Shawn Smithson, the Section Manager for Fleet Information & Fuel Systems for the City of Ottawa, is responsible for managing fleet technology and supporting the mechanics, stores personnel, admin staff, and city employees who use the city's 23 fuel sites. His role involves researching new technology and initiatives that could benefit the fleet. The City of Ottawa uses both FleetFocus and FuelFocus, and Smithson spends a significant portion of his day in the software, finding new ways to optimize it for their fleet. During the city’s implementation and upgrade to newer, more secure versions of the software, Smithson and his team were pushed to create manuals, policies, and procedures that would be effective tools for explaining the city’s unique utilization of the highly customizable software.

Sarah Sabastro, the Senior Fleet Systems Administrator for Exelon B G & E, has a challenging role that involves solving software issues within the fleet management system to optimize the fleet's workflows. Her interaction with AssetWorks software is vital to her role, as she spends about 5 hours a day analyzing quality trends, meantime to service, and forecasting. Sarah's role is critical to the successful utilization of FleetFocus. She starts her day by checking the inbox for all eight of their fleet shops to check for out of service notices. Once she has gathered the necessary information, she meets up with the shop manager to do clean-up on the out of service notices that she received.

Joel Klein, a Senior Information Systems Analyst for the Fleet Services Division of Sacramento County, CA, is responsible for troubleshooting any issues that other users at the County may have with their fleet management software. He also optimizes and configures the software’s treatment of parts and time to effectively auto populate work orders. Additionally, Klein spends a significant amount of his time building customized reports for upper management to use in decision-making with regards to the fleet. The challenge lies in ensuring that the fleet management system is active and ready for each day’s work, and that it is working effectively for all users. This includes the Lead of Light Fleet Operations, the Heavy Fleet Supervisor, and the Parts team.

The Office of Risk Management at the University of Central Florida (UCF) is tasked with the protection of all human and physical assets within the university. This includes over 300 buildings and 250 golf carts, with a total insurable value of nearly $1.4 billion. The university also has to track all capitalized assets within each building. The challenge was to maintain integral data on buildings, complete risk assessments, and develop risk mitigation strategies.

Goldman Equipment LLC, a Louisiana-based John Deere dealer, was looking for a way to differentiate itself from its competitors in the precision farm management services industry. The company wanted to offer its customers an intelligent automated farm management solution that would complement its integrated solutions team. The challenge was to find a platform that could handle a variety of tasks, including AB Lines, setup files, financials, and weather, which farmers use every day. The company also wanted to eliminate expensive software that saw limited use throughout the season.

The CHS, Inc. grain terminal in Savage, MN faced a significant challenge when they decided to switch over to the oneWeigh™ scale automation system from Cultura Technologies. The switch happened in late February 2011, at a time when the Minnesota River had breached its banks, and the terminal was shut down. As a result, the terminal was already facing a backlog of inbound grain trucks. To catch up, the terminal was soon handling 400 to 500 trucks daily using oneWeigh. While these volumes aren’t all that unusual at the terminal, the situation was still less than ideal for testing a new system because there was virtually no opportunity for training.

VicTrack, the owner of Victoria’s transport assets, was facing challenges with their paper-based inspection system. The traditional method brought several issues, including delays in getting the results to the office, the need for manual transcription of information into their maintenance management system, and the need to match up photos captured on digital cameras. Additionally, their spreadsheets were often complicated and subject to tampering by contractors, resulting in a lot of work to extract value from the information. Their Windows Mobile devices required docking in the office for synchronizing and were not necessarily intuitive. The requirement to dock them in the office to get data off them meant days or weeks of data collection was always susceptible to being lost whilst out of the office.

Seal Shield, a leading manufacturer of industrial-grade hygenic technology, was experiencing a healthy growth rate averaging around 15% year-over-year. By 2012, the company needed a true ERP and chose NetSuite. In 2019, Seal Shield decided to relocate its operation and warehouse function from the west coast to a third-party logistics (3PL) warehouse on the east coast. This move was supposed to increase efficiency and help the team prepare for unpredictability. However, the team found itself spending significant time developing processes and managing training of its outsourcing partner; an arrangement designed to create efficiencies consequently had the opposite effect. As Seal Shield began to address the pressures that came with a rapid rise in demand, Pacejet became a key component of building a world-class, in-house, distribution operation.

Vaxcel International, a manufacturer and distributor of home lighting and fan solutions, was looking for a transportation management system (TMS) that would not limit them to traditional processes. Their main concern was maintaining strong carrier relationships without compromising on efficiencies. Many TMS providers they had dealt with in the past were directly connected to one carrier or another, making it difficult to gain an impartial perspective on freight rates. They wanted to be able to objectively view all available rates, book them, and manage the process all from one location without sacrificing valued partnerships they have developed over the years.

Inmod, a rapidly growing international manufacturer and distributor of furniture, lighting and décor items, was struggling with an inefficient transportation management process. Their logistics team could spend up to 15 minutes to quote a single shipment due to the need to enter shipment information into each of their six carriers' websites to receive a rate quote. As the company continued to grow, this time-consuming process was identified as an area in need of improvement.

Monarch Brands, a Philadelphia-based wholesaler and manufacturer of microfiber, commercial linen, institutional towels, and wiper rags, had a manual supply chain operation that was time-consuming and inefficient. The company had two dedicated employees fielding phone calls all day from their seven different carriers, recording everything in an Excel spreadsheet, and manually comparing rates before booking. The company didn’t have time to take inventory and were ‘in the dark’ about a lot of their data. The leadership at Monarch Brands knew there had to be a smarter way to manage their operations, so in late 2018 they brought in Conrad Hough as their Shipping Supervisor. Hough has extensive experience in implementing technology into supply chain operations.

Grandville Printing, a third-generation family-owned business and the largest single-site printer in North America, was facing challenges with its home-grown shipping platform. The platform required constant updating, especially when a carrier changed their website, which wasted valuable time for their developers. The platform also didn't integrate information with EFI Monarch, the company's ERP, resulting in wasted time, limited visibility, and slower operations. The company tried leveraging their ERP’s shipping software to integrate data flows and condense operations, but found that this solution lacked the ease of use and functionality they required.

Vizonomy, a computer software company, was faced with the challenge of making natural risk assessments and hazard mitigation plans accessible to a wider range of stakeholders. Traditionally, these assessments were only available to a select number of government stakeholders who could afford the costs associated with the process. As a result, few communities were able to develop a plan and thereby become eligible for federal resources should a natural disaster occur. Additionally, the traditional risk assessment process was built on a static model, where datasets quickly become out-of-date and new assessments cannot be developed easily without external assistance.

Tecnilógica, a digital agency, wanted to leverage a timely, newsworthy event to generate brand awareness and drive traffic to their platform. The Ashley Madison data leak provided an opportunity to create a data-driven visualization that would attract a global audience. However, the challenge was to clean up the dataset, removing any identifying information to protect users, and then find a way to visualize the data in a compelling and insightful manner.

Spotify, a digital music service with over 100 million active users, sought to increase its brand visibility and user traffic through data-driven visualizations. After an original data-driven visualization increased traffic to the music platform by 2 million in just 11 days, Spotify aimed to repeat that success. However, this time the map needed to be customized with Spotify branding to underscore the company’s global reach and further brand awareness, while driving even more user traffic to the platform. The new visualization needed to embody Spotify as a brand, and provide insights on distinct musical preferences.

The city of Medellín wanted to serve a broader demographic by applying new technologies to connect city departments and agencies like transportation, administration, healthcare, education, utilities, and construction. To accomplish Medellín’s objectives, priority was given to the areas of the city where bigger social and economic issues were found. Emphasis was placed on the planning and development of urban projects to transform the physical environment in order to implement profound social and cultural shifts in the targeted communities.

Red Eléctrica de España (REE) wanted to provide the public with real-time information on over 2,000 indicators related to the Spanish electrical grid. It was critical to find a solution that was comprehensive and easy-to-use because indicators are responsible for making timely information public by law. With thousands of indicators, many updating every ten minutes, REE had to find a way to organize and display them so they could be found, analyzed, and understood. There was also a desire to show the data to an audience that lacked technical knowledge. They needed a solution that was fully customizable and provided an easy platform for spatial data analysis. Additionally, REE needed a model to visualize the power supply across the whole country, liaise with suppliers, coordinate supply with neighboring countries, and many other measures, that would reveal the performance of the energy market and other interesting data in a way the public could understand.

Le Télégramme, a French regional daily newspaper, was looking for a new way to visualize data in a timely manner to increase brand awareness and drive more traffic to its platform. They wanted to use visualizations that could be customizable and allow for easy adoption by non-coders. The collapse of the traditional business model of print newspapers has led many publications to establish themselves with original reporting, rather than just commentary or summaries of reporting from other publications to attract and retain readers and advertisers.

Fon Wireless Ltd. (Fon) is a leading, worldwide WiFi provider that operates a system of dual access wireless networks. With more than 19 million crowdsourced hotspots, their goal is to extend WiFi around the world. Fon wanted to develop a tool to expose their access point coverage throughout the world, as well as their partner network in various countries. They needed to build an open portal to help customers and clients explore and find millions of access points that they could connect to in the Fon Community WiFi. The portal required a visualization that could be adapted at every zoom level, preserving optimum performance, and the ability to include logos and details of all of Fon’s partners. Additionally, Fon wanted to have a more appealing visualization on their corporate website that enabled partners to have their own map including their specific access points.

EuroMaint, a leading maintenance solution provider for vehicles in the Swedish rail industry, was facing challenges in reviewing its workflow and synchronizing resources across 20 different applications for equipment support delivery. The company was heavily dependent on IT specialists for custom report development, which was not only costly but also resulted in long turnaround times. They needed an easy-to-use and intuitive analysis solution that could provide an integrated view into operations, bringing together financial, staffing, and operational data.

ACI Consult, a member of the Automobile Club d’Italia (ACI) group, was originally founded to handle ACI operations in the area of transport engineering. Since 2003, the company has been responsible for designing, developing and creating innovative traffic-control services, regional and environmental services, urban furnishings and lowimpact technologies. Among its more innovative initiatives, ACI Consult has been involved in ACITRAFF, a project intended to provide a great many regional bodies with targeted traffic reports in order to analyze traffic patterns and plan infrastructure projects. ACITRAFF monitors traffic flows and uses sensors positioned along the main roadways in order to gather data on the number of vehicles, their speed, their size and traffic congestion, so as to provide accurate, up-to-date traffic information. The ACITRAFF architecture is comprised of peripherals, including active and passive optical sensors, that communicate with one or more dataprocessing centers using a variety of communication networks (phone, cable, radio, GSM, GPRS, etc.). The system gathers data on an ongoing basis and sends it to a central database, which is then used for studies and subsequent traffic planning.

Aditya Birla Minacs, a business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions provider, faced increased competition in the outsourcing market. The company needed to deliver on its promise of ‘timely reporting of results at virtually every stage of the customer relationship lifecycle’ for their clients. This required empowering their frontline team with tools that would enable them to make quicker, faster, and informed decisions. The company had deployed multiple systems across regions for its key operations, each with its own reporting mechanism. Consequently, cross-functional analysis was non-existent. The executive team found the process cumbersome, and weren’t sure of the reliability and accuracy of these reports.

ADO Gardinenwerke, a leading manufacturer of drape material and decorative fabric in Germany, was facing challenges with its existing business intelligence tool integrated in the ERP system. The tool was unable to handle the high volume of data that needed to be analyzed for ADO’s sophisticated reporting system. Questions such as sales trends for specific customers, big sellers in various countries or regions, seasonal deviations in sales, and overall sales trend for individual models could not be answered efficiently. The tool required a massive amount of in-house and outside development to create reports and answer new questions. Additionally, data consistency was not always guaranteed and there was insufficient capacity to process mass data, leading to extremely long response times. The system was also inflexible and slow, failing to provide the necessary benchmarks and reports at the level of quality required for optimum data analysis.

Advantage Pharmacy Group, a successful business in the crowded and competitive market, has always believed in the importance of centralized infrastructure and services. The group manages systems like loyalty and marketing services, group ordering and warehousing, and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage financial services. However, they were missing a business discovery solution to ease the task of accessing, reporting, and analyzing data across all systems. They considered Microsoft SQL Reporting Services but found it limited and costly. They needed a solution that would unify the data for analysis, provide services to their franchisees, and bring together many disparate data sources in a single meaningful report.

Ahlers AG, a leading manufacturer of men’s clothing in Europe, faced challenges in managing and controlling production, storage, and sales due to increasing vertical integration and global competitive pressures. The company needed to provide business data quickly and precisely for decision-making. They required real-time answers to various questions related to sales trends, sales planning variations, stock quantity at the point of sale, and strategic planning of the next collection. The company initially started with a traditional OLAP tool, but it presented many shortcomings in managing high volumes of data, flexible analysis with evaluated dimensions, and speed and performance.

TNT's Corporate Audit Services Department was facing a challenge with their monthly reporting process. The department, which is responsible for internal audits worldwide, had three senior managers compiling reports for the head of the department each month. This process was time-consuming and lacked a consistent structure and uniformity, as each manager had their own method of compiling the reports. This complicated the data-merging process and the compilation of one departmental report. Additionally, all the data was manually inputted, which took a lot of time. The department was looking for a solution that would simplify the consolidation of the decentralized data, accelerate the auditing of data reliability, and present their custom-defined KPIs in a flexible and transparent manner.

Aon Asia’s management needed a clearer picture of the company’s revenue streams, starting with the ability to segment revenue by industry and product. The existing situation made it difficult to gain a true view of the company’s income across different offices in the region or to allocate the correct fees and commissions among their regional directors and country segment heads. Before using QlikView, it was all manual reporting – from regional director to country segment head to country finance. Each step in the chain required someone to manually compile the data and check for errors – a time consuming process involving a lot of following up with different parts of the business. It also lead to the possibility of different versions of data coming from more than one source. The search began for a packaged solution that could automate the process and analyze the financial streams.

Aon Groep Nederland bv, a provider of risk management, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, was facing challenges in fulfilling its Aon Client Promise, which is fully focused on creating added value and impact. The company was spending various man-hours on manually handling information requests using Microsoft Excel and predefined wordbooks in Oracle. The reports generated were sometimes lacking in uniformity. The company needed a flexible, interactive and associative BI solution that could be quickly implemented. The solution was also required to cater for the requirements of the current business landscape.

Arbinet-thexchange, Inc., a leading provider of voice and IP solutions for buying and selling telecommunications capacity, was facing a challenge of limited insight into their daily financial and operational performance. They were primarily relying on spreadsheets to calculate revenue month-to-date for decision making and for revenue forecasting. The company could not pinpoint how minutes were used, pricing of various voice services at current transaction levels, where revenue was made and lost, how traders were performing, or market trends. The requirements to gather data, download to spreadsheets and execute macros were manually intensive. While providing more insight into Arbinet’s true performance, the time required for information analysis still delayed response times to business trends.

Bainbridge International, a manufacturer and distributor of specialty products to marine, construction and recreational markets, was looking for ways to gain a competitive advantage over other companies in its industry. The company had previously utilized IT specialists Blue Rock Systems to stabilize and support its 50-user Microsoft DynamicsNAV (Navision) ERP installation. The success of that engagement led Bainbridge to approach Blue Rock Systems again about other ways to enhance its operations. Specifically, Bainbridge required a sales tool that would help the company track and increase customer spend and profit. They needed a 'finger on the pulse' solution that could provide valuable insights into customer behavior and product appeal.