Metro Bank, the first new mainstream bank in the U.K. in over a century, faced several challenges. As a newcomer in the field, it sought to balance well-established protocols related to process planning, optimization, and efficiency with the demands of savvy customers for excellent service and great products. The looming deadline for enforcement of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in early 2018 added to the pressure. In 2017, it was time to call in the experts, the ones with the best solutions in the business. With Software AG’s ARIS, the team mapped processes at an award-winning rate. Starting from manual, dispersed records, Metro Bank mapped more than 280 processes in less than a year—20 percent of which was regulatory. Over time, this extended to include more than 1000 new GDPR-specific models and 250 OCIR processes in ARIS.

The City of London set an ambitious goal to create the world’s first Ultra Low Emission Zone in central London by 2020. To meet this goal, London needed to know what every single vehicle is doing in real time. The best solutions go further, gathering and parsing data with even better visibility into any individual vehicle’s operating data and module systems. By 2021, more than 5,000 buses in London’s public transport network will be fitted with sensors, such as HJS Emission Technology’s Selective Catalytic Reduction Technology, which uses cutting-edge particle filters and catalytic converters to dramatically reduce emissions. But in today’s world, blind implementation isn’t enough to meet the strictest of emissions guidelines.

Nationwide, a British mutual financial institution, was looking to make business information more accessible to non-process experts. The company wanted to derive value from new ARIS capabilities closer to their release and needed an innovative end-to-end process to support cloud deployment and upgrade. The initial upgrade and move to the Cloud went smoothly, but at the first upgrade, there were major problems. The project was on the verge of failure but Software AG and Nationwide took an all-hands-on-deck approach to find a solution. A new end-to-end Release process was developed and agreed by both Nationwide and Software AG which was then tested at the next release, with small tweaks made along the way.

Nexon faced the challenge of managing a rapidly changing gaming environment where the lifecycle of games is decreasing, and the amount of data to be processed is increasing exponentially. The quality of mobile games is also steadily exceeding that of PC games, making it difficult to predict and appropriately manage system resources. The company needed a solution that could handle the complex technology requirements of game-related infrastructure, particularly in terms of capacity and response speeds. Initially, physical servers were used due to the limitations of virtual servers in delivering proper response speeds. However, with advancements in cloud technology, Nexon began exploring cloud solutions to address these challenges.

Sanoma Corporation, one of the largest media companies in Europe, faced the challenge of simplifying the creation of innovative online services for multiple business groups. The company needed to deliver relevant services quickly, requiring better insight and access to data. Sanoma had created APIs to provide access to data, including consumer profiles and media content, but needed a highly secure and scalable platform to deliver these APIs. The platform also needed to support a complex environment with diverse brands, digital assets, and developers working in various programming environments and apps for different platforms, including mobile devices.

Robinsons SQUASH'D, a new, ultra-concentrated and portable cordial, was introduced to the market with the aim of providing adults with a convenient way to enjoy squash anywhere. The challenge was to create a marketing strategy that would not only celebrate the great taste of Robinsons on the go, but also inspire people to get outside and enjoy squash in new and interesting ways. The company needed to create a buzz around the product and encourage consumers to engage with the brand in a unique and exciting manner. The goal was to create a new category in the market and establish Robinsons as the dominant player in this category.

PlantSwapper founders, Zeba and Nihal, identified a problem in the plant trading community. Traditional plant forums and groups were disorganized, with inconsistencies in plant nomenclature, leading to a lot of back-and-forth between plant swappers to complete a single trade. The process was time-consuming and inefficient, making it difficult for users to find good trades quickly. Additionally, the founders wanted to provide a platform where users could host and organize contactless swap meets, especially important in the current pandemic situation. They needed a solution that would allow them to create a user-friendly platform with powerful backend capabilities, third-party integrations, and a native app.

Milliyet Emlak is a real estate platform based in Istanbul, Turkey. The platform allows real estate agents and individuals to advertise available properties, and consumers to find a property to rent or buy. Each ad listed on the site includes the phone number of the owner or estate agent. Ensuring that the consumer finds and uses the phone number to make a call is crucial to the platform’s success. Milliyet Emlak had the idea to include a click-to-call button on each property ad, but believed there was still room for improvement. The team came up with a new design for the button and were keen to test the old version against the new one.

The Guest House at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, was facing issues with its magnetic stripe keycard locks. The keycards often became demagnetized, leading to lockouts. As the front desk isn't staffed 24/7, an on-call employee had to issue new keycards to locked-out guests. This was causing inconvenience to the guests and was also time-consuming for the staff. The management was looking for a solution that could eliminate the need for keys and cards and reduce the time spent on access control management.

Pharmaceutical companies are under increasing pressure to stand out from the crowd in an industry facing pricing pressures, promotional saturation, regulatory scrutiny, reduced product differentiation and increased customer and channel complexity. The healthcare market faces the dual paradox of being awash in data but often lacking in insight. Some of these companies are finding the means to pull ahead of the pack through leveraging analytics in broader and dramatically more effective ways. They are creating the organisational capability to develop and execute against differentiated insights. AsteRx was dealing with large data volumes, comprising millions of scripts from a national sample of hundreds of physicians to be analysed in a myriad of ways that would take weeks to manipulate for a single result. Customers were provided with raw research data, usually in Access or CSV format, making it difficult from which to draw insight. Furthermore, data contained lots of hierarchies, continually changing data frequency with varying levels of data aggregation. Multiple data sources also needed to be integrated with different formats, languages and data structures.

Rehtek Machine Company, a producer of micro-components for various industries, was facing a challenge in meeting the strict documentation requirements for ISO certification. The company had been maintaining all its records on Excel spreadsheets, which was not efficient or effective for the purpose. The lack of a proper system for documentation was hindering the company's progress towards ISO certification, which was important for both their customers and their own quality assurance processes.

Over the years, Dean Foods acquired several new businesses which operate as independent business units. This resulted in inconsistent data across its business units for the same products and a lengthy process to find and validate the data that customers needed. Tracking product formulas for all flavors within business units created inaccuracies and complexity that slowed the item maintenance process. As a result of company acquisitions, Dean Foods acquired a challenging number of new and inconsistent SKUs and UPC codes. There was inconsistent data between business units for the same products and a lengthy process to find and validate the data that customers needed. Dean also needed to simplify and homogenize complex product information. There were multiple levels of descriptions for the same product, and tracking product formulas for all flavors within business units created inaccuracies and complexity that slowed the item maintenance process.

After the sale of Findus to EQT Scandinavia, the company realized that a common business and IT platform was required. The IT environment was focused on local operations rather than European operations. Each country worked in a different way. There was a lack of policies and procedures and lack of coordination between different sites – there was no overall IT business model. A platform that could adjust to the constant change the company experienced was needed.

Solaire Resort & Casino, a leading gaming industry player in the Philippines, was facing increasing competition from new resort and casino properties. The company needed to integrate its customer-related applications and provide a real-time customer experience. However, the customer data was stuck in siloed programs, making it costly to access, slow to analyze, and difficult to use. To differentiate itself and provide a truly personalized visitor experience, Solaire needed to digitalize all customer-facing operations from touchpoints to back-office processes.

Stewart Title, a global real estate information and transaction management company, was facing several challenges. The company's disparate legacy systems were becoming increasingly costly to maintain and were showing their age. The company's vast historical insurance data, which had been a significant asset, was becoming a liability. The company was also facing pressure from agile FinTech startups that were unencumbered by legacy technology. Stewart needed to transform its technology infrastructure to reduce costs, increase agility, and leverage its historical data as a strategic advantage.

Lyreco, a global office supply distributor, was facing challenges in real-time stock and sales insight. The company was in need of improving service assurance and driving operational cost savings from restocking and servicing machines. The lack of real-time data was causing inefficiencies in their operations and was affecting their customer service levels. The company was also looking for ways to innovate and take advantage of a connected, digital future. They wanted to embed IoT technology in their products to redefine their relationship with their partners and customers.

Cemplex Group, a leader in the specialty concrete market, was implementing Tableau reporting software for its enterprise needs. The goal was to connect all the data company-wide into one reportable data set. However, Cemplex uses a legacy, indexed file-based, accounting software for accounting, inventory, and payroll. Nine of the different subcontracting Cemplex companies use this legacy software. Each company has its version of the software with the summaries aggregated at the corporate level. To drill down to the employee level requires access to each of the nine legacy accounting software’s indexed files. This complicated structure made reporting tedious and time-consuming.

The U.S. government law enforcement agency was facing a challenge in managing the massive influx of criminal justice records. The agency collects arrest reports, traffic citations, probation files, photos, and other criminal records from federal, state, tribal, and local agencies. As early as 2010, the agency was dealing with 1 million records or roughly 10 GB of data daily. However, the agency's disk-bound databases could not ingest, cleanse, and assimilate the information quickly enough. By 2013, data volumes had exploded 10x to 100GB streaming in daily.

The company, one of the largest telecom companies in the world, wanted a global platform that could scale new services for hundreds of millions of users and countless partners. The first challenge was a new pay-as-you-go global Wi-Fi service that was outstripping capacity. The company had built the service assuming it could sign up 5 million users in five years; it signed up that many in just six months. The runaway success meant the company needed 40 times that capacity—enough for 200 million users—to handle future demand, but scaling its existing infrastructure was far too costly. The company previously stored transactional and billing data in Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), but Oracle wanted $5 million for the kind of expansion the company needed. Worse, Oracle RAC hit a wall at around 150 business transactions per second—way below the company’s requirement of 2,000 per second.

Volvo Trucks, a global truck manufacturer and the world’s second largest heavy-duty truck brand, was facing challenges in implementing standard SAP® processes at its 100 locations. The company was looking for ways to streamline the process setup so that managers could have a clear, consistent view of financial processes. The main objective was to shorten the lead times for these implementations, which would ultimately lead to more efficient operations.

MPWiK S.A., a major water company in Poland, aimed to improve productivity across all operational areas while maintaining the quality of its core services. The company also sought to introduce a management system based on business processes that could be independently audited through formal certification, including ISO 9001 for quality management, ISO 14001 for environment management, and ISO 18001 for workplace safety. In 2010, MPWiK S.A. initiated a process transformation program to enhance productivity and transparency. Information technology was identified as a key factor in the success of this initiative, enabling the company to reorganize and introduce measurable and repeatable processes. This led to improvements in all core operational areas such as water production, network service and maintenance, and water leakage reduction.

As big, fast data proliferates, more and more data streams are being generated in real time from a myriad of data sources, such as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, markets, mobile devices, internal transactional systems and clickstream analysis. Real-time insights must be derived from this data to give a competitive edge to agile organizations that want to act on these insights before they lose their value. To handle billions of these data streams, new software architectures and techniques are needed. These types of software are called “Big Data Streaming Analytics.” Companies need educated specialists to harness the power of big data. The Streaming Analytics Education Package (SAEP) is Software AG´s answer to the growing demand for data science experts. Universities and private companies share the responsibility of training the sought-after talent currently demanded by the market.

Suva, a Swiss insurance company, was facing the challenge of managing its complex and diverse business processes for which no single-source IT solution existed. The company had to manage its heterogeneous software and hardware systems, which were comprised of core prevention, insurance, and rehabilitation solutions as well as various interdisciplinary applications. Suva was also looking for a way to align its business strategy and IT, support corporate governance, and manage its IT architecture in a heterogeneous IT environment.

HealthCare.gov, the official website of U.S. Affordable Care Act, was launched in 2013 to assist millions of uninsured Americans. However, the site was over budget and unreliable, fraught with technical difficulties. Citizens had only from Nov. 1 to Jan. 31 to use the site compare insurance options and sign up for 2014. The unexpectedly high number of visitors began to overload the site’s infrastructure. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scrambled for answers from a variety of sources, including internal government experts, external programmers and industry partner, Software AG. The main challenge was to rapidly improve the performance of the website, assure a stable and scalable platform— especially during peak buying season, and increase site reliability so that no data’s lost.

The global player in the oil and gas industry was spending over $1 billion annually on technology to organize, store, and share information that drives the business. However, the enterprise IT infrastructure had become complicated due to piecemeal construction throughout the company’s business units and a tangled web of legacy systems from mergers and acquisitions dating back to the early 1980s. The company had an estimated 8,000 applications costing over $600 million to run annually. Despite the significant annual expenditure on new systems, there was no alignment to a multi-year road map. Application strategies were inconsistent across the business units, and there was no common architecture or strategy.

The company, a global clearinghouse for online and credit card payments, was facing significant losses due to fraudulent transactions. The existing fraud detection system could only handle 50 rules, but the risk management team wanted to add thousands more to enhance the accuracy of fraud detection. Additionally, the company wanted to reduce transaction time to achieve real-time fraud detection in all cases. The existing platform had an end-to-end Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 800 milliseconds, which was not met 10% of the time, resulting in either approval of the transaction or payment of a fine, costing an estimated $10 million each year.

The company, a $70 billion healthcare giant, was facing several challenges. These included fragmented access to information, manual input and non-standard processes, newly demanding customers, lack of supply chain visibility, and scattered business process development. The healthcare market was also changing, with shrinking margins and regulations forcing strict compliance with constantly changing laws. The company's traditional way of seeking FDA approval was disjointed and required manual consolidation of paper specs. Each region had its own processes, and each framework operated independently. The company was also struggling with a major hurdle - responding to consumer queries in a timely manner. An employee would have to manually search data logged in different formats across different systems, a process that could take months.

Medellin, the second largest city in Colombia, was facing a number of challenges in its quest to become a Smart Digital City. The city's citizens were demanding better public-private cooperation and communication, public services accessible and accountable through the web, and a government able to respond to requests quickly and without mistakes. The existing processes for citizens to interact with the local government were cumbersome and error-prone. A concerned citizen would submit a paper request in person—with no telling how long it would take to get a response, if ever. Without tracking or a coordinated workflow, some requests were lost in a sea of paper.

The company, a top loyalty program provider, was facing a challenge in meeting the aggressive end-to-end Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 500 milliseconds for every transaction, as demanded by large retail prospects. The company's data center took an average of 20 percent longer than that — 600 milliseconds — just to query upwards of 32GB of customer data in a central, disk-bound database. Furthermore, Java-related garbage collection pauses caused unexpected spikes in response times that would have resulted in financial penalties for failure to meet the SLA, and in unhappy customers. In order to win new business from larger retailers, the company realized it had to move its data into fast machine memory.

The company, a global industrial powerhouse, wanted to embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) to drive advances in high-end manufacturing. However, the early versions of its open IoT platform had limited integration capabilities and could only connect their own products. It was impossible to import application data into the IoT platform or to export results into applications. The company wanted to transform its platform into a driver of key digital services business by harnessing data from other manufacturers’ products.