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Münchener Hypothekenbank eG, an independent real estate bank, was looking for innovative ways to stay competitive and decided to coordinate and automate internal processes within its private-client business. However, its existing process optimization system had its limits. The three processes - directing incoming mail, internal releasing of outgoing mail, and working together between departments on loan applications, across different systems - relied on the same process engine, making it impossible to carry out maintenance on one process independently of the others. Furthermore, the processes lacked the functions and interfaces to be freely configurable, resulting in increased complexity and a higher error rate.

R+V Versicherung AG, one of the largest insurance companies in Germany, was facing challenges with its old, monolithic software solution for business process management (BPM). The inflexible system required months of preparation for a release change, involving many manual tests and complete environment rebuilds. This process often resulted in system failures, negatively impacting the customer experience. Furthermore, updates were only carried out every few years, with smaller updates several times a year, limiting the company's agility and ability to respond to new requirements quickly.

The logistics industry is characterized by complex rules and regulations, governing imports and exports across international borders, leading companies to build deep business process knowledge over many years. Automating these deeply customized processes with off-the-shelf software leads to poor solutions and user dissatisfaction. But individual software solutions developed specifically for companies are unreasonably expensive. Like every business, the production and logistics industries are facing intense pressure to modernize. Constant optimization of processes is necessary to maintain and differentiate a company in the face of ever-tougher competition.

The hospitality industry was facing a crisis due to the global pandemic. The business model was workforce-heavy and expensive, and the industry was dealing with technology limitations that prevented them from offering a seamless data-driven digital guest experience or an intuitive employee solution. SV Group, a leading hospitality company operating in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, wanted to create a disruptive, end-to-end digital guest journey and an all-encompassing employee solution. They wanted to make it seamless for guests to book, check-in, enjoy their stay, and check out, thereby creating a superior customer experience. At the same time, they wanted to provide their employees with a one-stop solution that allowed them to service their guests in a proactive way. The biggest challenge of this ambitious project was orchestrating various cloud microservices to ensure critical processes run without issue to deliver a consistently exceptional guest experience.

SV Informatik, a provider of custom IT solutions for insurance companies, was in search of a new modeling tool for business processes. They needed a solution that would allow for process documentation, partial automation, and closer cooperation between the specialist area and IT. The company also faced challenges in handling mass loss events, such as storms, which could result in thousands of damage reports within a few days. These reports had to be manually transferred to the relevant insurance system, a process that was time-consuming and inefficient.

Automating land titling and taxation requires developing workflows that often incorporate more than a century’s worth of historical land and title data, mortgage information, cadastral maps, and more. In some cases, new titles may bring previously unregistered land onto tax rolls for the first time, creating new records adding tax revenue for a municipality. Land titling offices also have to keep up with an ever-changing regulatory environment and tax structure. Automated workflows for land titling and deed registration aren’t static, and land administrators need flexibility to customize titling and deed processes regularly and visibility to see that land transfers are processed and recorded efficiently.

The insurance and financial services firm was struggling with a manual quote-to-proposal process that was inefficient and negatively impacting revenue. The process involved employees manually reviewing each quote, extracting more than 200 fields of data to create a spreadsheet, and developing a consolidated report presented to the client. Once a plan was selected, the company would have to prepare a customer onboarding booklet with all coverage details. The entire process was tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error. The cost of business with small clients was incredibly high due to the manual nature of the process.

The company’s vendor invoice intake process was too time-consuming, repetitive, prone to error and delays. One of the client’s teams handles vendor invoicing for multiple business units, processing invoices from more than 30 different systems. With more than a thousand invoices coming in per month, it was time-consuming to collect and process data sent from numerous systems and in a variety of formats. Employees had to manually extract data from every document. Analyzing data, identifying missing information, and reuploading invoices was time-consuming and repetitive. The required bandwidth to pull invoices from various systems would stretch when the volume of invoices would increase, putting more stress and pressure on each team member. A high volume of invoices meant the team was more prone to errors, which slowed processing times and created billing delays.

Dentsu Aegis Network, a media and digital marketing communications company, was facing challenges with its mid-office media activation processes. These processes were repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Each customer had different needs, requiring Dentsu to adapt to each one. The process required extensive back-and-forth between multiple stakeholders and the speed was impacted by how quickly team members could respond to customers. An entire team was needed to absorb the pre-reconciliation actualization work to confirm media spend for large accounts.

Bosch, a global manufacturing company, was in need of a strong, collaborative automation technology partner to accelerate its digital transformation. The company was looking for a solution that could help them evaluate their operations, design and implement automated processes, and uncover ways to scale their efforts. The challenge was to find a technology partner that could meet Bosch's rigorous cloud security needs, critical for a company of its size and global footprint. Additionally, the company was also using RPA tools, so the new technology partner needed to have tight integrations to unlock even more value from across Bosch’s technology stack.

The transportation and logistics company was facing internal and external pressures to increase their operational efficiency. Much of the operational work was manual and tactical, often leading to high turnover rates due to lack of employee motivation and engagement. At the same time, there was pressure to do more with less, as consumer expectations were high, yet most were unwilling to pay more for the convenience of faster shipping. The company needed to align repetitive tasks with automation and enable employees to focus on the engaging, human-centric functions that drive value to the employee, the company, and customers.

The company needed to help its customers disclose all leases on the balance sheet due to changes in both international and US regulations. The company’s customers, mostly large enterprises, have thousands of lease agreements, which must be scoured for relevant information. The task was difficult to automate because lease agreements are not standardized and because the same type of information can be expressed using many different terms, causing poor results from keyword-based systems.

The support cases handled by the company’s support engineers were difficult and time-consuming to resolve because they referred to complicated technical issues in a complex networking environment. The fact that customers often used different terminology than what is used in the company internal documentation made the task even more difficult. Efficient handling of support cases was predicated on finding a solution from past cases instead of troubleshooting the issue from scratch. Attempts to reduce the time to find meaningful results with other search-based solutions failed, as they were not able to quickly and consistently identify similar support cases and did not improve the support team’s productivity.

The Fortune 500 insurance company was struggling with the manual extraction of key information from prior insurance plans issued by the competition. The process was tedious, error-prone, and expensive due to labor costs. The company had to review tens of thousands of policies per year, each with their own jargon and format. The complexity of the plans, with multiple entries per row and multiple employee classes of coverage, made the task even more challenging. Manual work often overlooked important provisions, leading to inaccurate quote calculations and profit losses for the company. Conventional tools failed to extract accurate information, forcing the company to rely on expensive manual labor.

The biopharmaceutical company was facing a challenge in tracking off-label usage of their medications. Off-label usage refers to the prescribing of medications in a manner not specified by the FDA and accounts for 10 to 20 percent of all prescriptions written. However, its exact extent is difficult to measure because pharmaceutical companies have no direct feedback mechanism to track what medical conditions their products are prescribed for. The company had no means to monitor how their medications are used as patient records are subject to privacy restrictions and do not allow the company to reconstruct which medication was prescribed for which condition. The company decided to use social media, particularly Reddit, as a source of knowledge about medication usage.

The media company, owning more than 40 publications, was receiving approximately 100 requests per week, corresponding to about 5,000 messages per year and double as many attachments. These Requests for Proposals (RFPs) needed to be classified depending on criteria like vertical market or target audience before being directed to the appropriate department. The challenge was that the RFPs were highly unstructured documents, coming in various formats like email body text or attachments in Word or Powerpoint. The extraction targets were very diverse and, in most cases, with very little context to learn from, making it difficult for state-of-art machine learning systems to deliver satisfactory results.

The bank was looking for ways to improve efficiencies through automation, particularly in the area of credit risk assessment. The complexity in language and structure of wholesale credit agreements made automation difficult. These agreements are complex, 100+-page-documents that are very bespoke because banks use different lending systems. Especially covenants use highly specific, use-case related formulations. Some extractions are straightforward, and the values can be extracted “as is” (no inference necessary), for example: named dates, commitments, rates, parties. Others are more challenging and require fine-grained distinctions between options or covenants (eg redeem deal options, termination options). Here an automation system has to comprehend domain logic based on document structure and relations of extracted items. Pricing-related tables contain many different parameters (applicable margin, interest payment schedules, commitment tables) and it is extremely difficult to automate the extraction of pricing information. This is why the review of credit agreements was still done manually, which cost a lot of time and money to the bank, not mentioning the high error rate of such a mundane task.

The company was receiving between 100,000 and 250,000 customer emails per day in 35 countries. A major challenge with such a high volume of incoming emails was to identify the emails that actually required a response (only 50%). So far, the customer centers spent a significant amount of time sorting out emails that do not need to be processed (e.g. out of office messages, FYI mails, etc.), a task that unnecessarily burdened the teams and increased the costs in the customer centers. The task was further complicated through the use of multiple languages in the emails.

The commercial property insurer with offices worldwide has about 2,000 high value, commercial customers with as many as 30 policies each. The head office creates standard policies which are forwarded to the regional offices and adapted locally. As the company does not use industry standard forms, the binding copies of locally-issued documents may differ from the original in format and content. The process of reviewing the locally-issued policies is done manually and is time consuming. The team responsible for this task spends approximately one third of their time on searching for differences between source policy and final version. So far, this review process could not be automated because of the different file types and formats, and because no tool could understand semantic variations. However, the company sought for an automation solution, as about 70% of the documents still contained errors after the manual review.

SunCoast Blood Bank, a nonprofit organization supplying blood to nine hospitals, was facing challenges with their paper-based record system. The organization used an offsite, secure facility to store paper records. However, record retrieval was slow, information was not searchable, and the long-term storage costs were unsustainable. SunCoast wanted a digital solution providing secure, seamless access to their data as well as sophisticated search functionalities. The organization is required to store donor records for ten years. However, if blood is unusable, that record must be stored indefinitely. If a donor updates the record with travel information or if test results disqualify the blood from being used, SunCoast must immediately amend that donor record and contact the hospital to locate that unit of blood.

GSC Logistics, the largest trucking company operating at the Port of Oakland, was facing challenges due to strict industry regulations. The trucking and shipping industry is highly regulated, requiring companies to store and manage a mountain of paperwork. GSC archives driving logs, hours of service, and daily vehicle maintenance records for over 200 owner-operators who work with them. The company is also required to store quarterly truck inspections and registration documents, driver’s DMV records, license, application, and proof of medical and vehicle insurance. In order to ensure compliance with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) requirements, GSC needed a system to enable them to identify which records were on file and which were missing. The solution also needed to provide information for California Highway Patrol (CHP) audits.

AlphaPet Ventures, a Munich-based start-up specializing in premium pet food, was facing a significant challenge in managing its accounting processes. The company, which handles several thousand orders daily, had a disjointed system for managing incoming invoices. Some invoices were stored as PDF files on servers, while others were kept in paper form and sent weekly to an external accounting department. As the company grew and merged with another start-up, the volume of paper invoices increased significantly, and the storage of invoices in PDF form proved to be inefficient. It became increasingly difficult and time-consuming to obtain an overview of the company’s liabilities, which was crucial for managing its cash flow.

Sebald Cement, a company with around 100 employees, was facing a challenge with their administrative processes. Over the years, the company had accumulated a large volume of files, particularly in the administration department, which was threatening to exceed their filing capacity. The company was in search of a powerful and future-proof document management system (DMS) to digitize their paper-based administrative processes. The aim was not only to reduce the volume of paper and digital storage in their central archive but also to improve the efficiency and transparency of administrative processes. The DMS needed to have integration options with various systems, such as the ERP system Microsoft Dynamics or the accounting program Varial Finanzwesen.

Gartner Towing Services, a rapidly growing company in Germany, was facing limitations with its server capacities and lacked an in-house IT administrator. The company wanted to store not only scanned paper documents but also digital documents from its leading IT applications in a well-organized manner. The aim was to use a uniform search term, for example, the license plate number, to display all documents relating to the services provided in the various business sectors at the touch of a button. The company also wanted to make administrative processes more efficient and transparent.

When the dealership decided to expand and build another Lexus dealership in a nearby community, they did not want to dedicate any of the physical space for record storage. They needed to find an on-premises electronic document management solution that would be compatible with their dealer management software, Reynolds & Reynolds, and allow them to transition to a paperless process. The dealership wanted to maintain total ownership of their data and digitize car sales documentation known as a deal jacket, parts and boutique invoices, repair orders and loaner car records.

Bremer Martinsclub, an association that provides a comprehensive range of services for people with disabilities, was facing challenges due to its rapid growth. The organization was dealing with an increasing volume of paper files and longer processing times. Additionally, the establishment of several decentralized branch offices to make their support structures more handicap-friendly added to the complexity. The organization needed a solution to digitize their business processes, manage the growing volume of paper, and provide access from any location. They were looking for a powerful and flexibly scalable document management system that could be seamlessly integrated into their existing software applications, such as Microsoft Access, Outlook, and an accounting solution from Sage.

LGC Hospitality, a leading hospitality staffing company, was facing challenges with their paper-based application and on-boarding process. The company processes paperwork for over 50,000 applicants a year and issues W2 forms for over 24,000 employees. Each employee had to fill out a 54-page application plus additional paperwork to set up payroll. The application was long and asked for the same information in several locations which candidates found frustrating. LGC staff had to spend a lot of time reviewing applications just to make sure every field was filled in and that every page had been signed. It was also very difficult managing, storing, and sharing this information internally, in addition to pulling information for audits.

Tillamook Bay Community College (TBCC) is a small accredited college located on Oregon’s rural coast. The college staff are trained in and required to follow Lean methodology, which identifies ways to minimize wasted time and resources. When the college received a $2.5 million Title III grant from the US Department of Education, the goal was to use part of this to improve business processes and increase efficiency. The college carried out an independent Lean analysis to determine the impact an electronic document management like DocuWare would have. The results showed a significant time and organizational savings. TBCC needed an affordable Document Management system allowing them to electronically share information, manage student registration, offer faculty fast access to student files for advising purposes and be easily adaptable for departments such as payroll. They also required that the system should integrate with their ERP and Student Information System (Jenzabar).

Moritz of Fort Worth, a privately-owned car dealer group, was facing challenges in managing repair orders and supplemental documents in their service department. The dealership had to comply with each manufacturer’s requirements for document filing, including when date and time stamps are used, and when signatures need to be ink or digital. Failure to fulfill document requirements could result in large fines from manufacturers. Additionally, the dealership had a high employee turnover rate, which meant that they would constantly be training new employees to use the system, so ease-of-use was critical.

Kim Transport Solutions, a transportation service provider in Singapore, was struggling with the management of its paper-based documents. The company was dealing with a steady volume of over 60 paper documents per day, including receipts, invoices, order confirmations, delivery notes, credit records, and printed emails. The documents were often duplicated, leading to a cluttered and inefficient storage system. When customers had queries about invoices, employees had to manually search for the relevant documents in the paper archive, scan them, and send them to the customer. This process was time-consuming and inefficient.