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To keep up with growth, Byrne Dairy looked for efficiencies at its central cold storage distribution center, Syracuse Cold Storage. This 100,000-square-foot facility boasted 9,000 pallet positions with 16 loading docks. The company wanted to learn more about equipment and operations that could improve material handling processes and material flow at the warehouse.

Because EMN was merging three facilities, the company looked to maximize its square footage and improve operator productivity. Activity never ceased during a day’s shift. Once pallets of wine and liquor cases arrived and were unloaded, they were moved to a staging location and distributed throughout the facility. They were then scanned and prepared for outbound shipping. This encouraged EMN to better develop its process and material flow handling.

Fabiano Brothers faced significant productivity challenges as they consolidated their operations from four facilities into two, totaling 390,000 square feet. The primary goal was to maintain their annual beer sales of about eight and a half million cases while optimizing space and increasing lift truck productivity. Additionally, they aimed to enhance the productivity of their order picking process and implement ergonomic lift trucks to reduce operator stress. The company needed a comprehensive solution that would integrate receiving, replenishment, and racking to achieve increased efficiency, cost savings, and productivity.

The NSLC is especially proactive in protecting its biggest asset — its people. The NSLC encourages all employees to take personal responsibility for themselves and the equipment they use to do their jobs. But managers needed better insight into the daily activities of the operators to be able to support this, along with more information that would allow them to make general warehouse decisions and improvements.

Consolidating two warehouse spaces into one meant a chance for Pacific Coast Warehouse to gain efficiency and improve control over product movement. It also meant considering a different warehouse design and installing a new fleet of lift trucks to work in racking that is significantly higher than the racking in the previous locations. As part of its research on which material handling company would obtain the order for the new lift trucks, Pacific Coast Warehouse tested all the competition, both in a controlled environment and on site in one of its facilities. The decision came down to projected value in productivity and ease of financing.

Selecting the ideal fleet of lift trucks can be a challenging task for any company, especially for businesses with seasonal demands. PartyLite Gifts Inc. faced an equipment selection quandary due to seasonal demand fluctuation. During the holiday season, PartyLite often sees a peak in business, but it relies on maximum uptime from its lift truck fleet to move products and prepare orders for shipping all year round. The challenge was to handle seasonal demand fluctuation for PartyLite’s products efficiently while minimizing costs for lift trucks that are needed only during peak demand times.

This steady increase in growth and production, as well as the consolidation of its various facilities, caused Rawlings to re-evaluate its lift truck fleet and maintenance program. In search of consultation and service, Rawlings turned to Heubel Material Handling, a Raymond Sales and Service Center it had worked with for more than 10 years. Rawlings quickly discovered that Heubel’s service plan and lift trucks by The Raymond Corporation helped the company increase productivity, decrease downtime and streamline its maintenance, all while remaining environmentally friendly and dependable. “I would personally recommend Heubel’s equipment and its maintenance plan,” says Terrie Semsch, safety manager at Rawlings. “We deal with a seasonal environment in which we experience surges in workload, so we need our equipment to operate consistently. Heubel’s integrated service, quality equipment and comprehensive maintenance ensure we are up and running in top performance, and this is something we can now depend on.”

The cold environment of refrigerated and freezer warehousing presents significant challenges for warehouse equipment, facility managers, and employees. U.S. Cold Storage, a company with over 110 years of experience in refrigerated warehouse operations, needed to ensure that their lift trucks could operate efficiently in severe temperatures. The company recently opened two new facilities in Wilmington, Ill., and Lebanon, Ind., and required reliable lift trucks to handle up to 100 million pounds of product per month between these locations. The challenge was to find lift trucks that could withstand the harsh conditions and maintain high productivity levels.

In Ireland, local regional authorities are not responsible for waste management, and the Irish customers are free to change provider if they are not content with the service. Ciaran Brady, Head of Resource Recovery AES, stated that it is imperative for AES to meet and exceed the service expectations of their customers. Previously, they were not always able to do so. AES handles recyclable, organic, and general waste, keeping approximately 165 vehicles busy with 400-500 collections per route on average. The challenge was to meet the full range of customer service expectations and improve efficiency.

Dietz & Watson faced significant challenges in managing their growing distribution needs. Their existing home-grown system was outdated and inefficient, leading to a lack of storage space and operational inefficiencies. The company needed a strategic implementation plan that would minimize operational impact while providing a high level of service to their customers. They required a solution that could handle various temperature-controlled areas and manage multiple product lines effectively. Additionally, they needed to ensure zero downtime during the implementation process to avoid disrupting their daily operations.

Houwzer’s digital delivery system is built on a highly complex, monolithic API with extensive personalization and localization to support diverse customer needs across different real estate markets. The company lacked visibility into all the possible ways its API was being used or how it was behaving in the real world. This created security concerns, as Houwzer could not know where or how sensitive data was exchanged, or if bad actors could exploit vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to private information.

The evolving video market in Argentina has brought demand for feature-rich OTT services. Video service providers are migrating from traditional RF delivery toward IP-enabled services and offering sophisticated features on par with Tier 1 operators in the United States. In keeping with market demand, Cablevisión Argentina envisioned a true TV Everywhere experience for its subscribers – one that offered true cross-platform compatibility and support for every possible subscriber device. Customers in the region use Chromecast heavily so it was imperative to provide DRM support for this use case. As an innovative and forward-looking provider, Cablevisión Argentina is vested in bringing its subscribers a powerful user interface and large number of supported devices packaged together with compelling, premium content. Rapidly evolving technologies and protocols push operators to adopt more nimble business models – ones that will scale in the future. Cablevisión Argentina sought to deliver seamless integration of device types so subscribers could access video on mobile devices, tablets and personal computers. Subscribers wanted to be able to start watching content on one device and then seamlessly continue watching it on a different device. Cablevisión Argentina was determined to solve all challenges faced by digital TV operators in the Latin America region: Offering a high quality, seamless viewing experience powered by expert user-interface features and a personalized recommendations engine. Harmonizing subscriber access rights across different networks, screens and locations thereby enabling a frictionless user experience. Conforming to stringent licensing conditions for premium content and preventing unlawful content access.

Swisscom, a leading telecom provider in Switzerland, faced the challenge of upgrading its existing IPTV service to meet the growing demands of its customers. The company needed to enhance the user experience, provide more content, and support multi-screen viewing. Additionally, Swisscom aimed to reduce costs and time-to-market by leveraging an Android-based platform for its new service, Swisscom TV 2.0. The challenge also included ensuring robust content protection and seamless integration with existing infrastructure.

Boston Group, Inc. faced the challenge of streamlining the development and fabrication of merchandising display and power systems to compress lead times and accelerate product delivery to customers. The company needed to move from 2D to 3D design to better showcase product concepts to visually oriented merchandising professionals and to become more efficient in their development processes. Shortening delivery and lead times was essential for competing successfully in the market.

Maximize thermoformed product design throughput by improving quality, streamlining processes, and leveraging surfacing tools.

Resolve design data compatibility issues and improve teamwork during the development of components and assemblies for custom-designed conveyor and separator systems to shorten design cycles and satisfy customer demand for shorter lead-times.

Make product development more efficient by facilitating collaboration between industrial design and mechanical engineering.

Feros Care faced significant challenges with their manual and time-consuming reporting processes. The organization needed to store and compare historical data, present KPIs visually, and manage a variety of datasets from different sources. Their existing methods were error-prone, resource-intensive, and often outdated by the time reports were completed. Additionally, annual reporting requirements placed a heavy burden on senior management. Feros Care sought a Business Intelligence (BI) tool to alleviate these issues, streamline their reporting processes, and enable data-driven decision-making. They evaluated several BI vendors, including Microsoft BI Stack, IBM Cognos, Tableau, and Qlikview, but found that these solutions required extensive customization, consulting, and mature data warehouses, which were not feasible for their needs.

When a food retailer launches a new item, many people are involved in the process: chefs, suppliers, procurement teams, taste testers, marketing, focus groups, legal teams, manufacturers, shipping companies, etc. Moreover, Gap Systems’ clients manage hundreds, even thousands, of product launches a year. That’s a lot of moving parts - including mountains of data that needs to be managed and interpreted to ensure a successful launch. Smartflow was intended to track these disparate items, so you know who is doing what at any particular time. Except, this wasn’t how customers were using the tool in reality. As a result, clients weren’t getting the value or insights they needed. They would say things like, “It seems our legal department is slowing us down, we need to do something about that,” when in fact, they couldn’t really show either way whether legal was the problem. It was all based on instinct or assumption, rather than the hard data they had at their fingertips. Evidently, choice wasn’t working. Customers needed high-end reporting embedded into the product to make Smartflow a success.

Juwai.com faced significant challenges in managing and processing their multilingual big data. They used multiple data sources in both Roman and Chinese scripts, and their datasets contained billions of rows. Processing such large datasets with Excel and internal scripting was intensely difficult, leading to manual reports generated by IT that were often out of date. The company needed more flexible and timely reporting to keep up with real-time developments. Additionally, manually adding data led to human errors and inconsistencies, which could only be dealt with reactively. The reliance on IT for report generation also placed a heavy burden on the department, further slowing down the process.

EREA’s clients, primarily in the retail sector, were overwhelmed by the large amounts of data generated in their ERP systems. These datasets often contained billions of rows, making it difficult to analyze and derive actionable insights. The time and resources required to process this data were substantial, and clients were struggling to make sense of it all. EREA needed a powerful BI tool that could handle massive volumes of disparate data and scale across the entire Latin American region. They also required a solution that could be easily customized by non-technical consultants to meet specific client requirements.

Anaqua, a leading provider of intellectual property (IP) management software, faced significant challenges with their existing reporting system. The system was rudimentary, time-consuming, and static, making it difficult for end users to utilize dashboards effectively. Clients were increasingly demanding better analytics and a more intuitive way to visualize their data. Additionally, security concerns were paramount, as many clients opted for On-Premise solutions and needed assurance that their sensitive data would remain secure and isolated from other clients.

The hotel industry faces significant challenges with scattered and inconsistent data sets from multiple sources, making it difficult to centralize IT and gain meaningful insights. Property management businesses often use on-site, Windows-based hardware that requires dedicated maintenance personnel, further complicating data integration. Bahadour Moussa, a Technology Evangelist, recognized the need for a BI tool that could store, clean, and prepare data before visualization, enabling hotels to analyze guest behavior and enhance their experience. The search for a suitable BI tool led to the discovery of Sisense, which met the criteria of ease of use, attractive UI, and the ability to connect to complex data sources without requiring ETL work.

BrightStar Care faced challenges in visualizing large volumes of data spread across multiple systems, including their home-grown application ABS, accounting software, help desk software, survey systems, and Microsoft Dynamics. They needed a solution to quickly answer business questions without rebuilding the entire pipeline for each new analysis. Additionally, they wanted to distribute their dashboard solution globally, allowing franchisees to access and visualize their own data easily. The complexity of the data and relationships between sources made it tedious to analyze, and they required a BI tool that offered self-service capabilities, agility for ad-hoc queries, visually attractive presentations, and a low cost of ownership.

Doron Gill, VP R&D at FairFly, needed to make day-to-day decisions based on a rapidly growing database. He wanted to combine this data with several other sources, including MixPanel and a CRM, without relying on R&D resources. After researching several BI tools, Doron realized he needed a tool that was easy to use for non-technical business managers. He was concerned that if R&D or IT had to manage data requests daily, it would not be sustainable. Doron and his colleague Ami Goldenberg were impressed by Sisense's ability to be used by business users without R&D involvement and its intuitive data visualizations.

Gentex, a leading supplier of personal protection and situational awareness systems, was struggling with an outdated ERP database that was over 30 years old and heavily customized. The company needed fast and accurate operation planning metrics such as projected revenue, opportunity forecasts, and expense reports. However, incorporating modern technical tools into their ERP environment for data analysis was limited and costly. The system had millions of records, and they needed a solution that could quickly process this data and deliver actionable intelligence.

When Ric Lumbard, Executive Director at ICN, stepped into his position, he realized that a central visual point for data did not exist. As a broadband carrier, ICN needed a visual system to be able to monitor the overall health and performance of the organization. Director Lumbard explained that state agencies tend to focus on monitoring the legal aspects of operations, but measuring the performance of operations is not always given the same attention. Director Lumbard was looking for a solution to raise the importance of performance awareness by providing visual cues and monitoring that allowed the staff to easily and quickly see a dashboard with important performance indicators. Another focus point for ICN was that the data to be analyzed was scattered across numerous sources–from a variety of databases to spreadsheets–in multiple servers and applications. The operations perspective needed a way to combine that data, maintain a single repository of truth, and visually analyze the data without sifting through dozens of pages of spreadsheets and columns.

Orion’s platform gathers and analyzes data on client investments, allowing firms to view their overall performance, as well as identifying weak or strong points in their business strategy. This presents its own hurdle, though. There is a LOT of data to wade through: 51 terabytes of it, in fact. Finding a BI tool that could handle this volume without sacrificing granularity was not going to be easy. Before implementing a BI tool, Orion used a manually built, flexible, and customizable reporting platform for operational reporting. So far, so good - except, by the time they generated each business metrics report and sent it to the client several weeks after the month ended, it was already out of date. Plus, the data was static, so clients couldn’t delve in to check the details or context. They only had headline figures, giving them an idea of overall performance. If they wanted to analyze this in any way, they’d have to request a special data query. This could take a day to develop. Orion realized that the company needed to take the leap from business metrics to business intelligence. Their customers needed a platform with better visualizations and direct access to accurate, up-to-date data, in order to make informed business decisions. Orion had executed a proof of concept by integrating an Excel interface into their API to get a feel for what customers wanted. The first approach was to create a dimensional model of the data, push it to firms using an SQL Server and teach them how to connect data to their current data visualization tool. However, Orion customers found dashboard-building to be too complex. Often, they didn’t yet know or understand what they wanted to get out of their data. Clearly, they would need a solution that was ready to deploy out-of-the-box and accessible by all users - not just those with IT expertise.

Over the last 15 years, the National Healthcare Service (NHS) of the UK increased their spending from 70 billion British pounds to 150 billion British pounds. In order to improve their efficiency and cut costs, the NHS created dedicated internal organizations to measure performance of organizations against each other, and to publish and distribute the data in performance reports. The problem was, the healthcare data was very complex - big, scattered and siloed - limiting the reports to focus on one area of measurement or one organization per report, and were published as static PDF documents. Users were unable to compare to other organizations or integrate across different sets of data, giving them an isolated view of their performance. Data regarding each area, such as clinical performance, cost performance, and staff and patient surveys were reported in separate and heavy 50-page plus documents that required time and research to see a bigger picture across platform. That’s where Res Consortium came in with the goal of providing performance dashboards that showed the data across platform in an intuitive way. In the past Res Consortium was producing dashboards using Excel with protection keys to protect sensitive patient data, but started looking for a BI platform that could move the dashboards to a web-based environment as well as to more efficiently and quickly handle the amount of complex data typical in healthcare.

FCTG faced challenges in pulling data together for a simple and user-friendly report to track daily sales and performance across the company. It would take up to three hours each morning to create this report, which the sales team used to influence and plan their daily targets. There was a need to improve efficiency and minimize any lost opportunities, and thus, it was necessary to develop an end-to-end solution that would be able to replace manual reporting, and allow 80 business users to receive daily reports at the click of a button. Prior to Sisense, the nSight brand didn’t exist and Flight Centre’s finance team was responsible for generating all of the company’s reports. As a part of the finance team for three years, Graeme proposed the idea to implement a BI solution, as he noticed analytics were getting more and more difficult with the company’s rapid expansion. He looked at three different BI software companies hoping for a solution that could automate daily reporting in a cost-effective way, be easily managed by people who may have little to no technical knowledge, and also allow business users to flexibly manipulate the data to immediately answer questions they had. Sisense checked all three boxes.