Albertsons was in the middle of a digital transformation program and wanted to rebrand itself to a tech-enabled retail chain. As part of this program, Albertsons was looking for ways to launch customer marketing campaigns securely. The company was engaged in a program to modernize its data infrastructure and move its critical data assets to Microsoft Azure Cloud. However, the company did not entirely trust Azure’s security features and was concerned about potential data breaches. At the same time, Albertsons wanted to continue to run personalized online marketing campaigns and launch advanced analytics program on its customer data. The company’s goal was to find a secure way to mask the customer data and ensure that only authorized individuals could run campaigns to access the data.

Enverus’s business growth drove the need for the company to build next generation products to support key O&G market segments. These products include applications to support well production and oil field services workflows, geo services for map analysis, a Geology, Geophysical and Engineering (GG&E) platform for interpretations and visualization, as well as a soon to be released mineral interest analysis application. Rapid time-to-market for these products and applications was crucial and this implied that the Data Tech team needed to deliver a data platform that supported the internal application development team quicker than they had been doing in the past. Also, rapid delivery of data directly to the customers was needed as well. However, the Data Tech team was challenged with integrating the data across the data warehouse, other data sources and providing it to the data consumers quickly. The product development team’s delivery timelines were routinely at risk due to data availability and data consistency issues. As a result, the developers were directly accessing the data sources and in other cases suffering from severe delivery delays. To solve this issue, one option was to use conventional ETL (extract, transform, and load), but that would take several weeks. A more timely way of meeting the needs of the product development team was needed.

The Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) was facing challenges due to a difficult economic and financial situation and an evolving technological environment. These conditions made it challenging for Istat to measure a society that is growing increasingly complex and diverse; exploit the wealth of information, including unstructured data; leverage new methodological and technological tools; become flexible, agile, and cost-efficient; and tackle the crisis of high costs and lower response rates associated with traditional data collection systems. In addition, Italian law recently required Istat must now produce a census report every year, using data from the Basic Population register and statistical surveys, rather than producing census reports on a decennial basis. The earlier censuses were based on universal suffrage, but now they are based on sampling approaches. To facilitate the change, Istat needed to modernize its data infrastructure, and part of that plan involved taking data from administrative sources and statistical surveys and integrating them into a system of registers (SIR) that cover the appropriate demographic, social, economic, and environmental domains.

Sicredi, formed by 108 credit unions, has a large number of data systems and platforms that make up the backbone of its IT infrastructure. Each individual credit union, besides wanting to ensure that it was serving unique data needs for informed decision-making, also wanted to improve its time-to-market. Most data needs at Sicredi are fulfilled through dashboards, reports, and offline files, all of which is leveraged by data analysts to generate insights. Due to the siloed nature of these data assets, data analysts have been relying on extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes to consolidate data from different data systems, including a data warehouse, a data lake (on AWS), and several sandboxes, to create local data repositories, which takes a lot of data analyst time and requires additional storage systems. Most of the organization’s data was stored in the data warehouse and data lake, which delivered dashboards and reports to business intelligence and analytics applications. Sicredi needed an integrated data platform that could scale at demand and promote both data democratization and self-service for data and analytics, without the need to replicate data. Sicredi also wanted to implement data governance throughout the organization.

City Furniture, an online retailer with a chain of physical stores in Florida, started out as a small family business that has grown to reach annual sales of $1 billion. While the company has been experiencing rapid growth, it encountered challenges with slow, inefficient data management technologies. The company’s extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes had high resource requirements and were slow to implement, so they impeded many important data initiatives. In addition, City Furniture’s operational and sales data systems were decentralized from the data in the transactional systems. This made it difficult to perform advanced analytics and understand operational issues such as scheduling orders, delivery delays, and returns. To grow, City Furniture needed advanced analytics to gain more visibility about deliveries, scheduling, and routing orders, and to better prepare the sales team to deliver orders. The company needed a centralized data source to provide accurate data to different teams such as sales, marketing, supply chain, and business operations, to help them make faster decisions.

Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages faced a challenge of multiple disparate data sources in various locations, which required lengthy and costly ETL solutions and extensive manual workarounds to extract meaningful information and reconcile this data to their ERP systems. The company needed fast, user-friendly access to integrate and report on data from various sources to optimally manage its business within an economically challenging environment. The typical daily update processes could take up to eight hours just for one day’s data, and that could fail, leaving the business without up-to-date reporting.

The data landscape at Hastings Deering was complex with data being generated through multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which needed to be integrated with several Caterpillar systems. Numerous data silos across the business had challenges with respect to consistency and accuracy, directly affecting trust in the data. Traditional data delivery methods and methodologies were delaying time-to-data and time-to-value. Additionally, Hastings Deering also began to see a shift in business requests, away from traditional data requests to data sharing requests to assist with quick insights. The company’s vision, and a key part of its data strategy, was to enable “data citizenship” through the establishment of a data and analytics center of practice.

Siemens Energy, a division of Siemens AG, is a leading supplier of products, services, and solutions for power generation plants. The company's Replacement Parts and Fleet Services division faced a significant challenge in accurately forecasting the availability of essential replacement parts. These parts have complex delivery schedules, long lead times, and are of tremendous value to power plant operations. The sales reps had difficulty forecasting the availability of these parts, which could lead to a standstill of an entire plant and cause significant financial loss. The division used an SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage orders and requisitions. However, the sales reps needed a more efficient way to examine sales orders and monitor the supply chain to ensure timely delivery of parts.

FirstCare Health Plans was facing a challenge due to its reliance on two different claims systems and data warehouses, disparate reporting systems, and a lack of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for finance, in-patient care, sales, pharmacy, and other functional domains. The company was experiencing a growing volume of claims that required manual intervention due to the expansion of its membership with new plans for the Texas Health Insurance Exchange. The company was looking for a solution that would not require an increase in internal staff members to support the growing workload.

The Labor and Social Security Oversight Office (LSSOO), a department of the Employment and Social Security Ministry (ESSM) of Spain, was facing challenges with its inspection system, Integra. The system was designed to support all inspection activities but was falling short in terms of response time for reports. The back-end architecture of Integra was drawing data from the same databases as the online platform that supported the daily activities of inspectors, sub-inspectors, and support personnel. This was compromising application performance and curtailing usability. ESSM officers needed a solution that would improve the functionality and performance of Integra applications.

Houston Community College (HCC) is a public institution of higher education that serves about 75,000 students each semester. The college relies on public funding from state and local governments, which requires extensive reporting to document decisions, monitor enrollment trends, track student outcomes, and provide access to key performance indicators (KPIs). However, HCC was struggling to find an easy method of presenting academic performance information to its board members, administrators, and the public it serves. The college was looking for a business intelligence (BI) solution that could create an Academic Dashboard displaying current performance metrics through Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server as well as a public-facing website. The college also wanted to integrate disparate data sources into a cohesive data warehouse and provide administrators, staff, and board members with flexible BI solutions to drill into data.

Rural Computer Services (RSI) is part of Caja Rural Group, the leading outsourcing institution for 72 rural banks in Spain. RSI differentiates itself with a deep understanding of each customer’s unique business needs. The shifting needs of end users, coupled with variations in global banking standards, recently required RSI to rethink the way people access and use information. When the results of an annual customer satisfaction survey revealed dissatisfaction with the bank’s existing business intelligence (BI) environment, RSI decided to provide better access to accurate financial information via a new, more intuitive set of BI dashboards. The organization selected Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform to modernize its data processing capabilities. Garrido and other IT leaders wanted to create a BI system that could integrate information from new and old sources and simplify access to existing applications. They also wanted to create an interface to devices and permit users to both enter and retrieve information through graphical dashboards and reports. Bank managers throughout the network needed a deeper understanding of key financial metrics to speed up decision-making.

Network Data Systems (NDS), an IT infrastructure professional and managed services firm, was facing challenges in tracking engineering resources for internal budgeting, workload planning, and billing. They also needed to enhance their reporting services to customers regarding IT environments and equipment. The company was using a manual process to report on internal business processes, including its help desk ticketing system, which was falling short. They needed a simpler and more efficient way to collect and share information about things like how many hours they work with each customer and which help desk tickets are open or closed.

Hof Hoorneman Bankers, an independent investment bank, was faced with the challenge of providing more than 500 customers with a personal digital overview of their investments on a daily basis. The bank wanted to focus on personal communications with its customers and keep them involved by providing regular insights and reporting on the status of their investments. The bank's strategy was to create a customer-facing BI environment, featuring interactive eStatements, that combines real-time and historical data from diverse sources into personalized dashboards and interactive Active PDF files.

Entertainment Promotions, a leader in the North American discounts and promotions market, embarked on an initiative to streamline and improve core business processes, simplify day-to-day tasks for its 520 staff members, and unify silos of activity across the organization. The effort, known as Project Breakthrough, involved the implementation of a variety of new software applications, including cloud-based solutions, to replace legacy systems. The company needed to maintain the availability of existing data sources as new systems were being turned on. The challenge was to ensure business continuity and information accessibility in the midst of a major technology infrastructure upgrade, which included the deployment of cloud-based systems.

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC) Foundation, Division of University Advancement, is responsible for fundraising and managing all aspects of donations. The foundation faced challenges in tracking all the information about donations, contributors, and fundraising programs. The IT staff needed to supply donors and university executives with detailed information on donation amounts, contributors, progress toward objectives, fund disbursements, and more. The existing system was inefficient, with requests for new reports having a ten-day minimum turnaround. The foundation needed a solution that could provide more accurate and timely information about fundraising and donors to university leaders and relieve the IT group from creating custom reports.

Utz Quality Foods, a large privately held snack food company, was facing the challenge of creating an enterprise-wide analytics strategy to support its rapid growth through both organic growth and mergers and acquisitions. The company needed to deploy real-time analytics to speed up decision-making and empower business units to take control of their data. They also needed to unlock clean, high-quality information via self-service dashboards, InfoApps, and other analytics assets. The company was looking for a way to increase efficiency and better compete with larger snack food companies.

AAA Ohio Auto Club was struggling with data management due to siloed operational systems. The organization was unable to use data strategically or gain a consolidated view of business operations. Managers were using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track business metrics, but it was difficult to generate a consolidated view of the operation. The organization was receiving more data and trying to review it with tools like Excel and Tableau, but they couldn't report quickly and accurately with the data. The BI licensing structure was also a challenge for them.

AcuSport, a leading distributor of outdoor and shooting sports products in the U.S., was facing challenges with its existing system of exchanging information with its vendors, retailers, and customers. The process of developing business-to-business (B2B) interfaces was becoming increasingly complicated, tedious, and time-consuming. The company's IT staff had to work with numerous order formats and network protocols to exchange documents, and create custom interfaces between the iSeries applications and a product information management (PIM) application from Stibo Systems. As business volume accelerated, the process of manually converting transaction information into the correct format for each system became inefficient. AcuSport began looking for a solution that would allow it to quickly integrate trading-partner documents with its software applications.

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) was facing challenges in managing costs while meeting high expectations from patients for the care they receive. The organization lacked an integrated information system, and reports were not readily available for decision-makers. In addition to serving a unique population, ANTHC needed to comply with government mandates to improve patient safety and quality performance. The organization was using Microsoft Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, and a Crystal Reports reporting system to access and analyze clinical and administrative data. However, these users had to manually extract data from a Cerner data warehouse and load it into Microsoft Excel tables for analysis. This lack of automation made it difficult to access or visualize data in a cohesive way.

The telecommunications service provider market is not only saturated with offers, but also experiencing a sharp increase in the number of users with data plans, which has led to an increase in network traffic. Due to this rapid growth and escalating demand, it is becoming increasingly difficult for service providers to plan and scale network infrastructures to accommodate steady increases in data traffic. In such a competitive market, companies need to constantly improve the quality of services offered to their customers, and they are always looking for ways to optimize their offerings. Many telecommunication service providers are adopting performance management technology to better monitor, measure, and assess the performance of critical IT resources. Other providers look to big data and predictive analytics to troubleshoot incidents and events in the data center. This is all part of a steady shift from a reactive to a proactive performance management model, as service providers work to ensure greater uptime, and thus, more exceptional experiences for their customers.

The American Alliance of Creditor Attorneys (AACA) was facing a challenge in promptly identifying and addressing problems with law firms or debt portfolios. It would sometimes take as long as six months to uncover an account languishing in a non-suit status or waiting on documents. These delays hindered the ability of the firm’s attorneys to make adjustments to their collection efforts. As a result, they were unable to negotiate payments or move accounts to judgment as quickly as possible. The inability for clients and law firms to access current account information on post charged-off consumer debt was delaying critical collection activities.

Arata Corporation, a leading Japanese wholesale distributor of household products, was facing challenges with its sales reporting process. The company's sales representatives were spending a significant amount of time and effort using Microsoft Excel to create monthly sales reports for each individual retailer that does business with the company. This process was cumbersome and resulted in inconsistencies. Arata needed a way to streamline the steps involved in preparing these reports. The company sought a solution that could be used as a common sales reporting tool for all staff, automating the entire process of retrieving and summarizing sales data, and outputting the results into formatted reports and charts.

Attenti, a company that offers electronic monitoring solutions for parolees, wanted to improve its technology to better track offender behavior. They aimed to assign compliance scores to each offender to determine whether they are improving or worsening over time. However, Attenti faced the challenge of not being an analytics company and did not want to create a homegrown software platform from scratch. They needed an analytics platform with strong data visualization capabilities that could handle the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data.

Axicom, Australia’s leading provider of independently owned wireless infrastructure, was facing a challenge in combining data from on-premises and cloud-based business applications to create cross-platform portals, dashboards, and reports. The company was using a JD Edwards ERP system and a new asset management system called Siterra. However, they needed an analytic platform that could span both on-premises and cloud-based information systems. They also needed an integration environment that could enable real-time and batch integrations between JD Edwards and the Siterra applications to avoid duplication of effort and potential inconsistencies in the data.

Bantierra, a Spanish savings bank, wanted to improve its reporting and business intelligence (BI) capabilities to closely monitor operational activities, improve customer satisfaction, and mitigate churn. They needed a system that could easily share information with all business units and commercial branch managers. Decision-makers throughout the Bantierra network needed greater visibility into customer activities, employee actions, and outreach activities so they could provide superior customer service and respond quickly to new opportunities.

Boise Cascade, one of North America’s largest producers of engineered wood products and plywood, faced a significant challenge in their operations. The company had poor visibility into millions of dollars in annual rebates and lacked the ability to visualize data from sales, production, inventory, and other key business functions. The company also wanted analytics capabilities to more accurately track more than $30 million in annual rebates that the company pays out to its customers and dealers. Accountants were using an Excel-based system for tracking the rebates and couldn’t get fine-grained analytics to determine if the rebates provided actual value to everyone involved. The company needed a solution that would provide them with the necessary insights and analytics to improve their operations.

Bridgewater Bank, a Canadian chartered bank based in Calgary, Alberta, was facing a challenge with its reporting system. The bank was dealing with an influx of data from various parts of the enterprise, including finance, operations, marketing, regulatory, core banking, and mortgage lending. The existing reporting environment was inconsistent and lacked the ability to drill into the data or visualize it on interactive displays. This led to conflicting terminology in reports, causing confusion and misinterpretation. The bank needed a new analytic system that could encourage collaboration, help managers monitor KPIs, and enforce consistency in the data shared among business units.

The Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) was facing a challenge with the increasing amount of data from tens of thousands of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) sessions per month. The therapists were manually entering treatment notes and progress updates into Excel spreadsheets. As the amount of data and total number of therapy hours increased, it became more difficult to generate progress reports. The organization had a pressing need for operational analytics to maximize the service each patient receives. The operations team at each center was tasked with matching patient and therapist availability to ensure that every patient receives the full amount of their medically necessary treatment. This was a difficult task that required constant monitoring of treatment utilization data.

Case Paper, a paper converter and merchant serving the printing and packaging industry, was facing challenges in accessing and utilizing data from IBM System i systems and other sources. The company needed better analytic capabilities for its entrepreneurial operating system management methodology. The company was relying heavily on Excel to get valuable information out of these systems. This process became even more cumbersome once newer versions of Excel were introduced, discontinuing many of the reporting features employees were utilizing. It would take developers as long as six months to merge the needed data from various IBM System i databases and create reports. Running those reports tied systems up for as long as an hour, preventing staff from efficiently processing transactions or entering data.