Kyoto University, one of the largest and highest-ranked universities in Japan, has a mission to provide high-performance computing (HPC) tools for researchers all over the country. With over 200 teams and more than 1,600 users relying on its computing resources, the university supports research in a broad variety of areas including natural science, economics, space science, genetics, and civil engineering. However, the massive data growth and demand for computing power meant that HPC is always evolving, and Kyoto University’s Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies (ACCMS) needed to evolve with it. To elevate its HPC capabilities, the team commissioned Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, to deliver three supercomputing systems. The workload management of these systems was orchestrated by Altair’s PBS Professional™, a part of the Altair PBS Works™ suite.

IBERIABANK, a financial institution with a growing footprint across the southeast U.S., was facing a significant challenge with its general ledger account reconciliation process. The bank, which manages approximately 20 billion dollars in assets, had to reconcile millions of rows in the general ledger, a process that was laborious and time-consuming. Some accounts were reconciled monthly, others daily, but regardless of the frequency, the process was a drain on resources. As the bank continued to grow, the need for an automated reconciliation process became increasingly clear. The bank's Controller, Denny Pagnelli, highlighted the issue, noting the 19 gigabytes of data that needed to be reconciled.

Southeastern Med, a community hospital serving over 4,000 inpatients and 100,000 outpatients annually in the Cambridge, Ohio area, was facing a significant challenge. The hospital's existing healthcare-specific business intelligence solution was unable to provide the level of reporting capabilities required to extract actionable insights from a wide variety of data sources. As the demand for more information and new types of reports increased, the IT department found it increasingly difficult to keep up. The hospital needed a platform that could integrate real-time information with static historical data from diverse sources. Additionally, they needed a way to make their vast data stores more meaningful and actionable, as their current reporting was not aiding in the discovery of insights needed to seize opportunities and mitigate risks promptly.

The United States Naval Academy (USNA) faced a significant challenge in organizing travel for over 3,000 midshipmen to global locations. The process, which involved acquiring and documenting travel arrangements and managing multiple itinerary and entitlement changes, was complex, dynamic, and high-risk for human error. The manual business processes and systems in place were inefficient, leading to delays, processing errors, cost overruns, and financial hardship for the travelers. The financial and logistical systems often failed to generate crucial travel information promptly. The USNA needed a solution that could handle structured data and information produced by multiple, disparate systems, as well as unstructured data present in forms, documents, and artifacts.

Hungerford Vinton, an external audit firm, was facing a common challenge in the auditing industry. The data they received from clients was difficult to work with, existed in a myriad of formats, and was generated by various types of accounting and financial packages. This resulted in more time, often unbillable, spent on extracting and analyzing the data needed for the actual audit. The firm also had to access and extract data from historical records and legacy systems, which are prevalent in government systems, a specialty of this firm. Additionally, they had to combine data from multiple companies for a single audit. Each client audit was unique, making audit data preparation a nearly insurmountable challenge. The firm wanted to significantly reduce the hours spent on data gathering and conversion, which could sometimes be as much as 15 hours per audit, some of which could not be billed back to the clients.

IVECO Australia, a manufacturer and distributor of commercial vehicles, faced a challenge in reducing the size, weight, and solving time in Finite Element Analysis (FEA) while improving the durability of components. The company had to conduct physical durability testing, which often led to redesigning components that failed during the test. This unnecessary design loop extended the target release date and increased the idle time of trucks during repairs. The company sought to validate components through FEA to eliminate this design loop during physical durability testing. The challenge was to predict the durability and test pass rate of components before creating a prototype, while also meeting strict cost and weight targets. The battery box, mounted on the truck chassis, was particularly susceptible to mechanical vibration, which could cause structural damage and hamper battery life.

The Marbridge Foundation, a nonprofit community serving developmentally disabled adults, faced a significant challenge due to new IRS regulations mandated by the Affordable Care Act. These regulations required the Foundation to provide detailed reporting on current and past payroll data. However, the Foundation's existing systems were not equipped to provide the necessary information, and the data output was only available in PDF format. The Foundation needed to analyze hours worked for over 300 employees to determine eligibility, calculate the employee share for each person offered coverage, and more. Hiring a temp agency to manually input the necessary payroll data was not a viable option due to cost constraints and the risk of errors, which could lead to substantial IRS penalties.

Cyclone Racing, Iowa State University’s Formula SAE team, was faced with the challenge of reducing the weight of their latest vehicle, CR22, specifically the vehicle's rear aerodynamic wing. The previous year's car had a heavy internal wing structure that led to excessive roll and instability during races. The team aimed to design a lightweight yet extremely stiff modified swan neck wing mount for the Formula SAE vehicle. The challenge was to ensure that the new design would not only reduce the weight of the entire wing package but also ensure that it was very strong and stiff to withstand the rigors of racing.

CNAF (Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales), a large public sector agency in France, was facing a significant challenge in handling its family benefit data. The data was only available in various text formats and lists, making the extraction of insights extremely labor-intensive. The fund allocation and distribution process was managed by CNAF’s Department of Workflows and Document Management, led by Jean-Michel Omont, Archive System Manager. Until 2006, the organization had always dealt with its massive amounts of family benefit data manually. The information had never been consolidated and extracting any insights from it was extremely labor-intensive. As reports became accessible from computers in text formats, the system improved somewhat, but users were still unable to access the reports in Excel directly. In 2008, CNAF wanted to better understand their local IT needs and how they could expedite their data processing since they were handling thousands of files every day.

MasterCard, a global technology company in the payments industry, was facing a significant challenge in its business financial support team. The team of 13 was spending between 40 to 80 hours per week manually reconciling transactions and cash from reports that resided on the company’s mainframe. This process involved printing 20-30 individual, multi-page reports daily and hand-keying data into Excel for reconciliation. The task was not only time-consuming but also inefficient, especially considering the company's rapid growth and expanding product offerings. Derek Madison, Leader of Business Financial Support at MasterCard, was tasked with identifying new ways to increase efficiency and improve MasterCard processes.

Icicle Seafoods, one of the largest and most diversified seafood companies in North America, was facing a significant challenge with their legacy accounting system. The in-house, DOS-based system was unable to provide access to data in a useful, dynamic format without extensive manual effort. The company was spending too much time manually translating sales, inventory, accounting, and general ledger data into a useful, dynamic format. Information was locked in PDFs and other inaccessible file types, making it difficult for the company to use their data for creating simple schedules and financial statements. More complex functions, such as analysis and forecasting, were well beyond their reach. This inefficiency presented a real problem for a company whose success depends on getting products from fisheries to market as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Berkshire Bank's Human Resources (HR) department was faced with the challenge of creating and sharing monthly reports for short-term incentive plans, compensation and salary, talent management, and internal/external auditing requests. The department, which manages over 1,300 employees, had to spend hours collecting, parsing, and reconciling data before it could be shared with the executive team. The bank's expansion over the years, through organic growth and acquisitions, led to the deployment of several disparate HR systems. This resulted in HR data being 'locked away' in various systems, making it increasingly difficult to access, reconcile, and combine information from multiple vendors and various Excel spreadsheets.

The Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT) in Pune, India, was faced with the challenge of designing, fabricating, and testing a Quad-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that uses topology optimization to decrease weight and increase strength. The project was undertaken by a group of undergraduate students under the guidance of faculty members. The objective was to leverage the design freedom provided by the unmanned nature of the vehicle to amplify the vehicle's performance. The team aimed to find a simple and fast solution to finding the structural improvements needed to enhance the quad-rotor UAV. The challenge also involved dealing with the complexity of designs generated by topology optimization when no manufacturing constraints are added.

Earthlite, a leading massage and spa equipment manufacturer, faced significant challenges in managing its accounts receivable and accounts payable reporting processes. With a diverse and distributed customer base, the company needed an efficient and accurate method to manage these processes. The existing method involved the accounts receivable team manually downloading and analyzing 500-page PDF reports to identify accounts where collections were needed. The static report structure prevented Earthlite from being able to sort and organize the information or perform any sort of data analysis. This process was not only time-consuming and resource-intensive, taking each team member approximately six hours every month, but it was also prone to errors and potential delays in the collections process.

The University of Texas – Arlington's Formula SAE racecar team faced a significant challenge in redesigning the pedal box assembly of their 2019 racecar. The previous pedal box assembly, made of a carbon fiber and foam core body with aluminum pedals and mountings, had issues with body flexing and required reinforcement, which unfortunately increased the weight beyond the original design. The team also found the design and simulation process to be time-consuming. The challenge was to make the pedal box assembly stiffer, lighter, and easier to manufacture, while also reducing the time spent on design and simulation.

Arbor Financial Credit Union, a financial institution with over $465 million in assets and more than 37,000 members, was grappling with the challenge of reconciliation reporting within their accounting department. The data they needed to reconcile came from various sources, including PDF and text files, and they required a tool that could extract and blend this information for reporting purposes. The strategic implication that led Arbor Financial to reassess their situation was the need for efficiency and quality time savings. They were in dire need of a solution that could pull thousands of reconciliation reports daily without error, a task that was nearly impossible with their existing system.

Whitnell & Co., a wealth management organization, faced a significant challenge in generating 415 monthly reports detailing its clients’ purchases of security shares and investments. The process involved reconciling individual lots from Whitnell’s accounting system records to their multiple financial custodians. With over 1,200 accounts at one custodian alone and more than 46,000 records in the final table built from 20 separate tab delimited text source files, the data management task was immense. The process was not only time-consuming, taking approximately two hours to import all the source files into Excel and format the columns identically, but it was also prone to manual errors. Additionally, the company struggled with direct comparison of accounts in their portfolio system to identify anomalies. The manual process was so laborious that it took several months to get through just a quarter of the data, rendering the data stale and the efforts futile.

The medical industry, particularly the orthopedics sector, faces a significant challenge in validating biomechanical models due to the complexity of materials, scarcity of experimental data, and the lack of representation of variability. These models are crucial in understanding and predicting deformities and fracture risks of biological tissue when subjected to external forces. The challenge is further compounded by the multifactorial nature of the studied phenomena, which include biological and chemical parameters that influence the mechanical behavior. The need for personalized medicine, especially in orthopedic surgeries, adds another layer of complexity, as it requires bone implants with shape and characteristics personalized to each patient.

Digital Architects, an Austrian-based architectural firm, was tasked with the challenge of building a simple, robust, and sustainable roof structure for a prosthesis lab at the Centre medico-chirurgical de l'Ulcère de Buruli, a hospital in Bouaké, Ivory Coast. The hospital specializes in treating Buruli Ulcer, a skin and soft tissue infection common in tropical and subtropical climates. The project was initiated by two Masters’ degree students at the University of Innsbruck, who had gathered charitable contributions and their own savings to design and build a workspace for the construction and use of prostheses for the patients at the hospital. The project was coordinated with the Vatelot Foundation, a non-profit organization that built the hospital in 2013. The challenge was to operate within an extremely tight budget and use available materials for building the roof of the laboratory. The team needed to calculate the use of variations of small L-shaped profile steel for a simple and robust setup that would not immediately require full assembly.

Dimensions Furniture, Inc., a furniture designer and manufacturer, faced a unique challenge. Their primary customers were internet and catalog-based retailers who demanded a large variety of models but in low volumes. This was a stark contrast to big-box retailers who required fewer models but in higher volumes. To meet this demand, Dimensions needed to design a plethora of new models. However, their existing design process, which primarily involved 2D tools like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, was not efficient enough to churn out the required volume of designs. They needed a better design tool that was not only efficient but also allowed for more free-flowing creativity.

Shanghai Arts and Crafts Factory, a provider of high value-added design services and handicrafts, was facing a challenge in advancing from their current 2D drawing approach to full 3D models and renderings. The factory's designers were using 2D drawing software like Photoshop to represent their ideas, especially for float design projects. They would quickly draw a main view of the float with dimensions and then transfer it to the float makers. However, this process was proving to be inefficient as it was hard to explain all the intricate details with just one side view. The designers had to communicate each detail to the manufacturer and discuss several times. Adding another view of the drawing created in Photoshop would take additional time. The factory was in search of a new tool to improve this process.

Race Face, a leading designer and manufacturer of performance cycling products, was faced with the challenge of designing and manufacturing a bicycle crank with increased stiffness and strength targets, without adding any weight to the current aluminum alloy part. The new crank also had to maintain strength targets. The constraints were to manufacture in a cost-effective way that minimized tooling cost and processing of each part. Traditionally, Race Face attempted to maximize stiffness using an I-beam cross-sectional design, optimizing the crank arm at the moment of inertial at various sections. From there, Race Face would run a finite element analysis, make changes and recheck until stresses were minimized for the desired shape and weight.

Acclaimed Architect Peter Macapia was seeking to change perceptions and convictions about how buildings could look and how they impact their environment. He was exploring new frontiers in architectural design that simultaneously employed principles of architecture and engineering to produce totally new insights and types of structures. Macapia initially worked independently to carry through research started in the 1960s and ‘70s in Japan, efforts that had produced genetic-type algorithms for structural morphology. However, these early computational methods were primitive in their applicability by today’s standards. Macapia’s perception of what was possible in his field changed significantly in 2010 when he was preparing a course for the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles.

A leading global automotive parts supplier, with over 300 manufacturing centers and close to 90 product development, engineering and sales centers in 30 countries, faced a significant challenge when it expanded its operations to a new facility in the southcentral United States. The company's business model is based on invoicing against the cost of each component used in the manufacturing of a final product. On average, over 100 different components were used in each finished unit, with the number often exceeding 250 for custom variations. The supplier needed to validate, reconcile, and report on all the components used to manufacture the final unit for the automaker. Poor inventory controls and inaccurate supply chain reporting were impacting the supplier’s operational costs and revenue numbers. Additionally, the automaker required that each component used in the final unit be mapped to the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) of the fully manufactured vehicle. The number of different data sources and formats used in this process demanded a solution that was easy to use, could extract needed information from disparate data sources, and ensure accurate, timely, flexible reporting and invoicing.

BMW Motorrad, the motorcycle division of BMW, was facing a challenge with the crankshaft model building process. The process was previously outsourced to external providers, with the average time taken for a model being between 1-2 weeks depending on the engine type. The organization required an annual estimate of new crankshaft models to be produced for budgetary decisions. However, the actual production of the models often fell short of estimates due to varying constraints on the part of the suppliers. Additionally, for any additional crankshaft models when required, the overall order processing time could be lengthy. To facilitate effective budgetary planning and decision-making, accuracy in model production forecasts with a high degree of confidence became necessary.

Socomec, a century-old, France-based company specializing in innovative power solutions, was seeking to create additional value for its customers by implementing increasingly complex and sophisticated power setups. The company's specialty lies in providing low-voltage energy installations for critical energy buildings like datacenters, solar plants, utilities, and hospitals. However, simply meeting customers’ power needs wasn’t enough for Socomec. The company aimed to provide solutions that would enable customers to elevate their businesses to the next level of performance and efficiency. This required the implementation of intricate power setups and services, involving detailed processes such as governance, project management, change management, architecture, integration, and cybersecurity. To achieve this, Socomec decided to collaborate with an open ecosystem of experts and partners, allowing it to focus internal resources on its core competencies.

Guerrilla Gravity, a mountain bike manufacturing company based in Denver, Colorado, faced a significant challenge in pioneering a new material application and technology without a roadmap. The company was experiencing rising demands and needed to meet schedule and production challenges. The launch of their innovative Revved Carbon Technology, which combines a new bike frame material and a new patent-pending manufacturing method, brought an additional set of challenges. The company had to scale production with increased demand, which was doubling year after year. The introduction of the new technology also posed the risk of unknown problems arising, putting launch schedules in jeopardy.

KTM Technologies GmbH, a division of PIERER Mobility AG, was tasked with the challenge of improving the engine performance of the KTM 450 Factory Edition motorcycle. The specific goal was to expand the rpm range of the engine by designing a new type of rocker arm with lower inertia while maintaining or improving stiffness and deformation level. The challenge was to reduce the mass inertias of the moving masses to a minimum while meeting the component’s stiffness targets. This would allow the rpm to be maximized without leading to higher forces on the component, ensuring the part's durability performance. The structure and optimization group at KTM Technologies, which focuses on structural optimization of parts for various manufacturing methods, was given the responsibility of redesigning the rocker arm.

Cape Regional Health Systems, a healthcare service provider for a growing resident population and over a million seasonal visitors, faced a significant challenge in managing and analyzing their expanding data. The organization's eight-person finance and reimbursement team struggled to consolidate information from a dozen different databases and reports, including patient records and insurance providers. As the organization grew, so did the volume of data, making it increasingly difficult to gather the right data points for analysis. The IT team was using SQL-based coding scripts to extract data from various modules and repositories, a process that was not only complex but also time-consuming. The team often had to rely on external consultants for assistance, which further delayed the data retrieval process. This delay in data access was a significant hindrance for the executive team, who needed timely data to make critical business decisions.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), a globally recognized architectural, urban planning, and engineering firm, was tasked with designing the New United States Courthouse in Downtown Los Angeles. The challenge was to create an open and transparent public space that complied with the General Services Administration’s (GSA) 2020 sustainability objectives. The building had to incorporate numerous sustainable design features, and SOM’s structural engineering team had to devise a creative structural system that would suspend the building's perimeter above the civic plaza while maintaining the required setbacks from the street. The challenge was not only to meet these stringent requirements but also to do so in a timely manner.