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The client was using an Order Management System built using Oracle Forms and Reports. The System was developed and continuously enhanced for the last 20 years. While it met the functional requirements, it was difficult to use and required specialized skills to maintain. The System also could not keep up with modern day requirements around mobile workforce support, rapid changes as per business needs, and low cost of maintenance. The existing technology was outdated as well. Thus, the business was looking to invest in future proofing the technology. However, the existing application had business assets that spanned two decades. These assets were important and needed to be reused in the new platform. This included business logic and application.

A big furniture and mattress company based out of the United States had a unique business model in which they have total control over the merchandise right from the manufacturing stage to the retail sales stores. A significant part of its customer traffic was moving to online channels. A personalized customer experience was becoming the only differentiator for the physical stores. The company wanted its physical store workforce to be geared up to deliver the personalized experience.\n\nTheir major challenge was:\n\nNew-age Digital Consumers\nThe new-age customer was gathering product information online. Store managers were not much informed about the needs of the customer, who walked into the store, with specific requirements and product needs. A personalized shopping experience was the need of the hour for Store Managers of this mattress company.\n\nQuickly materializing an app against all odds\nAppointment scheduling had to be presented to customers when they visited the website – a monolithic artifact built with legacy technologies. Technical resources were in short supply, especially web developers dealing with legacy technology. This delayed application delivery and pushed up integration costs.

Flanagan’s application was archaic and was implemented many years ago when online ordering and shopping cart designs were still in their nascent stage. Front-end was created using complex Oracle Forms rendered as web-based applets, which made it less usable. All major browsers stopped supporting applets completely. However, most of their business data were stored in the Oracle database which they needed to reuse. In a nutshell, the application they used was not user-friendly. Flanagan was looking to replace the existing application with a modern and responsive interface that could reuse their data at reduced costs.

A leading provider of personal, commercial property, casualty insurance, and long-term retirement savings products in the US faced challenges in managing their long-tail apps. They struggled to build apps independently of internal IT intervention, which required additional operating investments. The major challenges included high development and support costs imposed by IT for non-critical apps and the need to create a minimal IT dependency channel for infrastructure provisioning, support, data access, and app maintenance. The internal IT team wanted to focus on core business applications and spend minimal effort on maintaining long-tail apps.

The insurance management software required us to provide data security, secured API access, prevent URL tampering and other vulnerabilities. The data needed to have access control where information can be accessed by authorized personnel and agents could access only their customer data. The usability needed to be improved as well keeping in mind there are two different types of users. Improvements in UI, which supported client customization with respect to branding and theme changes needed to be developed from an aesthetic standpoint.

Companies find it difficult to change the packaged applications they get from ISVs. No matter how good a software package is, invariably it will have to be changed in some way to fit the way the company works or its particular market or some specific process that gives it a competitive advantage. Every company is different; even routine business processes common to most businesses, such as answering customer questions, responding to email inquiries or processing online sales, differ for every organization. The issue of changing software becomes particularly acute when the ISV’s software addresses interaction with customers and other key stakeholders. In such customer-facing situations, organizations want the software to exactly match their business processes. And to complicate matters, a process may be slightly different even for different groups within the same company. In that case, no single change or set of changes works for everybody. That was the situation KANA faced. ISVs like KANA need visual configuration tools like WaveMaker built into their products to simplify the change process, both for the client and for the ISV. Without something like WaveMaker, ISVs that want to do the right thing for their clients in terms of ease of change often find themselves scrambling to support multiple versions of the product. This dramatically increases the cost of development, product management and support.

Continuous feedback was being exchanged as the functionality was developed and demoed to various stakeholders. Role-based data control was essential, where the admin user had access to all Telco and Customer data, Telco users had access to only their Customer data, and Customers had access to only their data. The password expired every 24 hours, forcing users to change it upon login. Admin users needed the ability to select multiple Work Orders and update the Approval and Fulfilment Status. Additionally, there was a need for Admin users to upload Partner Transactions using a delimiter-separated file. Rich dashboard reports were required to provide a complete overview of the system and actions that required the Admin user's attention, along with exhaustive drill-down reports.

Being a bank, it was very particular about security and compliance. Different workloads were categorized in tiers based on the level of security - gold meant the highest level of security and bronze the lowest. The IT department’s vetting process was elaborate and strict. Every deployment went through rigorous testing phases. The bank followed continuous integration pipeline and used Jenkins based CI/CD to deploy to their docker-based infra in private cloud. Moreover, the systems did not have internet connectivity for security reasons. WaveMaker platform needed to be updated and upgraded frequently for security patches and product updates. These VMs ran in AWS cloud environment.

Approval processes in Mercy Health Care were manual and archaic. A spreadsheet was emailed around to get approvals before any change could be entered into the HR system. From time to time, emails or paperwork would get lost in someone’s mailbox and eventually would become hard to track and maintain. On the other hand, the Mercy group grew from being just 10 hospitals to around 32 branches in just a couple of years. The approval process however did not scale up. It needed to pass through at least 5 levels of hierarchy and was often delayed. If done correctly, a single approval process took almost 2 weeks to complete. The process was simply not scalable. Moreover, retrieving and entering information into the HR system manually was painful. Considering the fact that Mercy was handling almost 64000 approvals a year, this timeline was simply not feasible for them. In its attempt to speed up the approval process, Mercy IT team needed to come up with an application that could handle the hierarchies and the sheer volume of approvals. The Personnel Action Form(PAF) is an application that was put in place to replace this manual process.

Pertamina had around 150 internal workflow process applications built on IBM Lotus Notes. They needed to migrate these workflows to modern applications urgently due to these reasons: Most of the internal workflows were developed using Lotus Notes which faced an uncertain future as the Lotus Notes license was due to expire in 6 months. Existing Lotus Notes forms were extremely complex with numerous controls and role-based access. Pertamina IT did not have sufficient manpower and tools to redevelop these applications rapidly. They wanted to transform the development team into an agile team by adopting the principles of Scrum along with a suitable platform.

Contextin’s unique algorithmic approach to campaign performance optimization works by analyzing hundreds of granular variables—including page characteristics, user engagement data, and semantics—on an impression-by-impression basis and then extrapolating its learning for each campaign within the context of the specific performance and budget parameters. This enables Contextin to assess bid price and identify the type of impression most likely to get results. With massive sets of proprietary data at the core of Contextin’s platform, the company recognized the need for a powerful NoSQL database that could manage and process vast sets of information without slowing RTB response times. To support its early production platform, Contextin integrated an open source distributed database to which the company was contributing code. However, as its business grew, Contextin began to evaluate NoSQL database options that would offer greater performance. Query time and availability became the stumbling blocks for many of the NoSQL databases evaluated. While many of these solutions were capable of working with significant amounts of data, few were equipped to consistently provide the millisecond response times required in the online advertising industry.

Initially, eXelate relied on an in-house solution to manage the data pool and real-time delivery of the data and analytics that provide its customers with critical insights into understanding and leveraging consumer behavior. However, as the company’s business expanded, particularly in North America and Europe, eXelate required a more robust platform to ensure the speed, availability, and continuity on which its reputation is built. Several factors played into the decision. eXelate reviewed a number of NoSQL databases to address the company’s rapidly growing big data challenge. After conducting a thorough evaluation, eXelate chose the Aerospike real-time NoSQL database, which features cross data center replication, to handle data management and replication across its data centers.

For [x+1], driving business value depends directly on the ability to use customer, behavioral and purchase data to consistently deliver relevant messages in real-time and in a format that is appropriate to the online channel being used by the customer. A central component of the [x+1] Origin platform is the ability to integrate with a company’s website to provide personalized audience targeting for each unique site visitor. The company initially deployed other databases to meet its complex performance demands, including a traditional relational database and a popular open source NoSQL system. However, both failed to meet critical access times or provide the reliable performance required. With a strong engineering team in place, [x+1] considered building its own solution but ultimately could not justify the cost.

eXelate sought a real-time, low-latency cloud platform and a high-performance database solution for real-time data delivery and analysis to meet massive scale demands of between six to seven billion events per day at a reasonable cost. The right solution would need to accommodate scalability, real-time performance, including 50/50 balanced reads/writes and real-time replication across four data centers worldwide.

Snapdeal’s business and platform model is anchored by an innovative system enabling sellers to list their products, manage inventory and make pricing changes in real time while shoppers can review and rate sellers on issues such as shipping, delivery and returns. But challenges on how to maintain their platform’s real-time performance as the business scaled up 200 times arose. Sellers need to push their updates in real-time, and consumers demand a highly responsive online experience. With every page click, Snapdeal combines the updates from shoppers and sellers to display the most relevant products, as well as rankings for all the sellers that are offering the product by price, delivery time, and customer satisfaction. To support its inventory and pricing system, Snapdeal initially deployed MongoDB NoSQL database servers with data in DRAM as a cache in front of MySQL. The Snapdeal application used write-through techniques to update information first in MySQL and then in MongoDB, and it processed reads from MongoDB. However, as the business scaled and more sellers made price adjustments on more products, the MongoDB response times shot up from 5 milliseconds to over a second compromising the consumers’ shopping experience and leading to lost revenue opportunities. Worse, price changes were not always reflected in real-time.

FFR was a growing company that had recently made an acquisition and needed to integrate and streamline the combined operations on a single platform. One portion of the organization was using Microsoft Dynamics NAV while others were using Oracle. They chose to standardize the organization on Microsoft Dynamics due to its lower cost of ownership, ease of use, and flexibility to support future growth.

As a successful user of Microsoft Dynamics GP, Divisions, Inc., found it lacked information about its customers and its operations. For the sales team, proposal generation was a tedious task.

As its business evolved, Cumulus Media discovered that it needed more technology support. The company’s biggest needs were a system that would be easily accessible, scalable, and reliable. Its previous systems were hosted solely on-site. With 93 markets all contained in one central on-site system, important data was often hard to disseminate to individual project managers in particular markets. Additionally, VPN Tunnels were required to connect to main servers, making access to servers in Atlanta difficult for other offices in New York and Dallas. Costly licensing fees had become a budgetary concern, and the company was looking to reduce cost.

Conger Construction Group needed a centralized software solution in which everyone from the business could access data, including jobs, contacts, and accounts, using multiple platforms.

In the past at Cincinnati Surgical, reporting functionality was poor. It was a difficult three-step process to get the data (necessary for making strategic business decisions) out of the software. An “awkward” old user interface made it time consuming for employees to enter sales orders and other data. Functionality such as forecasting and historical analysis that a quickly growing distributor like Cincinnati Surgical needs was missing. The current software system wasn’t scalable. As Cincinnati Surgical’s distribution channels and sales increased, they quickly grew beyond the limitations of the software. Cincinnati Surgical didn’t want to devote people and budget to supporting an IT infrastructure while also investing in other critical areas of the company.

Since inception, the company had grown from managing $100 MM of capital to investing more than $650 MM, their staff had more than doubled, and their teams were now geographically dispersed. The casual contact and information exchange Caltius relied on the past was no longer effective and neither were their IT systems. Challenges included: Applications being used by both front and back office staff varied and were not integrated, causing duplication of work. Inability to track emails and/or integrate them. Dramatic change and variation in use of technology (from laptops to smart phones to electronic tablets to legal pads).

CalTex was outgrowing their 15+ year old ERP system, and was the largest organization using their legacy system at the time. Their business needs had outpaced their solution, slowing down processing speeds. Cal-Tex also needed a greater ability to customize their system.

CareSource lacked a centralized place to capture and manage member information, including members, partners, community, activities, tasks, workflows, etc. There was also a lack of visibility to reports and dashboards to manage the member lifecycle, stay compliant with healthcare and privacy laws, and report back to state and government agencies. The goal was to move a workforce from a manually intense process to a state-of-the-art high functioning system.

In the past, Burkett’s systems were not integrating with the company’s growth as different applications were being introduced and utilized. The previous technology was limited in its ability to integrate with the new applications. Burkett’s systems lacked real-time reporting and analytics, therefore management could not make the most optimal decisions.

Restaurant Equippers needed to replace its outdated ERP solution and integrate a new solution with the existing warehouse management system. The old system was 15 years old and discontinued by the software developer, making it difficult to extract usable information. The company needed to ensure it was targeting the right customer base, carrying the optimal product mix, and minimizing total cost of ownership for customers. Expecting rapid growth, the chosen solution had to support significant company expansion.

BioStorage Technologies experienced rapid growth, making its largely manual invoicing system unmanageable. The company relied on an entry-level accounting package and numerous spreadsheets, which required significant manual effort to process data dumps from their sample-tracking software each month. This inefficiency was unsustainable given their growth rate, necessitating either a substantial increase in administrative staff or an investment in technology to streamline the billing process.

BC Technical acquired three companies and faced challenges in reducing inventory levels across three locations and 190 technicians, maximizing profitability of high-cost parts used in aging equipment, and acquiring new customers with a larger service footprint. They needed to deliver on demanding SLAs, accurately quote prices to beat the competition while remaining profitable, and capture and report key metrics to better manage their business. Additionally, they required increased visibility into inventory and work orders in process, and timely financial closing for board-level reporting. A poor implementation of Dynamics Field Services CRM integrated to Dynamics GP left the company chasing data discrepancies and focused on transactional processing complexities, frustrating both employees and management.

At Ahresty, company growth was outpacing the capabilities of their customized Microsoft Dynamics SL solution. The procurement processes were very manual, requiring the transfer of paper forms from start to finish. Additionally, the Inventory costing system required manual intervention and multiple integration points. The team at Ahresty desired a modern ERP solution to automate processes and connect their mission critical operational systems.

Control Risks was relying upon several disparate systems and manual processes to manage their global risk management consultancy across five continents. This approach yielded no comprehensive handle on customers, project costing, resource utilization – and most critically, no metrics on overall corporate performance. The management team at Control Risks knew that in order to grow the business according to plan and drive increased margin across the business, they needed to implement a single solution across the organization to improve margins, plan and execute projects in a more standardized way and more effectively manage costs.

LeafFilter™ was running a combination of a proprietary system built in-house, and QuickBooks for their business needs. Both solutions were onsite, which was a burden on the IT staff. QuickBooks couldn’t properly communicate with their proprietary system, and lacked the reporting functions needed to carry out the needs of the business. In an effort to enhance efficiency and foster growth, Leaf Filter decided to find a new solution.