As Canada’s leading electronic healthcare solutions provider, TELUS wanted to create the nation’s most comprehensive Electronic Health Records (EHR) system. The system would give clinicians immediate and secure Web-based access to patient e-health records at any time. Canada is investing billions of dollars to build an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system that will enable healthcare providers, coast to coast, to access and update any Canadian’s health record electronically and securely. By 2016, the plan is for every Canadian to have an e-health record, containing a variety of medical documents, from doctor’s notes and diagnostic images to prescriptions and test results. TELUS Health Solutions is helping Canada “get there faster” by delivering a Health Information Access Layer (HIAL) solution that aligns with the Canada Health Infoway Blueprint and will enable every provider in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador to access DIS data. This is among the first provincial DIS systems in Canada.

The Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act became U.S. law in 2004 so banks could process more checks electronically. Before this act, banks had to physically transport paper checks from where they were deposited to the bank that paid them. Now, instead, banks can process checks faster and more efficiently using digital images. BOK Financial saw this as a business opportunity to gain efficiency. However, the process of integrating the digital check processing system was complex due to the numerous back-end operational systems involved in depositing, validating, and handling errors and closed accounts.

All direct trading operations at DWS are conducted via its IKS investment account service. As Europe’s largest supplier of public funds, DWS has been handling all necessary customer and account management since the late 1980s with an Adabas- and Natural-based mainframe application. In the late 1990s, DWS put its entire It landscape, including this essential application, to the test. the need for action arose in particular because of insufficient integration of the different It systems. A need for modernization was quickly identified in the IKS department, DWS’s internal distribution channel for the funds trade. Over the years, a number of isolated solutions with only limited interaction capabilities had emerged. The mainframe application was developed with Adabas and Natural in the late 1980s for central customer and account management. It was distressing that marketing and distribution applications, such as call center and document management, could only access the mainframe application via workaround solutions or, in some cases, could not access it at all.

The Department of the Treasury of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has three main applications for the collection and management of taxes: ARBITRIOS for the calculation of taxes, PRITAS for the management of corporate taxes and REFO for processing individual taxes. The challenge is to provide a single view of the taxpayer through a Web portal that integrates data from all three main systems. The Treasury Department was looking for the tools to carry out an application integration, which would allow the agency to have a single view of the taxpayer through a Web portal. This new integration platform was also needed to provide higher efficiency in managing department records. The solution would have to maintain and improve existing investments, re-using the Natural and COBOL application code. The solution also would need to support a technological evolution—rather than a revolution that would completely alter existing IT assets.

Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, Israel’s fourth largest bank and the country’s largest mortgage bank, was facing stiff competition in the dynamic Israeli banking industry. The bank wanted to reach customers in new ways and offer custom-tailored products quickly and easily. However, the bank's legacy systems did not fit the bank’s ongoing business and legal requirements. The competition among banks was harsh and, in order to succeed, the bank had to change the way it handled customers and the products it offered. The bank’s IT infrastructure integrates core mainframe systems with applications running on open environments, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), optical archiving and Web-based applications. The bank clerk’s desktop included both 3270-emulation and .NET applications, requiring them to switch between screens while working with the customer.

Icelandair, one of the largest private companies in Iceland, was facing a challenge. Despite the increase in online ticket sales, the company was not realizing the expected cost savings, staffing reductions, and operational efficiency gains. For every reduction in telephone sales man-hours, there was a corresponding increase in the amount of back-office effort needed to support online sales. The company was also struggling with regional variations in ticket sales processes, which were not standardized across the organization. The airline industry is highly competitive, and airlines must constantly seek out efficiency in their operations to remain profitable. Icelandair needed to operate on the highest possible load factor and attract and retain customers who now shop online for their flight needs.

Insurance companies are facing immense challenges due to market deregulation and increased customer demands. This requires a high degree of market orientation and flexibility of business processes. One of the key questions determining lasting success is whether insurance companies’ legacy IT systems can keep pace with this development. Nuremberg-based uniVersa faced this challenge and needed to ensure their IT systems could adapt and evolve with the changing market. They also faced a specific challenge of creating appropriate inventory management systems for their new insurance product, Tip-Top Tabaluga, in less than two months.

To keep ahead in the fast-moving fashion industry, Bossini wanted to have better visibility into its business and operational processes by synchronizing real-time data across multiple orders, shipments and stock-keeping units (SKUs). However, the data resided in a number of systems, from point-of-sale (POS) solutions to Bossini’s warehouse management inventory. In order to achieve its goals, Bossini had to integrate a series of platforms including the old and new versions of its Oracle application and the company’s legacy platform. During the transition from legacy system to SOA, the company’s different platforms had to be integrated. Other applications like the company’s new POS system had to be connected not only to its new Warehouse Management System (WMS), but also to the old POS because the company was still in the midst of systems migration.

Hibernian General Insurance, one of Ireland's largest and most respected insurers, was facing challenges in serving insurance brokers and policy holders while reducing the time and cost to administer insurance policies. One of Hibernian’s key applications is its Branch Policy System (BPS)—a character-based application used by internal administration and call center staff to service insurance brokers and policy holders. To improve response times to these customers and reduce the costs of administering insurance policies, Hibernian decided to take a service-oriented approach and create a Web-based, easy-to-use interface that leverages and reuses existing key functionality contained within the business-critical Branch Policy application. Initially, Hibernian planned to replace its legacy application with an off-the-shelf general insurance package. However, over the years, there has been a large investment in this system which has provided users with a very high-level of functionality. This was found extremely hard to replace with an off-the-shelf general insurance package.

Nissan Europe, a pan-European service provider to Nissan Europe, faced several challenges. The company was dealing with competition from the East, reliance on manual processes, and an aging internal mainframe architecture. The company had relied on Software AG’s Adabas & Natural for database management and application development since it opened its flagship plant in the U.K. in the 1980s. However, with continuous improvements in efficiency and speed, the partnership has helped Nissan Europe develop an entire suite of mission-critical applications that run on Adabas & Natural, touching everything from manufacturing, to purchasing, to sales and marketing. With zero software failures in the past 30 years, Nissan Europe returned to Software AG for the next step in the evolution of its Adabas & Natural systems: committing to a new efficiency-boosting, feature-enhancing, cost-reducing project running through 2022.

Nissan, one of the world's largest automobile manufacturers, was facing the challenge of fulfilling its strategy of producing and delivering made-to-order vehicles. The company had been relying on Software AG's Adabas and Natural for database management and application development since 1985. However, with the increasing customer demand for customized cars, Nissan recognized the need to improve database performance and application efficiency. The challenges of an overburdened database were inevitable as database backups were interfering with employee productivity and a high number of data files running in parallel on a critical path often created a bottleneck.

The Bavarian Federal State Department of Taxation has a major daily task of corresponding with citizens through letters. The content of these letters is the primary challenge, but they also need to be printed, enveloped, and dispatched in a timely manner. This is a manually intensive task for the 16,000 tax clerks. The department recognized that if only a portion of these letters could be processed automatically, immediately after they’ve been composed, the taxation department could reduce costs and, at the same time, utilize staff’s time more efficiently.

The companies of Vienna’s Wiener Stadtwerke (WStW) Holding AG public utilities holding company were using a personnel information system called PI, introduced in the early 1990s, for payroll accounting and personnel management. In 2005, the company management contemplated whether the solution should be replaced with a more modern one. The challenge was to replace or modernize the PI system without losing its unique features such as application functionality and security. The PI system involved 130 complex application processes with logic and database access along with 239 screen interactions where users could choose from about 1,800 input/output maps. The users who accessed PI on a regular basis were accustomed to the symbol-oriented green screens, but the less frequent users preferred standard PC user interfaces.

7-Eleven, the world's largest convenience store chain, faced a significant challenge in maintaining a supply chain and distribution network to support thousands of stores. The company had to coordinate orders with hundreds of suppliers to deliver products to stores on a daily basis. Many of its smaller suppliers did not have the infrastructure in place to support Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technologies, which 7-Eleven used to automate the exchange of orders and business documents with some of its largest partners. As a result, the company had to rely largely on manual processes with paper invoices faxed, mailed or emailed into the company, and manually keyed into back-end financial applications.

COLT had deployed the same systems in several countries and all of them were operating independently. As a result, there were over 10 instances of each application — and each one containing its own silo of information. Customer information was recorded in several systems and there was no consolidated view of a customer across the whole company. COLT also wanted to automate the provisioning process with the local telecom operators for certain products. This would require COLT to integrate its order handling system with that of the operator. This extended the scope of the integration challenge beyond the enterprise into the realm of B2B.

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.

Fujitsu Technology Solutions, a leading European IT infrastructure provider, was experiencing rapid growth in its service business. However, the company's 20-year-old proprietary service middleware was unable to keep up with its evolving business needs. Fujitsu required a solution that would offer greater flexibility for user interfaces, facilitate improvements in its 24/7 support, enable faster on-boarding of customers, and increase cost efficiencies. The solution also needed to ensure continuous availability throughout the transition process due to demanding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and high penalties.

The Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) was faced with the challenge of improving the availability of data between federal, state, county, and local agencies as well as external partners. They needed to ensure easy interoperability between systems and applications while meeting local, state, and federal reporting and compliance requirements. The agencies were previously limited by point-to-point, hardcoded integrations, siloed systems, and manual processes that were paper-based and slow. This made it difficult for them to share information securely in real time and streamline their services to better meet citizen needs.

Physicists at CERN conduct extensive experiments using particle accelerators. A variety of process visualization and control systems is used to monitor the equipment, including the TIM system and Diagnostics and Monitoring (DIAMON). TIM monitors around 120,000 sensors in such areas as building services engineering, while DIAMON monitors some of the equipment and IT components related to the particle accelerators. Technicians and engineers at the control stations have dashboards that show the status of the systems; the dashboards are continuously updated based on the data from the monitoring systems. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to CERN to operate the monitoring platforms in the most fail-safe way possible. Because these systems play the role of a control center, unexpected occurrences, power outages and major accidents result in a large number of events. One of the requirements for the implementation was that the incoming data could be processed in less than one second. Even during the greatest peaks, the infrastructure must be stable enough to handle the large number of status messages and help the staff in the control center and engineers troubleshooting the systems.

Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM), a top global shipping company, was seeking to improve its business processes and enhance operational efficiency. The company had recently implemented SAP ERP, which increased the company's IT heterogeneity. This led to a need for seamless communication between the different IT systems. HMM wanted to address a spectrum of business integration needs, such as supply chain automation, application integration, and data synchronization. The company was looking for a single integration solution that would quickly connect any system or application without coding.

Radboud University Nijmegen, an international university with a wide range of courses, was facing challenges in gaining insight into and overview of all hardware components, applications, data, and processes. The university's Group Information Management Department found that information regarding the connection between applications and processes was fragmented, making it difficult to collect the correct information at the start of a project. The business side also required more overview of the work processes. A cohesive process from recruitment to registration and ultimately deregistration of students was needed. The university, therefore, looked for an ICT partner who could provide a product that allowed for better insight into and overview of the connection between IT systems and processes.

The digitalization of everyday life is becoming increasingly prevalent, with big data, cloud, mobile access, social and security issues becoming more intertwined and having a significant impact on business and society. This has forced companies to drastically reconsider and transform their processes. The University of Applied Sciences, Saarland (htw saar) recognized the need to prepare their students for this digital era. They wanted to provide their students with a comprehensive overview of current processes within companies and teach them how to best transform these for the digital era. They also wanted to provide real-life problems that students will encounter in their professional career, that students learn to solve using market-leading software.

The digital revolution has not spared universities. They are affected both in their internal transformation processes and in the content of their curriculums. Universities like the University Bonn-RheinSieg are facing several major challenges: attracting students with new standards in research and education, applying and developing state-of-the-art technologies, responding fast to changing industry demands, and teaching theory through practice. The growing demand for specialists in the fields of digital business makes recognizing opportunities for collaboration with the private sector all the more necessary. Universities and private companies share the responsibility of equipping the market with sought-after talent. The University of Bonn-Rhein-Sieg has been using an earlier version of the Integration Education Package (IEP) from the Software AG University Relations program since 2011 and was excited to use the new one.

SOKA-BAU, a service provider for the construction industry, was relying on a series of legacy systems that had grown over time to manage its tasks. Although this environment could still meet demands, it was not able to provide fast and cost-effective IT support for new service offerings over the long term. Even small adjustments already took a great deal of effort. Furthermore, the IT infrastructure did not offer centralized data storage, so massive amounts of data needed to be stored and managed redundantly—also consuming major time and effort. For that reason, SOKA-BAU decided on a fundamental modernization to build its IT on a futureproof, scalable basis.

MAPFRE, a global leader in insurance, faced several challenges as it expanded its operations. The company needed to improve the functionality and performance of its existing operational management system, increase scalability to support global operations, integrate systems and processes across the enterprise, simplify the development of new business solutions, and improve collaboration between business and IT. The international market was particularly competitive due to the residual effects on prices after the global financial crisis in 2008. As a result, insurance providers were being pressured to become more efficient and do more with less. MAPFRE decided BPM was the solution that would provide the scalability and efficiency needed to get ahead in the global marketplace.

DigitalGlobe, a leading global provider of commercial high-resolution Earth imagery products and services, was looking for ways to avoid waste and build services and APIs faster. They wanted to foster a 'right click/add' development mentality and enable more organizations to leverage their imagery and data. The company was also looking for ways to quickly integrate mergers and acquisitions and decommission redundant systems. They saw a huge potential in exposing their services quickly to the world and were looking for a platform that could help them achieve this.

Angostura Limited, a leading Caribbean rum producer, was facing challenges with its manual, paper-based sales process. The process was creating delays in getting orders and related information into SAP. The salesperson had to physically print the customer’s current data before a customer visit and orders and payment receipts were handwritten and manually entered later into SAP. This required the manual intervention from at least four separate departments multiple times along the process. While in the field, the salesperson could not directly answer customer questions regarding available stock and account balances, and would need to phone the related area to inquire.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) was faced with the challenge of offering a single technology platform for all gas market participants to easily transfer information and data in a seamless way for each gas market. It also wanted to more effectively promote greater industry collaboration and flexibility for how participants interacted across the platform. A key part of this challenge was the modernization of the Gas FRC Hub, a B2B platform for the gas retail markets throughout Australia. The hub infrastructure was also planned for use in the NSW/ACT gas retail market.

ATB Financial, a financial institution and crown corporation, was facing challenges in its business lending origination process. The process was slow and inconsistent due to manual data entry and interpretation, which led to human errors and slowed down the process. The subjective interpretation of the approval criteria led to inconsistent outcomes and often resulted in rework. It could take up to three weeks for a single customer to be approved with an average process time of about 11 days. ATB aimed to accelerate the process of onboarding small business and agricultural customers to one day or less. They also wanted to increase visibility to monitor and optimize processes and leverage agile business rules to boost the approval rate.

Openreach, a division of the British telecommunications company, BT Group, was established in 2006 to ensure equality of access to BT’s local network for rival telecom operators. As one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world, Openreach has complex processes and a vast infrastructure. However, the company's systems and processes were siloed and they had issues around end-to-end systems or accountability. Openreach aimed to implement processes and systems that would increase control and also enable effective management of the business going forward. The company sought a more proactive and sustainable solution for managing risks while also working with a consultant firm to define, build and implement a Business Control Framework (BCF) with a five-step life-cycle methodology, covering: risk assessment; documentation of process control; testing; remediation; and sign-off.