-specific ecommerce solution. When they decided to offer BrightStores and Magento as alternative ecommerce platforms, they realized that developing such integrations would be a lengthy and costly process.

SURA Seguros Chile, a part of the Sura Group, was facing challenges in automating its business processes to offer better services to its customers and comply with its innovation policy. The company wanted to automate its Business Request process and the creation of Insurance Policy quotes process. These processes were initially carried out manually using Excel, leading to errors, delays, and lack of activity monitoring. The company was in need of a solution that could automate these processes, reduce errors, and allow for real-time monitoring and management.

Northumbrian Water, one of the UK's largest water utilities, faced a significant challenge in extending workflow to remote environments, including underground and overground assets, as well as to suppliers and contractors not on its enterprise network. The company needed to track the physical condition of hundreds of chemical tanks, a task that was previously done using spreadsheets and paper forms. These methods were not searchable and did not facilitate analysis. Tanks that corrode can leak toxic chemicals that damage the environment and may seriously injure people. They can also expose the utility to tens of thousands of pounds in regulatory fines and even higher civil damages. The company needed a solution that would allow for prompt and accurate recording of tank conditions and facilitate easy analysis of the data.

Tenthwave, a full-service digital agency, was grappling with the challenge of managing multiple phone systems across its various offices. The company had a Nortel hardwire PBX, a self-managed Asterisk server, and Vonage, while its remote employees used their personal cell phones. As the company expanded, the need to add more staff to the system led to increased competition for resources. Tenthwave heavily relied on telephone communication for customer interaction, with conference calling being a crucial business tool. However, the company was paying $50 per conference line per month, and the number of lines purchased was limited, necessitating its own management process. The company was using multiple technologies for voice conferencing, leading to confusion and inefficiency.

Gator Motorsports, the Formula SAE team based out of the University of Florida, was faced with the challenge of improving the performance of their Formula-style racecar. The team aimed to decrease the weight and increase the strength of the car parts for better competition performance and faster design. The critical components that needed redesigning included the pedal box and suspension bell cranks. The team's goal was to develop and construct a single-seat race car for the non-professional weekend autocross racer with the best overall package of design, construction, performance, and cost. The challenge was not only to engineer and produce a reliable, high-performance vehicle but also to organize and manage a team to develop a feasible product for the market.

The case study presents four distinct challenges faced by different sectors of the marine industry. The first challenge was to design mooring systems, considering the tension in the mooring lines, the movement of the floater, anchor capacity, and interactions of lines with the seabed. The second challenge was to equip ROV pilots training with simulation software and real-time data about structure, cable, and umbilical tensions. The third challenge was to efficiently assess the motion/response of tidal energy platforms in complex wind, wave, current, and loading, and ensure the design is maintainable. The last challenge was to determine the effect of strong tidal currents acting on cable and barge during cable lay operations and determine the operational impacts of having to lay cable after a slack tide.

OHB System AG, a leading space company in Europe, faced a significant challenge in the development of optical instruments used in satellites. The company had to ensure the structural safety of a satellite mirror subsystem and therefore used CAE software in their development process. The challenge was to ensure that the device would function correctly and last as long as predicted without any fatigue failure when in space. All satellite parts have to withstand very heavy loads and vibrations, especially during launch, and it would be prohibitively expensive to exchange them once they have been launched into space. The engineers had to predict some of the loads as a function of time (deterministic loads), but they could only estimate others statistically (random loads). For these random loads, the engineers normally employ a random environment introducing broadband and high frequency vibration into the system, which comes from the engine, acoustic loads or aerodynamic turbulences.

The case study presents three distinct challenges faced by maritime operations. The first challenge was to determine the spar response in waves of various frequency, amplitude, and direction in tidal platform analysis. This was crucial to understand the impact of different sea conditions on the structure. The second challenge was in towing operation analysis, where the task was to determine how the tow point moves in different sea states. This was important to ensure the safety and efficiency of towing operations. The third challenge was in cable ferry analysis, where the objective was to determine wave radiation and diffraction loads on a cable ferry. This was necessary to understand the forces acting on the ferry and ensure its stability and safety.

The challenge was to develop an effective seismic retrofit design for a hypothetical unreinforced masonry structure. This was part of a bachelor's project by Davide Gamberini, a student at Politecnico di Milano University's ACTLAB, the Architecture Computation and Technology Laboratory. The focus of the project was on unreinforced masonry structures, which are common in historic buildings in Italy. Given Italy's reputation as one of the most earthquake-prone regions in Europe, there was a pressing need to develop improved retrofitting strategies to preserve the country's cultural heritage. The challenge was to analyze the structure of a hypothetical unreinforced masonry building and find structural improvements to enhance the building's seismic performance.

The Bionic Tower, a high-rise tower proposal in Abu Dhabi designed by the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA), is a symbol of LAVA’s visions of tomorrow’s architecture. The design unifies nature’s organization system with advanced computing technology, to achieve an architectural expression of ultimate lightness, efficiency, and sophistication. The structural expression of this architecture is a proposed organic exoskeleton which acts to structurally stabilize the building. The major challenge was to generate a unique structural form that is lightweight and organic in appearance in order to achieve the free-form exoskeleton structure.

The Technische Universität Dresden's Formula Student Team faced the challenge of designing and manufacturing a new Formula Student steering column mount. The existing steering column mount was complex, consisting of four different areas at different angles, making it difficult to produce with a 5-axis milling machine. The solution to produce this part consisted of four different milled aluminum parts that were all bolted together. The team was looking for a way to simplify the design and production process, reduce the weight of the part, and improve its performance characteristics.

Soueast, a China-based automobile manufacturer, was faced with the challenge of optimizing the crash performance of its DX7 vehicle while reducing reliance on physical tests. Crash safety is a crucial part of the development process, and designing a car body that has good collision energy absorption performance is one of the main goals of automotive design. However, due to the high cost of prototype crash tests, it is not practical to validate a design’s feasibility through trial and error alone. The key to the success of virtual simulation is dependent on whether the simulation results are an accurate representation of the physical test results. The target for the DX7 project was to achieve the best possible crashworthiness while under tight time and budget constraints. The two main challenges were ensuring the CAE simulation results accurately reflect the physical crash test and analyzing and optimizing the restraint system.

Biberach University of Applied Sciences, specifically the Institute for Architecture and Urban Development, was faced with the challenge of creating modern, functional, stiff, and light architectural designs. The university wanted to provide its students with practical experience and introduce them to cutting-edge design and engineering tools. The challenge was to create designs that were not only aesthetically pleasing but also structurally efficient and cost-effective. The university also aimed to foster a higher level of collaboration between engineers and architects, reduce the number of design iterations, and ensure that the final design remained faithful to the initial concept.

AMETEK, a leading global manufacturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices, was contracted by Lockheed Martin to design a portable flight suit chiller unit for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. The chiller unit works with a pilot cooling vest to maintain a pilot’s deep body core temperature at ≤ 100.4° F (38° C). The JSF program aims to deliver affordable, next-generation striker aircraft weapon systems for the U.S. Navy, Air Force, Marines, and allies. Pilots flying these aircrafts are subject to high levels of acceleration – up to 9g – and must wear G-suits to prevent blackouts. To prevent pilots suffering from heat stress in the cockpit and on the ground, portable flight suit chiller units are needed. The design challenge was to monitor multiple variables and develop the code that goes to the controlling device to make those adjustments automatically. The chiller unit must also run within its power limits to prevent damage.

Dalhousie University, a public, research-intensive institution in Nova Scotia, Canada, faced a challenge in keeping its mechanical engineering curriculum current with industry demands. The university, which has a strong focus on research and practical design work, was receiving feedback from the industry that students lacked knowledge of fundamental tools such as finite element analysis (FEA). Although FEA was included in the curriculum, it was only an elective course in the final year, taken by a small number of students, and completed after all work terms. The university recognized the need to expose every mechanical engineering student to the basics of FEA at an earlier stage. Furthermore, the university needed to identify state-of-the-art engineering tools and provide support for their implementation in a large-scale program, while managing budgetary constraints.

Texas Instruments (TI) was faced with the challenge of characterizing their FAST™ observer, a part of their InstaSPIN™ technology. This technology enables designers to identify, tune, and fully control any type of three-phase, variable speed, sensorless, synchronous or asynchronous motor control system. The task was assigned to Dave Wilson, Senior Motor Systems Engineer with the C2000 group. Wilson attempted to characterize the FAST™ observer by setting up a dynamometer (dyno) system with a circuit board to control it. However, this process was slow, tedious, and required constant recalibration due to output variances over time and temperature changes. Furthermore, the electromagnetic torque could not be measured on the dyno, only the shaft torque could. This was a problem since the software could not be properly tested as the hardware he was using was not adequately equipped to test it.