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The healthcare provider faces several challenges. They need to service a wide geographic area and reconcile financial constraints with growing demand. They also need to obtain real-time access to a single source of data, ensure adequate bed and staffing availability, combat bottlenecks and meet emergency demands, and view the status of all hospitals at a moment’s notice.

The biotechnology firm was facing challenges with data consolidation from disparate sources. They were relying on manual Excel-based processes which were inefficient and time-consuming. The firm needed a solution that could handle franchise performance, product launch, market share, patient evolution, competitive and financial data. They were also looking for a solution that could empower end users and provide education.

Greenway Automotive Group, a Florida-based organization running 46 full-service car dealerships across several states, was struggling with its Dealer Management Systems (DMS). The DMS was designed for single dealerships, making it difficult to compile consolidated financial reports, track productivity and trends, or compare the performance of different stores. The old DMS could only achieve one update a day and had limited capabilities for drilling down on various issues and generating automated reports. This compromised effective forward planning. Greenway wanted an enterprise-wide view and a reporting layer above the DMS that could show trends and market conditions, and where views could be easily customized and modified without having to log into 46 different computer systems.

The healthcare industry has been transformed by the advent of electronic health records (EHR), which provide accurate, up-to-date, and complete patient information. Epic, a leading EHR provider, has developed the Epic Caboodle Data Warehouse (CDW) for the storage and retrieval of large amounts of clinical data. However, healthcare organizations often struggle with accessing this data efficiently. Traditional ticketing systems for data queries can result in overlapping communications and lost time. IPC Global, a leading enterprise systems integrator of data, analytics, and cloud solutions, aimed to provide healthcare organizations with more efficient access to every record they have ever created and help them combine data from both inside and outside their organization for vital analysis.

AdventHealth, a healthcare organization, was looking for ways to integrate technology more deeply into the workflows of their frontline workers. They wanted to provide a tool that would help streamline workflows and increase the quality of work life for their clinical team. The challenge was to provide a tool that would be useful from an operational standpoint, providing near-real-time dashboards to give the nursing team and leadership the opportunity for action, not reaction. The goal was to develop a comprehensive tool for all levels of team members, from frontline nurses to the chief nursing officer, that could be used operationally to make actionable decisions to impact both patient outcomes and ensure good stewardship.

Asobanca, a nonprofit institution representing 15 of the 24 biggest private banks in Ecuador, faced a significant challenge in rebuilding people's trust in the banking system following the financial crisis of 1999. The crisis, which was a combination of bad politics, bad banking, and bad luck, resulted in many banks declaring bankruptcy and 64% of the population living below the poverty line. This has led to a lingering lack of confidence in the financial sector. Additionally, the way information on the financial system is collected and distributed in the country posed a significant obstacle. Many different institutions disperse the data, each using their own methodologies of data collecting and processing, making the data often incompatible and difficult to analyze. Furthermore, data access services offered by some companies are expensive and not user-friendly, discouraging many potential users.

Charter Communications, the owner of the Spectrum brand of telecommunications and media services, was facing a significant challenge. In a saturated mobile market, the company wanted to launch new products within a nine-month timeframe. However, its existing technology infrastructure was not capable of delivering the necessary data within this period. The company needed a solution that could rapidly onboard and standardize 200Tb of data from more than 60 sources, and prepare and publish this data to various analytical and production platforms.

Contra Costa Health Services, a safety net system for the residents of Contra Costa county, was struggling with data management. Despite having access to a large amount of data, the organization was unable to extract actionable insights from it. The data systems were limited and decision making often had to be gut-based due to lack of evidence. The culture around data awareness was also very different at the time. Data can tell uncomfortable stories, and those stories can ruffle some feathers if an organization has not made the data maturity journey. Things changed significantly in 2010 with the Affordable Care Act and its funding for electronic health records (EHRs). As a result, in 2012 they went from only using electronic systems primarily for billing and claims to using Epic, an enterprise wide EHR solution. With a consolidated system and a great platform, they suddenly had access to massive quantities of data. The EHR data in the data warehouse was supplemented by developing partnerships with social services, county jails, and other community organizations to share data while following prevailing privacy laws.

The Consumer division of BT aimed to have a BT product in every UK household. To achieve this, they needed to consolidate various BT brand data from different data siloes and data warehouses into a unified view. They also wanted to empower users to interact and explore the data with confidence and trust.

HAN University of Applied Sciences, located in Arnhem and Nijmegen, the Netherlands, wanted to improve the data literacy of its students. The university recognized the importance of equipping students with the ability to understand and exploit data, given the increasing data generation in modern businesses. However, the university faced challenges in providing students with access to data analytics software and a community of experts. They also wanted students to gain practical experience on tools and processes common in the corporate world. The university was looking for a solution that would be cost-effective, given the tight budgets universities often have to work within.

Financial Services organization Meilleurtaux identified an urgent need to deploy commercial and marketing applications for their franchise agencies. The agencies required access to in-depth analysis to make informed decisions that would drive the business. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide the necessary data and analytics to the agencies in a user-friendly and accessible manner.

The global medical devices, pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods manufacturing company was previously collecting data off-hours and storing it in highly structured data warehouses. The reporting was generally at aggregate levels and done in silos. The structured reports were designed to show what happened by plant, by product, over time. This approach was not efficient and did not provide real-time insights into the manufacturing process.

Castrolanda, a Brazilian agricultural co-operative, is facing the challenge of transforming from a physical organization into a digital co-operative. The expansive business has generated a wealth of data that could potentially be leveraged by its members. However, the data is unstructured and difficult for members to access. Everything has to be done in person, as their data portal is too inefficient to provide solutions in a digital way. The vision of Castrolanda is to bring structure to the data, give all members self-service digital access and educate them on how to use Qlik to gain business insights.

The author works at Amazon Produce, a major importer and distributor of fruit, and also teaches business intelligence at universities. The challenge faced by both the company and the students is the need to become data-driven in a world where data skills are increasingly in demand. For Amazon Produce, the complexity of their supply chain, which involves over 50 growers across Latin America and major US retailers, made it difficult to track performance and tell a story about everything that happened along the supply chain. For the students, the challenge was to gain hands-on experience with real-world business intelligence tools and build a portfolio of data visualizations.

As the UK’s largest scheduled coach operator and urban bus provider outside of London, National Express faced several challenges related to business intelligence (BI) and data analytics. The company had to deal with manual reporting from various data siloes, which provided limited insights due to reports showing only one aspect of company performance. The reports also had limited flexibility and analytical capabilities, leading to a high 'event-to-action' latency. To overcome these challenges, the company decided to deliver BI as a service.

Lintech International, a chemical distribution company, was struggling with managing the distribution and sales expertise of more than 2,000 chemical products from over 20 suppliers. This was negatively impacting their productivity and performance. The process of preparing reports from their ERP and CRM systems was time-consuming, taking up to 8 business days per quarter. This delay in data processing and reporting was hindering their ability to make timely and informed decisions, leading to inefficiencies and potential loss of business opportunities.

Amadeus, a leader in SaaS solutions for the airline industry, generates large volumes of data across its various applications. The company faced the challenge of reconciling and analyzing all of this data to produce attractive KPIs. They needed a solution that could handle the large data volumes and provide valuable insights for their operations.

The wine industry was facing a significant data gap. Consumers around the world were constantly sharing their thoughts and feelings about wine, how they buy it, and where they're drinking it, resulting in vast quantities of data. However, there wasn't a good way to track that digital trail to meet consumers where they are. The industry needed a way to harness this data and use it to their advantage. Additionally, there was a fear factor around data, partly due to privacy and security issues. Wine people can also be shy about their lack of knowledge and bandwidth to learn more. There was also a romanticized element of the wine lifestyle that seemed at odds with the concept of data.

Many organizations are either reluctant to fully embrace a data-driven culture, or simply unsure how to get started. One of the first hurdles blocking progress toward full information integration is the belief that data integrity requires extremely limited access. The legacy of this previously messy process is the reluctance of modern organizations to release access to data to the entire organization. Even where staff may want personal involvement, that ongoing fear of losing control is unrelenting. Leaders may believe the perfect solution is to designate a small group of database administrators and allow staff the opportunity to request extractions or factfinding projects. This solution almost always results in bottlenecks and a distancing from the concept of including data in decisions.

At UOB, the traditional approach to data discovery was a per-project process used for regular reporting purposes. Extracting data for these reports was often manual and time-consuming. The reports created were also often one-dimensional and not in real-time as there were limitations when analyzing historical data on Excel files. The bank wanted to make data discovery more accessible, insightful, and relevant to business real-time needs. They also wanted to create a culture driven by data analytics across the organization.

The Town of Oakville, located in Canada, had a wealth of data but lacked the tools for effective analysis and visualization. The existing tool, QlikView, was maintained by IT staff and was not user-friendly for everyday staff. The town needed a solution that was easy to use and could be utilized by a wider pool of employees. The goal was to enable staff to create and use their own dashboards, thereby promoting data literacy and self-service. The town also wanted to ensure data integrity and accuracy, as the insights drawn from data are only as good as the information placed into the system.

The University of Worcester was facing a challenge in meeting the global demand for data specialists through its existing data-driven decisions module. The university wanted to give its students a better understanding of data analysis and data mining by enabling them to visualize the results of their work. Additionally, the university wanted to increase student marketability by providing hands-on experience of commercial software. The challenge was further compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the university to transition to distance teaching.

The challenge faced by mesur.io was to create a platform that could collect, analyze, and present meaningful data for small and mid-sized farms. The agricultural monitoring equipment available in the market was primarily designed for large-scale agriculture and did not provide actionable insights for smaller farms. The founder of mesur.io wanted to create a solution that was affordable and easy to use for the majority of farms worldwide. The solution needed to provide real-time data on soil conditions and offer recommendations based on historical trends. The challenge was to create a user interface that could present the data in a meaningful way and provide real insights rather than just displaying graphs.

DCH, a leading FMCG and Pharmaceutical company, operates across 12 Asian economies and a wide range of product categories. With such a widespread operation, DCH realized that it needed to sustain a deep understanding of both its customers and its business. Gaining such insights would help it work more efficiently today and plan more comprehensively for the future. Data was the key to obtaining this business intelligence and DCH realized that to create a firm basis for the business, it needed to update its Enterprise Resource Planning solution. DCH wanted to make positive use of its ERP data so, as part of the ERP upgrade project, it sought a new reporting and data analysis solution.

ENI’s upstream activities are complex with more than 160 natural gas and oil extraction plants located worldwide sending performance and operations data on a daily basis. Keeping track of the overall situation is essential for managing maintenance operations and ensuring that the company reaches its targets. Without a dedicated platform, the data sent by the plants used to be collected via email and analyzed manually, using standard spreadsheets and occupying vast amounts of time and resources. Managers were only able to see an overview of production towards the end of the working day, via a PDF sent by email, with limited possibility for in-depth analysis. ENI needed to improve the control and analysis of this information, not so much for operations but for managerial purposes. The objective was to improve the timeliness, quality and granularity of the data, seeking to create a platform that provided a good customer experience and also enabled the analysis of historical data to allow managers to monitor performance more effectively.

Radiall, a world leader in the electronic connectors industry, was facing challenges with its BI ecosystem. The company wanted to become a data-driven organization, but it was struggling with a number of tools and data quality issues. The company's objective was to reduce the number of tools and data quality issues and deploy a data culture within the group.

Puget Sound Energy, a Washington State-based company, supplies electrical and natural gas services to approximately four million Americans daily. The majority of the business operations are run on SAP, making it crucial to limit outages when implementing SAP changes. To ensure smooth transitions, data must be accurately placed in the right systems at the right time to prototype, test, and implement new SAP implementations. The company has 12 SAP instances and is constantly adding new products, making the process of updates and data synchronization a significant challenge.

Tasmania Health was facing a challenge where their entire data structure was reliant on a single person, creating a single point of failure. This was problematic as it created a risk of data loss or mismanagement if that person was unavailable. The organization was also separated into silos, with each structure having its own 'data guru'. This led to a disjointed system where insights into processes and outcomes were not possible. The organization realized the need for a more centralized data process and remove data confusion. However, the transition to a centralized system was met with resistance due to fears of losing the go-to person for data in each region.

Multipack LJM is a company that provides packaging services for a diverse range of products including food, pharma and FMCG, with major brands such as Nestle, Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola as their clients. The company faces the challenge of responding to changes in demand in real-time. This involves adjusting and optimizing production to meet the evolving needs of their clients. The challenge is further compounded by the need to manage the procurement of raw materials in line with the changing requirements of their clients.

Nationwide Building Society wanted to transition from a report-centric culture to a data-driven one. The goal was to make data accessible to all 19,000 employees, providing more visibility into business processes. The company aimed to create a 'Fit to Fly' data-enabled culture, where data is at the heart of decision-making and operations.