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ING Bank Turkey aimed to enhance customer service and market share by making banking accessible through mobile devices, the Internet, or branches. The bank faced challenges such as lack of transparency in service levels, inefficient processes, and user-unfriendly systems for both customers and employees. They needed to streamline processes, decentralize operations, and increase service and sales while differentiating their distribution with new third-party channels.

Lufthansa Cargo’s IT systems had evolved into a complex and heterogeneous structure centered around the host-based MOSAIK application, which dated back to the seventies. This system enabled access to product information, bookings, reservations, and shipment tracking, as well as the exchange of waybill data via electronic data interchange (EDI). However, developing add-ons and adaptations to this system was time-consuming and costly, which was necessary for the optimal support of Lufthansa Cargo’s time-definite services. These services responded to customers’ needs for the rapid shipment of specific types of goods within a precisely defined time frame. The company needed to reduce operating costs by simplifying the complexity of interfaces and maintenance, and to accelerate the time to market of its new products and services. Enterprise and business application integration were identified as key facilitators, connectors, and control systems to achieve these objectives.

Royal Caribbean strives to anticipate guest needs and optimize their experience throughout pre-cruise, cruise, and post-cruise interactions. To accomplish this faster, better, and at lower cost, the IT team realized it needed a higher level integration and a services-oriented architecture that would let them transform legacy applications into reusable and re-combinable software services. The company needed a cohesive enterprise (ship and shore) integration services foundation and governance to manage the service lifecycle and sharing across the organization.

As Katarina Khan, head of enterprise architecture, explains, “Over the last 20 years, the airline industry has evolved from a system of long-established, state-owned carriers to a dynamic free-market industry. There are a lot of low-cost airlines now, and for passengers, it’s become very much about a digital experience—self-service apps for booking, re-booking, and flight updates. “Back in 2001, our challenge was to move away from old point-to-point integrations and become more loosely coupled—to reuse integrations and have a very reliable, secure, high-performing infrastructure. We wanted to give the business a shorter time to market and make it easy to integrate with partners and communicate with our customers in a modern way. If we didn’t modernize, it would have been very difficult to deploy new solutions to meet customer demand.”

Over the years, Societe Generale’s Risk, HR, Accounting, Procurement, and other business units (BUs) had each built their own information systems to meet business needs. These systems had evolved into separate silos of technologies with no plan for reuse. The results included high development and maintenance costs and data discrepancies that ultimately impacted the ability to make informed decisions. To overcome these issues and industrialize integration between business units, Societe Generale’s IT management decided to implement a platform to manage and govern data exchanges: the Système d’Echange Groupe (SEG), or Group Exchange System.

Swisscom faced significant challenges due to intense competition from local Telco operators and over-the-top providers that use local network resources. Additionally, the company was undergoing a rapid transformation to digital business, which necessitated an organizational restructuring and IT platform consolidation. The primary challenge was not only integrating technologies and IT platforms but also integrating people from different divisions to create solutions for the entire company. Without successful integration, Swisscom risked slower product creation, increased costs, and reduced revenues.

The rapid pace of change in the telecom industry presents a major challenge to the wireless providers. Consumers are constantly demanding changes like new rate plans, value-added services, better connectivity, and popular mobile applications. Throughout the industry, companies fight to keep up with the expectations of customers. As applications on mobile devices become richer and begin to generate more data, T-Mobile strives to be at the forefront of change. Consumers expect to see updated data in their apps the moment they open the phones, which necessitates automatic updating of data and faster transmission speeds. The sheer volume of traffic that smart phones and mobile apps generate is going up exponentially. By adopting the right technologies, T-Mobile wants to provide exemplary service and connectivity to its customers.

At Western Union, customers are central to everything. The company aims to make financial transactions as fast and secure as possible, with no margin for error. Customers are increasingly embracing new technologies, especially in regions like Indonesia, India, and Africa, where adoption is faster than in some developed countries. This shift brings new requirements, such as the need to complete transactions on mobile devices. Western Union faced challenges in integrating its payments ecosystem with hundreds of banks, half a million locations, and various post offices, ATM networks, mobile devices, and online and retail locations.

BMO Financial Group faced the challenge of meeting customer expectations in real-time across various channels, including branches, call centers, and digital platforms. With the rise of digital marketing and social media, customers expected personalized and timely interactions. The bank needed to simplify and automate processes, provide real-time information, and create data visualizations to make efficient decisions on how best to serve customers.

Retail giant Marks and Spencer wanted to empower its business analysts to learn more about the business and use that knowledge for better decision-making. They aimed to improve the productivity of the organization, particularly focusing on IT. This included optimizing the number of people working on projects and improving the speed at which solutions could be delivered. M&S started looking for a solution that would supply self-service data access and empower employees to confidently use data to answer key business questions without IT support.

BroadReach faced a significant challenge in improving healthcare outcomes due to the fragmented nature of data across various clinics, hospitals, and NGOs. The delay in data reporting, especially for late-stage HIV and TB patients, was critical as it could take weeks to get a report, leading to severe health consequences. The primary challenge was to integrate and understand data from multiple sources quickly and effectively to make informed decisions that could save lives.

In the semiconductor industry, constant margin improvement is a common challenge, and no different for NXP Semiconductors. They have a complex sales model involving direct sales to customers and through distributor channels. Managing distributor incentives and ensuring no margin leakage across different regions was a significant challenge. The traditional, static BI environment was slow and highly dependent on IT, making it difficult to add new data columns or graphs to reports. Analysts spent more time pulling data from various sources rather than analyzing it, leading to delays in identifying and acting on outliers.

Though nonprofits want data, they don’t always have the ability to get it. “When we start a project to help a nonprofit, we sometimes see a data collection issue, and not collecting data can have implications on funding. Funders are the biggest group demanding data from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), nonprofits, and even government,” says Heeke. At the same time, funders aren’t always keen on the idea of their donations going towards analytics tools. “There’s a huge opportunity to use enterprise-level tools for social impact and finding ways to make this technology accessible to the non-profit community is critical.” “It’s really about the quality of data and the ability to make the data visible and useful to a wide audience. People forget that good ideas come from people on the ground, and not necessarily from the analyst in an office,” says Heeke.

digitalSTROM aimed to create an infrastructure for smart homes that integrates cloud-based services like weather and security. The platform needed to handle high performance and low latency, be open and secure, and integrate various technologies from multiple partners. It also had to prioritize events from IoT devices, ensuring fast responses for critical alerts like fire alarms while managing less urgent events efficiently.

Like many companies in the energy industry, the challenge for Cargill was the volume of its diverse data and the difficulty of processing it quickly to enable fast response to market events. Without a strategic partnership, Cargill would have had to develop these solutions internally, which would not be ideal. The company needed a way to manage and analyze large volumes of data efficiently to make timely and informed decisions.

In 2007, XL committed to becoming a leader in a challenging market, one with 98 percent prepaid subscriptions and a state-owned telco that held over 50 percent market share. One challenge was that functional IT systems were in discrete silos, which did not allow the company to respond and support the business effectively. XL required a platform that would provide reliability, scalability, and allow for agile delivery of functionality. Additionally, XL's marketing challenge was to predict customer desires to optimize sales and marketing, understand customer needs, and identify opportunities to provide value.

ZE clients were looking for self-service BI, and ZE needed to decide whether to build or partner for this solution. Building in-house would require more developers, a longer time to market, and a shift in focus. ZE's clients demanded fast data availability and scalability in terms of software, architecture, technology, support, pricing, capability, and growth. ZE aimed to empower clients with the best total solution to maintain and grow its market share.

As QSuper transitions to providing superannuation management for a broader range of customers, the demands of a more competitive market suggested the need for change. The company aimed to improve operational efficiencies by streamlining back-office functions and reducing costs. QSuper faced challenges with application silos created by various business functions running separate operations and point-to-point interfaces that resulted in a brittle integration infrastructure and disjointed communications. This complexity made it difficult to deliver solutions promptly, affecting customer experience and increasing costs due to inefficiencies in communications.

eClinicalWorks aimed to transition from merely capturing healthcare data to converting it into actionable insights. The solution needed to provide simple answers to complex problems, present analyses that were comprehensible and visually appealing to end users, and facilitate the extraction of data from silos. The company initially considered developing its own software but decided to integrate TIBCO Spotfire into its existing EHR application after recognizing its potential to generate new revenue from existing customers and its strong reputation in the healthcare industry.

For its new always-on, all-digital Hello bank! project, BNL aimed to improve customer acquisition by offering innovative, customer-focused banking services. The project required implementing new technology and staying updated with technological innovations. BNL faced several challenges, including transitioning from traditional, manual workflows to digital business processes, reducing costs, and moving from centralized back-office management to distributed management. They needed a robust infrastructure for application integration due to the heterogeneous applications built over the years, which lacked standardization.

Sage’s customers wanted more visibility into the talent searches it was performing and to dramatically outperform in the recruiting market. The company aimed to increase visibility into what people were doing, what was going on in the search, and also into their recommended strategy for searches. They wanted to differentiate themselves using technology.

Banco Sabadell aimed to transition to a new digital banking model to meet the demands of more discerning digital customers. The bank faced challenges with complex legacy systems that were not integrated, leading to increased costs and longer time-to-market for new cross-system requirements. The primary goal was to simplify operations, administration, and customer relationships to deliver top-quality financial services and enhance customer satisfaction.

The company began to notice exponential growth in information. It wasn’t just the amount of data that was growing, but the sources, diversity, and complexity of data was also increasing. The need was no longer as simple as managing growth; companies now needed to react and manage data quality and governance. On top of all of that, they can’t lose sight of the true purpose of gathering data: to inform their business decisions. Cadeon’s customers demanded agile, innovative technologies that could help them deal with, and benefit from, the explosion in data they were experiencing.

Oil and gas is saturated with tools and software, presenting an opportunity for data science to connect across domains and provide unique workflows. Ruths.ai aimed to be a data science partner and trusted advisor by delivering quality solutions and good advice. They sought technologies that enabled easy deployment at enterprise scale and allowed end-users to gain trust and exercise intuition. Without the right technologies, Ruths.ai would be limited in their ability to deliver and connect with clients.

Recently, the oil and gas industry has experienced a sharp decline in prices, putting a strain on cash flows and project economics. R. Lacy Services saw this as an opportunity to acquire oil and gas assets at lower evaluations. However, the company faced challenges with inefficient data capture and data stored in multiple sources, which hindered their ability to make informed decisions. The goal was to provide decision-makers with 24/7 access to data to improve profitability and identify high-quality acquisition candidates.

The oil and gas industry faces significant challenges in maximizing the use of analytics tools like TIBCO Spotfire. Companies need to increase production and reduce costs while dealing with competitive pressures and commodity price fluctuations. Inefficient workflows and the use of multiple tools can hinder decision-making and lead to falling behind competitors. Standardizing on a single, powerful tool like Spotfire can help companies become more efficient and make better decisions.

Yellow Pages, a well-known Canadian digital media and marketing solutions company, faced the challenge of transforming its business from traditional print directories to the digital world. With consumers increasingly looking for information online, on smartphones, and on social platforms, the company needed to adapt to these new search methods. The primary challenge was to ensure that the information provided was complete, accurate, up-to-date, and rich. The company had multiple sources of merchant information, which, if published online without proper management, would lead to incomplete or duplicate listings. This would result in a loss of users, as consumers do not accept inaccurate information. The company's vision was to have efficient, systematic, and controlled curation of directory content by implementing the right governance, people, processes, and tools. The Content Accuracy & Relevance (CAR) initiative aimed to acquire, maintain, and deliver the richest, most accurate, up-to-date, and relevant content to consumers, while providing advertisers with exceptional ROI for lead generation and customer acquisition.

Istrabenz Plini faced significant challenges in maintaining customer loyalty and operational efficiency due to manual reporting processes. The company relied heavily on ERP systems, spreadsheets, and custom-made legacy systems, which led to errors and inefficiencies. The inability to automate reporting and reduce errors posed a risk of losing customers who demanded high reliability and care. The need for a flexible and configurable reporting tool was critical to meet the daily or hourly demand for ad hoc analytics from various departments such as logistics, sales, production, and finance.

Over the years, Syntelli Solutions has served over 100 clients across various industries, including banking, financial services, healthcare, and sports. The primary challenge is to help clients leverage data analytics platforms to gain actionable insights. Creating dashboards is easy, but deriving insights that improve market share or profitability is difficult. The key requirements are ease of use for all types of users and enterprise-class scalability.

Families have choices about where to send their students, so education, like other industries, has to demonstrate that it’s providing a value-added product. CNG seeks to be a top school in Colombia and Latin America to compete for excellent teachers in the international marketplace. The data comes from standardized testing companies as Excel files, and merging these data sources is error-prone. Additionally, the data in the student information system is manually entered by hundreds of teachers, leading to data quality issues. Without addressing these challenges, teachers would lack the information needed to develop interventions for students, and the school couldn't allocate financial resources effectively.