Santam, South Africa’s leading short-term insurer, was facing challenges with its IT changes which were difficult and expensive. The company was using Microsoft® Word templates, fragmented tools and different methodologies which led to frustration among employees. The company needed an Enterprise Architecture (EA) with a repository-based product to support its drive to optimize the organization. The aim was to develop an integrated environment that’s more agile and supports the business strategy.

The Automated Regional Justice Information System (ARJIS) mainframe is relied upon by over 11,000 law enforcement officers, adjudicators, investigators, and analysts at 81 agencies. However, the public safety committee of the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) wanted ARJIS to improve how information was integrated, shared, and re-purposed. The mainframe-based system was costly and hard-coded, making it difficult to adapt to the dynamic needs of law enforcement. The challenge was to move off the mainframe to a service-oriented, process-centric Web-based solution that could increase information accuracy, timeliness, and availability at less cost.

Poste Italiane operates across many lines of business, including postal, banking, insurance and financial services. As a result, this diverse enterprise is subject to many different laws and regulations. The company is also widespread with 154,000 employees in 14,000 offices and 16 subsidiaries. This is why a traditional audit approach based on simple testing for each subsidiary or location simply wouldn’t work. As a diverse enterprise, Poste Italiane has to comply with a wide range of laws and regulations issued by the European Union, the Italian Parliament and other authorities. Because of these different regulations— combined with the company’s dispersed structure—Poste Italiane was unable to use a traditional audit procedure based on testing. Instead, Poste Italiane opted for an integrated and methodical approach focused on control design and system reliability.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) started to develop its digital delivery channels during the past decade. HMRC became the first customer for the Government Gateway, a system that provides the pan-government building blocks for secure and efficient transactions. As the number of digital services and transactions at HMRC grew, it became apparent HMRC’s interface to the Government Gateway (known as DIS) needed to be more resilient and accompanied by more responsive support services.

The market communications department at Süwag Kundenservice GmbH processed more than 23 million messages in EDIFACT format in 2011 alone. The company wanted to improve process controlling with greater transparency and more detailed key performance indicators. This would enable the company to better analyze processes when disruptions occur, deadlines are set or when incoming and outgoing messages need to be checked. The solution needed to incorporate requirements from the market communications, supply management and accounts payable management departments. This would ensure all customers could be enrolled in a timely manner by the supply management department, guaranteeing the processing and handling of supplier change processes and ensuring that contract confirmations and budget billing plan notifications to Süwag Kundenservice GmbH customers are sent by defined deadlines.

SICK AG, a global provider of modern sensor technology, has experienced significant growth, leading to an increase in the heterogeneity of the company’s IT environment. With over 40 subsidiaries, numerous sales agencies, and partnerships, ensuring seamless communication between the different IT systems was crucial to guarantee smooth operations and customer satisfaction. The company needed a solution that could integrate the various IT systems from procurement to production, logistics to sales, and handle the increasing volumes of data being exchanged.

Staples Inc., the world's largest supplier of office products, promises to make buying products easy, including making customer deliveries the very next day whenever required. When Staples experienced an increase in delivery volume, the company needed an integration solution that could be implemented rapidly and scaled easily. The company had recently acquired Corporate Express and was seeking ways to maximize synergy and reduce costs across the business. They identified an opportunity to integrate transportation networks for a potential multi-million-dollar cost savings. However, the supply chain platform they had selected couldn't scale to handle the massive transaction volume. Staples was committed to finding a solution that did not slow down integration efforts with Corporate Express.

Split Airport, the second largest airport in Croatia, was faced with constant growth in seasonal traffic. The management identified the ability to perform core processes within strict time limits as key to business success. This led to the decision to implement performance analysis of its key business process—passenger and aircraft handling. The initiative was aimed at gaining insights into the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), identifying weaknesses, and optimizing process times. The seasonal character of the airport's business, with most traffic occurring during the summer season, made effectiveness, efficiency, and speed crucial factors for success. At the same time, strict compliance with all local and international air traffic standards, regulations, and obligations was essential.

Cargolux Airlines S.A. was in a strong market position with impressive sales and constant profit figures when the top management decided to run a “health check” on the company’s processes. Management perceived inefficiencies with the organization and IT spending was not optimized to support it. “In addition, management felt that internal groups sometimes had different versions of the truth and decision makers were having trouble gathering the information they needed in a timely manner. Finally, over time each business unit had started to run their own systems and created databases that sometimes competed with each other. The risk of duplicated and unclear ownership of tasks had become too high.” Cargolux started to look for a way to streamline its processes and provide the foundation for creating a service-oriented systems architecture.

GEWOFAG, a company that manages around 30,000 housing units in Munich, was faced with the decision of whether to maintain its buildings in-house or to outsource the work. The current trend in the real estate sector is to outsource maintenance services to external providers, who can perform the services more cheaply than internal staff on a case-by-case basis. GEWOFAG has its own technical workshops unit (mainly for corrective and preventative maintenance), which employs around 60 tradespeople, including garden workers to look after green spaces and parks. The company sought an objective expert opinion on the most cost-effective approach.

Landesbank Berlin AG (LBB) was faced with the challenge of managing an extensive rulebook, which comprised 180 manuals and required 10.5 million pages to be updated every year. The bank decided to replace the old system with intranet-based rules and procedures, thus avoiding the need to distribute huge amounts of paper to employees across the enterprise every day, as well as structure and archive it. The bank needed a solution that would provide redundancy-free, audit-proof documentation and give employees direct access to all relevant process descriptions.

Océ, a supplier of digital printing systems, software, and services, had developed a complex and mixed IT infrastructure over the years due to its growth and acquisitions. This complexity limited the company's ability to take rapid, decisive action. To address this, Océ launched the SPINE project with the ultimate objective of creating a more flexible and maneuverable organization. The project aimed to realize a new, comprehensive IT architecture and a radical harmonization and standardization of its business processes. The new architecture would be based on SAP.

Piraeus Bank Group, one of the most dynamic financial organizations in Greece, was facing challenges due to its rapid international expansion. The bank needed a well-defined enterprise architecture at its headquarters that could be rolled out to its subsidiaries to streamline local operations based on the Piraeus Bank model. Additionally, the bank was experiencing a rate of growth that involved operational modifications on a daily basis, which needed to be efficiently maintained and distributed. The bank also aimed to create a strong, well-documented, comprehensive, and flexible enterprise architecture that would be valid for Piraeus Bank Greece but also applicable at the Group level. This would allow for efficient distribution of Group policies and operations and quick integration of newly acquired subsidiaries.

Brenntag Europe, a world leader in international chemical distribution, was facing challenges due to its continuous growth. The growth had led to a highly disparate and inefficient IT environment. There was a lack of enterprise-wide process standardization and visibility. The company also needed to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley criteria and improve its quality management for ISO certification and audits. The company desired to implement a consistent operational foundation, built with standardized and modular processes, to facilitate simplified implementations and the optimization of existing applications.

Vipnet, a leading GSM operator in Croatia, was required to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) as part of the Mobilkom Austria group. The compliance required making business processes transparent and proving the efficiency of its internal control system. However, the company faced several challenges. Controls weren't specifically defined and couldn't be mapped as part of a process flow, leading to insufficient process mapping. Additionally, controls weren't tested. The company needed a financially oriented approach to process management to become SOX compliant.

Fast-growing Costa Crociere wanted to improve its booking process to handle more service options and more reservations than ever before. Travel agents and customers needed to be able to make a reservation through any channel. Behind the scenes, corporate systems needed to be integrated into the booking process. With such a large number of travelers to serve, the group’s booking system is equivalent to the ordering system of a large manufacturer. Costa’s ERP system must guarantee efficient functionality to reduce the time it takes to manage bookings, and it must constantly adapt to new business developments. The system stores and manages all the essential information about the cruise holidays chosen by customers: the itinerary, cabin type, personal details and additional services, such as flights, transfers and hotels. The job of managing this huge amount of information is further complicated by the fact that the booking system also offers options for purchasing cruises and associated ser- vices that are open for varying periods, prior to booking confirmation. If a booking is not confirmed, all cabins and other options must be made available in real-time to other potential customers.

Federazione Toscana BCC, a federation serving 33 banks of cooperative credit in the Tuscany region of Italy, aimed to achieve process excellence across all these banks. The federation wanted to introduce a process methodology that would make the banks results-driven and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire banking network. However, each bank needed the flexibility to adapt those standard processes to its own organization. The challenge was to design a system that could host information on all processes at work throughout the banking network and yet allow each bank to align these processes with its unique organizational structure.

In 2008, the Estonian eHealth Foundation set out to build a nationwide Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. The country’s goal was to improve the quality and convenience of healthcare for 1.3 million citizens by centrally storing their health records. To make the best decisions at the point of care, physicians would be able to access a citizen’s EHR online, anytime. This massive undertaking needed a flexible integration platform. After extensive research, the foundation selected webMethods Integration Server, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), to link disparate information silos and local databases.

Baker Hughes, a top-tier oilfield service company, wanted to optimize its Procure-to-Pay (P2P) process to improve invoice accuracy, minimize delivery delays, and reduce late payments. The company needed a world-class Business Process Management (BPM) solution to increase process agility, visibility, and control. The company was looking for a solution that could provide real-time metrics and alerts for process abnormalities, reduce invoice errors and payment delinquency rates, and save costs on every invoice.

HSBC Turkey had planned to double its customers and regional branches in five years without changing staff. To support this fast expansion, HSBC Turkey took a holistic approach to SOA governance—one that will assure effective lifecycle management, asset governance and impact analysis while increasing service re-usability. From the first application deployed, it was obvious SOA governance was essential to getting the maximum value from SOA. Governance would guarantee the success of the company’s transformation to an SOA and unify all legacy governance processes within a single framework. The company would be able to enhance asset management and re-usability by improving existing governance roles, procedures and rules.

W&W Group, a financial services provider, was facing challenges with its Internal Control System (ICS). The existing ICS was not able to support the company's high standards for risk management and was making it difficult for them to comply with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. The lack of good-quality documentation and a process-related overview of risks increased the chances of shortcomings in their process controls and risk assessments. The company needed to standardize their alert and escalation management processes and provide status reports on the performance of the ICS itself to meet new German regulatory requirements.

Bank Mandiri, Indonesia's largest bank, aimed to transform its payment processes to significantly reduce the time and cost of transactions and fuel revenue growth. The bank wanted to deliver highly efficient, competitively priced electronic payment and transaction services in a uniform way across multiple channels and touchpoints. The bank also aimed to anchor itself as the dominant and preferred partner for Indonesia’s move to a cashless society.

Evonik Industries, a global industrial group, was facing challenges with its international operations. The lack of uniform representation standards and file formats for processes made it difficult to gain a cross-sectional view of the enterprise and prevented the development of a shared understanding of processes and process management. This became particularly clear when preparing for an SAP roll out in Greater China. The company was aiming for shorter documentation times and standardized process documentation, with the aim of reducing the number of process harmonization workshops to a minimum. The resulting documentation base would be used for future projects and help create a shared process understanding. The constant demand for training created an urgent need for comprehensive process documentation in China.

VR Leasing Group, a member of FinanzVerbund, a cooperative association of financial solutions providers based in Germany, was facing challenges due to its heterogeneous IT landscape. The disparity in the IT landscape made it difficult to standardize or automate sales processes, particularly the loan application processing. Each disparate application in the process had its own address list, and data had to be entered manually and then verified. This resulted in an overlap in functionality between systems, adding to the inefficiency. The sales partners used various browser-based online front-ends, each with its own specific application process and its own address list, which was not always consistent with addresses stored in the other front-ends or in back-end application management and customer relationship management systems. This resulted in an excessive effort to test and maintain application functions and interfaces that carried out similar tasks. The same was true for assuring the quality of master address data since data was not exchanged automatically between disparate applications.

Apollo-Optik, Germany's largest retail chain for optical products, was facing challenges in serving its customers with high-quality products and on-time delivery. The company's IT landscape was complex and consisted of several different back-end systems, leading to redundancy in data and functionality. For instance, retrieving all data on a customer required calling upon many relevant functions in different systems. This inefficiency prompted Apollo-Optik to transition to a more efficient Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and implement re-usable services across all systems. The company aimed to provide the highest level of quality in customized eyeglasses on time, every time, and needed a solution that could help achieve this goal.

Wales & West Utilities (WWU) is a regulated gas distribution business that transports gas safely to more than 7 million people through its network of the 35,000 kms of pipelines that covers Wales and Southwest England. The company is responsible for attending gas emergencies on streets and at businesses and homes within one or two hours. However, WWU faced challenges in monitoring the emergency process, which was a manual and labor-intensive activity. The company used a simple Comma Separated Values (CSV) user interface to a standalone system that queried databases directly. This system was resilient in the event of a failover, but it did not provide real-time visibility into the emergency process.

Attracting and keeping mobile phone customers requires continuous innovation. Orange UK excels at this. To meet customer expectations, Orange strives to provide products and services that are simple and user-friendly. That is why the company set out to make pay-as-you-go mobile service as convenient and easy as possible. The challenge was to create a system that allows customers to top up their accounts from anywhere while on the go. The process needed to be fast and seamless, interacting with up to 10 systems and sending the customers their top-up approval in seconds.

TURKSTAT, the Turkish Statistical Institute, is responsible for Turkey’s official statistics on a wide range of topics. As part of its corporate e-transformation, the institute aimed to provide fast, easy and secure access to statistics needed by different interest groups. Manual methods of sharing this information were insufficient. TURKSTAT needed to provide data to outside groups categorically, according to user needs, and in a dynamic and sustainable way. As more organizations needed to share data, TURKSTAT found using manual methods or writing code was inadequate. The institute urgently needed a high-speed data exchange platform. Additionally, security was a key concern. TURKSTAT has always been a trusted institution. Decisionmakers are confident in statistical information published by TURKSTAT, and providers of data are certain that their privacy is well-protected. That level of trust could not change.

CSC Scandihealth aimed to become a market leader in Denmark within electronic patient records, maintain the Nordic countries as a home market, and develop the company into a “Centre of Excellence” within European healthcare. The company needed to choose a new technology for their IT solutions in the 1980s. They wanted an effective development tool suitable for creating a standard system for developing patient records. They studied five different solutions from various suppliers before deciding on Software AG because they offered the most flexible development tools and were easy to communicate with.

The UNIQA Group insurance companies receive thousands of paper documents by mail every day. Sorting and forwarding these documents for action was taking too much time and effort, which is why UNIQA sought an automated business process management solution. Its goals were to shorten processing times, lower administrative costs and better distribute the workload to speed up processing. In the past, document distribution was time- and staff-intensive. It could take several days before documents finally reached the right administrator, who then had to scan them for documentation and archiving purposes.