Whirlpool Corporation, a global manufacturer of home appliances, faced several challenges. They needed to quantify the environmental impacts of their products throughout their entire life cycle to improve their environmental performance. They also wanted to integrate environmental KPIs among the main drivers of product development. Furthermore, they aimed to identify potential areas of improvement and hotspots that needed to be addressed in a conscious PCR development for refrigerators.

Santex SpA, a major player in the Italian market for the production of medical devices, was seeking to improve the energy performance of the company and the environmental impact of its products. To achieve this, Santex implemented a management system in compliance with ISO 50001 requirements for Energy Management and ISO 14040 and 14044 for LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) and EPD® (Environmental Product Declaration) processes. These processes were actively used by Santex to evaluate, monitor and improve environmental performance. However, the company faced challenges in generating Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) autonomously and rapidly for new products.

The Zircon Industry Association (ZIA) needed a way to conduct Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in line with the most recognized and up-to-date methodologies and using industry-specific data. They wanted to use LCA as a strategic tool for zircon producers to benchmark with industry averages and to set continuous improvement goals. They also wanted to provide an informed supply chain with an accurate and independently-verified LCA, clearly showing that the very low environmental burden of zircon makes it the preferred choice as far as life cycle environmental performance is concerned. This would help to underpin ZIA member companies’ sustainability profile and provide additional communication opportunities throughout the value chain, including building designers and users of ceramic tiles.

Tata Steel, Europe’s second largest steel producer, has been using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for 16 years to support the development of its products and to contribute to industry-wide efforts to establish standards for sustainability, particularly in the automotive, construction, and packaging sectors. However, the company faced challenges in understanding how steel performs compared to other materials such as aluminium, concrete, timber, and carbon fibre. They also needed to use LCA studies as a marketing tool to support their supply chains and to support decision making in product development. Another challenge was identifying hot spots in the steel value chain so that efforts to reduce a product’s carbon footprint, water footprint, and energy use can be directed to where they will have most effect.

Bega Cheese®, an Australian dairy food manufacturer, had challenges monitoring and reporting environmental performance and sustainability achievements across its supply chain. It needed to collect sustainability data from all business units and integrate it into other internal systems for reporting. At varying levels in the organization and at varying intervals, it collected energy consumption, water consumption, wastewater and solid waste data. Bega Cheese was unable to easily track its sustainability performance or generate ad hoc reports in a timely manner with confidence in the quality of the data it collected. Bega Cheese’s initial software solution could only create a pre-determined, fixed set of reports and provided no way to create ad hoc reports requested by its stakeholders. For every exception, Bega Cheese had to return to the software provider to ask for customized reports, leading to additional cost and time expenditures.

The Italian Ceramics Industry, represented by Confindustria Ceramica, was faced with the challenge of tackling an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) project that represented 82.6% of Italian ceramic tile production. The industry needed to communicate the environmental performance of Italian ceramic tiles in an objective and transparent manner, while emphasizing sustainability activities and investments. They also needed tools to qualify for green building rating schemes (LEED, DGNB, BREEAM) and Italian green public procurement bidding procedures (CAM). The industry was also looking to identify potential improvement areas and projects for better environmental performance of products and support individual companies in product-related environmental reporting.

Interface, a global market leader in developing and manufacturing modular textile floor coverings, has been committed to sustainable action through its Mission Zero®. The company has been using GaBi software since 2001 to conduct life cycle assessments (LCAs) for its products. LCAs take into account the entire life cycle of a carpet tile, from raw material extraction, production, and transportation, to use by the customer, care, and disposal. The challenge was to identify the environmental impacts at each of these stages and pinpoint areas with the greatest potential for improvement in terms of transparency, innovation, product portfolio, cost savings, and risk management.

ANTER, a non-profit organization, aimed to generate awareness of personal environmental responsibility through the 'Voluntary Chart of the Sustainable Citizen' initiative. They wanted to create a user-friendly platform that enables families to understand their Environmental Footprint and the consequences of daily habits and choices. The challenge was to differentiate from available Environmental Footprint Calculators, assuring a scientific basis. They also needed to present the initiative and the tool within a short timeframe.

FONA International, a company that creates 500 to 600 new flavors a month for clients, was facing a challenge with the documentation of potential chemical hazards on a Safety Data Sheet (SDS). The company was operating in a competitive industry where the ability to send samples in a timely manner could be the difference between winning a contract or not. However, it was equally important to comply with any pertinent regulatory safety-related requirements. The company was manually creating labels in many different languages depending on the country the product would be sold in. Each sample required its own SDS, which was a time-consuming process. The company also had to meet the requirements of the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS), a system set up by the United Nations to standardize the definition of what constitutes a chemical hazard.

Lorenz Meters, a German company that produces over 1 million high-quality water meters annually, has developed an innovative circular economy business model to sustainably offer customized products for metering services, water utilities, and industrial applications. However, the company faced several challenges. They needed fact-based proof of the environmental performance of their circular business model and quantification of the environmental impact over the entire product life cycle. They also required data-driven insights into Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and identification of improvement potential for the further development of the circular business model.

Aptar, a global leader in the design and manufacturing of a broad range of drug delivery, consumer product dispensing, and active packaging solutions, faced several challenges related to sustainability. The company was struggling with the identification of climate-related risks and opportunities and the application of the TCFD (Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure) methodology. They also needed to benchmark their performance against competitors regarding the assessment of climate-related risks and opportunities. Quantifying the financial impact of these risks and opportunities was another challenge. Lastly, they needed to communicate their sustainability performance to investors and customers through recognized programs like TCFD and CDP.

The global pharmaceutical company was facing challenges in managing quality risk and reducing product defects. The transition from conventional to biopharma drug production had made compliance more complex and traceability crucial. The company was using spreadsheets and extensive process flow documents to conduct risk assessments for hundreds of products. This process was complex, cumbersome, and difficult to query. The elements of the process were not clearly linked, making the investigation of complaints burdensome and expensive. The company was dealing with disparate risk assessment processes across more than 62 countries, using time-intensive, manual reporting tools, and had an ineffective complaints analysis process.

BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, was using decentralized tools like Word and Excel to document process hazards. As a result, documentation was inconsistent and data extraction was cumbersome. Gathering strategic insights required experienced staff to review long, 300-page reports. The company had limited visibility of risk across the global organization, which was a significant challenge.

Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. (M&M Ltd. or Mahindra), a mobility products and farm solutions provider, is the flagship company of the Mahindra Group, an Indian multinational federation of companies operating in over 100 countries around the globe with a presence in multiple industries. In order to take action on combating climate-related risk and contribute to the ambitious emissions reduction target set by the Group, M&M Ltd. decided to set a robust Science Based Target (SBT) in line with the climate goal from the Paris Agreement. During the target development process the company assessed and set science-based greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets, considering their direct (scope 1) and indirect (scope 2 & 3) emissions. Mahindra evaluated their emissions based on the Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi) methodology, using primary collected data and data from Sphera’s LCA databases GaBi, to get robust insights for their entire value chain.

Lumileds, a company committed to a culture of quality, responsibility, and sustainability, was facing a challenge. Their custom-built, end-of-life software for the monthly data collection for health & safety and quarterly data collection for environmental data was no longer adequate. They needed to replace it with a state-of-the-art sustainability solution to track, monitor, and report against their sustainability targets. The new solution needed to be easy-to-use and intuitive for data collectors and data admins. Furthermore, the implementation had to be completed before the next reporting window.

The Volkswagen (VW) communications department was tasked with calculating its carbon footprint to identify emissions reduction actions, inspire other VW brands, and contribute to the decarbonization of the entire VW group. The challenge was to determine the boundaries for the departmental carbon footprint and identify all emissions directly or indirectly caused by the VW communication department’s activities. The department faced difficulties in distinguishing its activities from the VW group and identifying emission hotspots and levers for reductions. The diverse set of activities required different emissions calculation methods.

Rafter, a company that operates a cloud-based platform for colleges and universities to make educational content more affordable, effective, and accessible, was facing challenges in maintaining a competitive position in the market for online book rentals. The company was bottlenecked by a nightly ETL execution that took up to 10 hours and caused slowdowns during the day. Excel and an existing data visualization tool couldn’t handle analytics at scale. In addition, most of the Rafter staff was dependent on data analysts for writing routine queries, causing further delay before their questions could be answered. These limitations hampered critical activities across the business such as finance, inventory management, pricing and campaign management, and operations.

Infectious Media, a UK-based company pioneering the use of programmatic advertising, faced a challenge in accessing real-time data for campaign performance analytics. The company's fast-paced business required optimization specialists to adjust campaigns while they were still in flight. Initially, account managers wrote their own SQL queries, but mistakes often led to interruptions for data analysts. When the company shifted to having the analytics team write every query, it created a bottleneck that caused unacceptable wait times for reports and distracted data analysts from critical consulting and optimization work. The company needed a new analytics solution that offered flexible, self-service data exploration and reporting. Additionally, Infectious Media used two different databases: MySQL for billing and client reporting, and Google BigQuery for user-level data and algorithm research. The analytics team needed a solution that could provide access to both data sources and allow them to query both directly with the speed and flexibility required to optimize campaigns in flight.

ISCS identified a market opportunity for industry-specific business intelligence software, but building a solution from scratch was not practical. Their customers, who were scattered along the adoption curve for analytics software, needed a flexible solution that could be used by anyone from novice business users to sophisticated data analysts. The software also had to make it easy for ISCS developers to build new and customizable features for companies with special requirements. The ideal BI solution had to eliminate data silos to offer 360-degree views of all the data, display interactive data visualizations, and support data exploration in real time. The tool also had to be scalable, provide fast performance, align with the ISCS public cloud strategy, and integrate seamlessly with the SurePower Innovation® platform. Lastly, the company wanted to minimize the time to market, which strongly tipped the build-vs-buy analysis in favor of “buy”.

Hipcamp, an online platform for discovering and booking campsites, was facing challenges in accessing comprehensive data to understand their customers’ experience. The company was using a set of special-purpose analytics tools to track web events and visualize behavioral trends, each with its own database. This resulted in inconsistent data across the different tools, making it hard to understand exactly where the data conflicts came from. To access financial data, engineers had to write manual SQL queries and it was impossible to handle common exceptions such as partial refunds and promotions. The company’s marketers were unable to identify unique visitors across multiple devices or tie anonymous visits to customer transactions. This meant that they couldn’t accurately manage the customer acquisition funnel, and were left to guess what was working and where they should improve.

Grand Rounds, a healthcare company, was established to connect patients with the most qualified experts for their medical needs. The company works with firms of various sizes, from 1,000-member firms to Fortune 50 employers, in over 120 countries. They provide expedited access to top physicians for better health outcomes. However, Grand Rounds faced a challenge in managing and accessing its vast network of data. They needed a partner to help build a scalable, external dashboard to provide its customers with valuable reporting.

DigitalOcean, a developer-focused cloud computing platform, was facing challenges in managing and utilizing their data effectively. As the company grew, their product evolved to cater to larger teams of developers working on more complex projects. However, they realized that there was a wealth of data across the company that wasn’t being properly incorporated into the decision-making process. They were initially doing every single analysis in an Excel spreadsheet, which was not scalable or efficient. They needed a solution that could centralize their data and make it more accessible for decision-making.

Casper, a small industry disruptor in the mattress industry, was facing a challenge with scattered and siloed data across files. The underlying technology was not efficient or scalable, and Casper needed a tool to take them to the next level. The business user front end was also impacting company decision making. Analysis was siloed in files and people couldn’t do much more with it other than look at the data. Querying across sources was a huge task and no one place held all the information. It was everywhere.

Counsyl, a high-tech genetic testing company, was struggling with financial modeling and optimizing operational workflows. The finance and billing departments were particularly challenged with billing medical services to health insurance companies, which made predicting revenues and cash flows difficult. The company initially tried using their CRM software for reporting, but it wasn’t a good fit for their industry-specific requirements. As a result, the finance team had to manage multi-gigabyte Excel files with complex nested pivot tables and VLOOKUPS, which took hours every morning to manage and often resulted in frozen machines. Additionally, they had to pull developers and software engineers away from their work to get the raw data needed for their analysis.

Urban Airship, a mobile growth company, was facing a challenge in managing and analyzing a growing data pool while helping some of the world's best-known brands grow with mobile. Their clients had a growing demand for data and Urban Airship needed a data platform that was not only ideal for its customers but also for their product team. Flexibility was an important factor as Urban Airship's users are mobile marketers and mobile product owners, with a broad spectrum of technical backgrounds. They started to look at ways to provide user-level intelligence, along with the ability to slice and dice the data they collected in their product.

Blue Apron, a pioneer in the meal kit delivery service industry, faced challenges in managing its complex operations. The company needed to source ingredients at the right time, quality, and price, pack orders efficiently and in exactly the right proportions, and ensure meal kits were delivered to the customer fresh and on time. As data volumes grew and queries became more complex, it became difficult to scale their existing data warehouse hosted on another cloud provider. The only options were choosing ever-larger server classes and increasing storage throughput by purchasing a higher number of provisioned IOPS. This led to a need for a more efficient and scalable solution.

DogBuddy, an online dog-sitting and home dog boarding community, generates a torrent of data about the parties on both sides of the transaction—owners and sitters—as well as particulars about the dogs. Add to that the enormous amount of clickstream data coming from the website, the app, and online ad campaigns, and you’ll find a potential business intelligence headache as well as a rich lode of potential insights. The marketing team struggled to make sense of reports from disparate data sources that couldn’t always be combined, often with different metrics for each data source. This created a barrier to building consensus about what was or wasn’t working well in ad campaigns. Delays in getting the data also impacted the team, because they often had to wait for the technical team to assist in building reports for them, and because the reports came in fixed, manual formats like Excel, it was hard to share data in meaningful ways.

Deliveroo, a food delivery service, was facing challenges with its initial BI tool as the company expanded. The tool lacked the necessary security, user management, and automation to support the company's growth. Business users were unable to make agile decisions as they had to wait for technical staff to write SQL for each report they requested. Code management became time-consuming for the data team as each dashboard had a unique code base. Changes in the underlying data architecture required updating the code in about 100 different locations. Additionally, variable demand based on the day of the week or time of day could put unpredictable strains on the data warehouse capacity.

Kiva.org, a nonprofit that connects lenders with low-income entrepreneurs and students worldwide, was facing a data bottleneck. Despite having a data-driven culture, accessing data was difficult for their non-technical business users. They either had to learn SQL and request access to the data or write a specific question for a data engineer, which was a slow and discouraging process. As Kiva continued to grow and acquire lenders and borrowers from across the globe, the data analytics team knew that they needed a business intelligence tool that could scale with them. They needed a tool that could meet their various reporting and analytics needs.

Guidewire saw a market opportunity for industry-specific business intelligence software, but it wasn’t practical to build a solution from the ground up. Guidewire customers relied on the SurePower Innovation® enterprise suite for managing their day-to-day business operations, but they had to use third-party tools for business intelligence. They struggled to make sense of limited canned reports after enduring delays from data transfers, and the reports weren’t customized for the insurance business. Guidewire stepped in to close the gap by adding insurance-specific business intelligence features to the SurePower Innovation® suite. From a technical standpoint, the ideal BI solution had to eliminate data silos to offer 360-degree views of all the data, display interactive data visualizations, and support data exploration in real time. The tool also had to be scalable, provide fast performance, align with the Guidewire public cloud strategy, and integrate seamlessly with the SurePower Innovation® platform.