P&O Ferries, a leading ferry company in the UK, operates in a highly competitive market where consistent quality of service is crucial. The company's strategic pillars include smart growth, competitiveness, and customer-centricity. However, changing regulations, such as the EU Sulphur Directive, significantly impact P&O Ferries’ overall costs and squeeze operating margins. The company was looking for ways to increase business agility and resilience, reduce dependency on legacy IT systems, and realize new revenue opportunities. On the retail side, P&O Ferries wanted to diversify its offers to accommodate continental European customers’ tastes and provide more value-added services. On the freight side, the company needed to cater to the needs of its customers who operate in a very price-sensitive market and require real-time data exchange and support for digital business services.

Zurich Insurance Group, a leading multi-line insurance provider, had been using ARIS for over 10 years for modeling and documenting business processes in both of its business segments, General Insurance and Global Life. However, as the current version of ARIS was nearing the end of its life cycle, Zurich needed to migrate to the new ARIS version 9. This migration needed to take into consideration different user requirements worldwide and had to be implemented for all of the Zurich Group’s ARIS users worldwide. The migration project also had to ensure the smooth continued operation of more than 50 ARIS databases.

In the financial services industry, information is expected to be immediate, relevant and actionable. End-of-day events processing is no longer adequate. Financial institutions have to become thoroughly Digital Enterprises and need to understand events as they happen.

Kiabi, a French retailing powerhouse, was facing a burgeoning customer volume, data overload and inconsistency, and a market-wide transition to omni-channel retail. The company's consistent growth of nearly 9% annually, expansion from 5 to 32 countries, and a customer base increasingly composed of Millennials, a group constantly online, in-touch and communicating, put a strain on their legacy systems. Their website slowed to a crawl and their data was riddled with errors. IT had to align to the company’s business functions—and fast—for Kiabi to turn themselves into the omnichannel business they had envisioned.

Logrand’s vision is to become a customer-centric, Digital Enterprise. To achieve this, Logrand wants to adopt new digital business models and change from manual operations to those that are reactive, predictable and automated. The end game: Increase customer satisfaction.

With the prediction of 50 billion devices being connected by 2020, the Internet of Things is revolutionizing every aspect of life. Wipro Technologies, a leading systems integrator, consulting, and services company, is at the forefront of this transformation with its Looking Glass solution—an Internet of Things solution for smart, connected products. The challenge was to leverage the power of IoT to increase ROI, customer satisfaction, and revenue for enterprises across various industries.

The insurance industry is facing a myriad of challenges including aging IT infrastructure, increasing customer churn, decreasing turnover, protracted time-to-market, disruptive new entrants and a steady stream of new regulations. Additionally, more and more customers are looking for a digital touch point with their insurance providers. In order to keep up in this environment, providers are looking for an easy-to-use digital solution that has a rapid ROI, a low TCO and can be integrated with legacy systems. The solution must also come with a Web portal that’s reliable and customer-friendly for easy online access to services.

Schwering & Hasse (S&H), a Germany-based company, manufactures a large volume of copper magnet wire, a critical component of numerous electrical products. The manufacturing process requires minute tolerances for the insulation, with even a tiny deviation from the specification rendering the wire useless. S&H's mission is to manufacture as much wire as possible with as few errors as possible. However, the company faced challenges in maintaining high quality standards due to rapidly changing customer demands and product specifications. The existing information systems were not equipped to create a factory that was truly “transparent” to both line workers and managers. The company needed a system that could provide immediate and accurate visibility into multiple production quality factors in real time.

Logrand’s vision is to become a customer-centric, Digital Enterprise. To achieve this, Logrand wants to adopt new digital business models and change from manual operations to those that are reactive, predictable and automated. The end game: Increase customer satisfaction.

With the prediction of 50 billion devices being connected by 2020, the Internet of Things is revolutionizing every aspect of life. Wipro Technologies, a leading systems integrator, consulting, and services company, is at the forefront of this transformation with its Looking Glass solution—an Internet of Things solution for smart, connected products. The challenge was to integrate, capture, analyze, and respond to data captured by embedded sensors in remote printers at customer sites. The company needed to understand and act immediately on real-time maintenance data to proactively increase service levels, drive down costs, and maximize asset uptime, utilization, and placement.

The insurance industry is facing a myriad of challenges including aging IT infrastructure, increasing customer churn, decreasing turnover, protracted time-to-market, disruptive new entrants and a steady stream of new regulations. Additionally, more and more customers are looking for a digital touch point with their insurance providers. In order to keep up in this environment, providers are looking for an easy-to-use digital solution that has a rapid ROI, a low TCO and can be integrated with legacy systems. The solution must also come with a Web portal that’s reliable and customer-friendly for easy online access to services. Analysts refer to the market for digital insurance solutions as immature and with lots of potential for growth.

Schwering & Hasse (S&H), a Germany-based company, manufactures a massive volume of copper magnet wire, with 400 production lines producing 140,000 kilometers of wire per day in a 24/7 operation. The wire, which is coated with a thin layer of insulation, is a critical component of numerous electrical products, such as transformers and motors. The tolerances required for the insulation are minute, with even a tiny deviation from the specification rendering the wire useless. S&H's mission is to manufacture as much wire as possible with as few errors as possible. However, the company faced challenges in maintaining high quality standards due to rapidly changing customer demands and product specifications. The company's existing information systems were not equipped to create a factory that was truly “transparent” to both line workers and managers, and did not provide detailed, real-time information about every phase in the production process.

In the financial services sector, the ability to deliver new capabilities daily in a compliant manner is crucial. However, Standard Chartered, like many organizations, was hindered by a multitude of interfaces that impeded agility. The bank sought to innovate faster by reducing interfaces and enhancing quality through the use of a globally federated business process framework.

SKF, a leading knowledge engineering company, was tasked with supporting its customer, Stora Enso, a global provider of paper, wood, and packaging products, with cutting-edge solutions. Stora Enso uses SKF’s cloud-based condition monitoring suite to ensure asset availability and is gearing up for growth. A prerequisite for this growth was establishing an interconnection between SKF’s software and Stora Enso’s SAP® system. In the past, there was no integration between SKF software and SAP. All individual software integrations for customers were developed from scratch.

Royal Dirkzwager, a European leader in providing information and communication technologies to the maritime-logistics market, was facing a data overload due to the continuous stream of information from 120,000 ships transmitting every two seconds. The company was struggling to cope with the overwhelming data volumes, growing demand for precision ship tracking, and increasing customer functionality requests. The traditional ship-based transponders were limited to communicating data only when a ship came in to port and were unable to reach further than 40km offshore. The company needed a solution to exploit the data for added functionality and reduced costs.

Hillsborough County in Florida, with a population of 1.2 million citizens, operates an Information & Service Center (ISC) to provide a reliable source of information to citizens, businesses, visitors and internal departments. The county aimed to become the “Next-Generation County” and the centralized call center was a significant part of this plan. However, before the implementation of the call center, the county used aging, unmaintained and unsupported on-premises customer relationship management software. Incoming inquiries were handled by “call taking groups” and there were no recorded performance metrics. This led to inefficiencies and a lack of transparency in the handling of customer inquiries.

In the digital age, banks are looking to present personalized offers to online customers as soon as they log in at a response time of two seconds or less. Offers must stay active for 30 minutes for tracking and processing reasons—all while millions of other customers may be accessing the same applications at the same time. The challenge was to develop a real-time personalized marketing promotion system for a leading retail/corporate bank that provides an optimal, secured, feasible, reliable and robust mechanism for presenting eligible marketing offers based on the user/visitor, channel and situation.

Since 1952, distributor Casbega has focused on the flow of Coca-Cola products in Spain. Recently, the company took a closer look at the flow of its processes—starting with accounting. Specifically, Casbega wanted to speed up invoice administration and reduce related costs. Document flow between branch offices and departments was too excessive, and email was proving inadequate in driving workflow and managing files. Every year, Casbega’s accounting department processes 40,000 invoices from other departments and regional offices. The invoice approval process varies depending on the office and department. Invoices advance to different levels of approval, enabling the delegation of tasks and the automatic generation of reminders to the responsible employees at each level. All employees who process invoices keep a copy of each invoice as a record. The process is integrated with an accounting system controlled by SAP technology.

California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) is America’s second largest public pension fund and the largest educator-only pension fund in the world. The organization was facing the challenge of reducing operating costs by moving Natural batch to the less-expensive IBM zIIP™ processor. The organization was looking for a solution that would not require any changes to the existing code or modification to batch jobs for the START application. The organization was also concerned that a new product would require more testing and more validation, which would mean more time to realize savings.

AXA’s goal is to become the preferred company for all of its stakeholders and customers. This requires a strong focus on the customer and fostering employee involvement by building a culture of trust and SLA achievement. In claims management, in particular, AXA France wanted to identify the cause of SLA issues to increase customer satisfaction and optimize the claims management team. In the end, AXA wants its claims management organization to have a process optimization mindset.

The infrastructure at Zurich Airport is highly complex and must meet the requirements of a wide array of user groups: passengers, airlines, ground crew, customs, security services and air traffic control, to name just a few. Vastly different systems are used for these tasks, requiring millions of data to be transferred among them every day. Until a few years ago, scenarios like this in which data from one system needed to be made available quickly to several other systems posed a major challenge for Flughafen Zürich AG as the airport operator. The interaction between these applications constantly needs realignment as well. But the file export provided in most cases means that nearly every change or new development requires pulling in 30 to 40 IT service providers to achieve a one-to-one integration among the affected partners.

DB Netz AG, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn AG, is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure for rail operations. The company's IT infrastructure was complex and many applications were developed independently from one another, leading to data being managed in different databases and functionalities for realizing requirements being developed redundantly. This resulted in higher costs and longer project durations. The company sought to develop an innovative IT toolbox system as part of a service-oriented architecture that would structure and harmonize the development process for all IT applications within the company. The goal was to automate processes from technical requirements through realization and documentation.

Oriflame, a beauty company selling direct in more than 60 countries, faced several challenges. The company's average annual growth of 11 percent over the past 20 years and expansion into more than 40 countries brought many business challenges. This naturally created challenges for Oriflame’s Global Shared Services IT Group as well: to incorporate new markets, adapt requirements and manage disparate business needs. In Oriflame, the one business constant is clearly change. The primary business applications were consistent across Oriflame: the in-house sales application (Orisales), JDA® Platform for supply chain management and IFS Applications™ for ERP. However, the alignment issues were at a more fundamental level.

The Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) in Kuwait had been relying on the stable architecture of Adabas and Natural for its core civic information systems and applications for almost three decades. However, personnel changes over time, along with inadequate standards and controls, led to a fragmentation of key business and technical knowledge. This was upheld by just a few seasoned agency employees. As a result, production changes were increasingly unpredictable and the risk was high that new decrees from the Kuwaiti government could not be implemented in time. The agency needed to regain control over its IT assets and business process information, expand knowledge throughout the organization and be able to plan for and make changes safely once again.

The Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality (EMM) unified 20 cities, townships and local councils in the East Rand region of Gauteng into a single municipality. However, services were not unified across the municipality—each of the 20 Customer Care Areas (CCAs) and various departments had their own processes and procedures. The lack of transparency and standardization led to duplications, information silos, uncoordinated efforts, months-long approval times and hampered city planning. Part of EMM’s challenge to solve was that service processes were mostly manual and paper-based, handwritten forms were physically sent from one department to another. Manual entry of the same information in multiple systems cost time, effort and increased errors. Forms could be lost and it was difficult to determine where a particular application was in the process flow.

FortisBC, a fully integrated electric utility in southeastern British Columbia, was facing challenges with its decade-old customer information system. The system, which was used daily by customer service, was out of warranty and needed a language, interface, and database update. The system had proven functionality worth preserving, but replacing it could have cost tens of millions of dollars. The company wanted to modernize the system at a fraction of the cost of replacing it. Other goals included adding a Web front-end, creating a single sign-on environment, improving security and eliminating manual password changes, assuring easy mobile and remote access, building a platform for a next generation of business services, and improving the ability to deliver more self-services to the customer.

Swisscom, a leading telecommunications and IT company in Switzerland, faced several challenges. The industry-wide move to digitalization, a rapidly expanding B2B market, and growing demand for increased system flexibility were among the key issues. The old way of managing transactions, which involved manual input and piles of paper, was inefficient and costly. The company needed a solution that would not compromise data security while improving speed and efficiency. Swisscom also wanted to reduce the number of steps in some processes by half to cut costs and improve turnaround time and quality.

Swisscom, the leading telecommunications provider in Switzerland, was facing challenges with its order process reporting. The company was unable to proactively monitor orders, and the analysis of existing data was either extremely difficult or impossible. This led to frequent, time-consuming internal queries, often triggered by customer inquiries. The lack of transparency and efficiency in the process led to high frustration levels both internally and externally, damaging the company's reputation and resulting in lower sales. Swisscom needed a solution that would allow for the monitoring of all processes with problem alerts, transparent and fast reporting, easy measurement and display of KPIs, direct access to process information for various departments, and comprehensive project documentation.

Alliance Healthcare, a leading pharmaceutical wholesaler in Germany, was facing high competitive pressure and a need to improve performance. The company's inventory system, Wapha, developed with Adabas & Natural, needed to be moved from the expensive mainframe environment to a more cost-effective Linux platform. The company also wanted to align its systems with IT optimizations and protect its long-term investments in its inventory system. The company's IT landscape was diverse and heterogeneous, making the rapid implementation of new requirements time- and cost-intensive. This was not acceptable in a market that is highly rebate- and sales-oriented and subject to frequent legal changes in Germany’s regulated health system.

Accarda AG, a specialist in integrated customer management, is Switzerland’s leader in customer loyalty cards with a payment function. The company manages more than two million customer loyalty cards, with annual card revenues of 2.5 billion Swiss francs. Accarda AG ensures a favorable ratio of costs to benefits for its clients. The company stands for high-performance, individualized business processes and strict adherence to the client’s budget and timing requirements. Consistent process management, with quality assurance in accordance with ISO 9001, is the key to ensuring that Accarda’s clients derive the greatest possible benefit from the growth in sales that can be expected from implementing a loyalty card program. The company was looking for a solution to measure, analyze and optimize business process chains, create dashboards for the online visualization of process measurement results, and provide online access to the entire range of process-related and organizational knowledge.