Pfizer (Colombia) was managing its documents and maintaining information security, yet it lacked precise control over growth policies and document retention. The company wanted to take some initial steps toward becoming a less paper-reliant company. To do this, it had to invest in improving and automating document processes.

Due to the company's organizational structure, the number of employees and different departments, there is a high volume of documents circulating around the mining company. Several different procedures were created, prompting Cerro Vanguardia to seek a solution that could help it manage its documents, making them easier to find and facilitating their traceability. Furthermore, the mining company needed a specific software solution to help it ensure continued compliance with the Environment, Health and Safety System and with the ISO 14001:2004, ISO 9001 and OHSAS18001:2007 standards.

CooperTools, a division of Cooper Industries, faced challenges in maintaining high-quality standards and efficiency in their operations. The company needed a solution to manage nonconformities, plan and implement corrective actions, and boost productivity in document management. Additionally, they required a system that could integrate with their existing ERP and provide easy access to documents for external auditors.

One of the biggest challenges Yang faced was in choosing and leveraging third-party tools. “How do you weigh vendors when you don’t really know what your needs are, and how those needs will change over time?” For a data warehousing solution, Yang ended up siding with Amazon Redshift, as it met all of his needs for storage, speed, and security. But to get data into Redshift, he needed an ETL solution to match it. Stitch Data was the first provider that caught his eye and that he later implemented - but it wasn’t long before his team outgrew it. “Plug-and-play tools like Stitch work great for straightforward workflows, but we needed more customization and access under the hood to not only comply with our security requirements, but also stay competitive with companies that have more developed data infrastructures” said Yang. “The fact that we didn’t have control over transformations forced us to consider other, more comprehensive options.”

When Andy joined PMC, the data infrastructure was still quite young. Clickstream data from Google Analytics was flowing into Google BigQuery, but it was not being fully leveraged, enriched and made actionable to the business. Where possible, the decision was to leverage cloud tools and limit the “data ops” aspects of the infrastructure. Before long, a myriad of cron jobs, jobs servers and raw job log files had begun to eat away at the time Andy and his team had to extract insights from the data. “I was frustrated,” says Andy, “that wasn’t what I wanted to to be doing.” A data scientist by trade, he wanted as little long-term overhead as possible when it came to data engineering.\n\nWhen Andy discovered Apache Airflow, which programmatically authors, schedules and monitors workflows, he replaced his cron jobs and began to more efficiently engineer his data as directed acyclic workflows (or DAGs). But even Airflow required quite a bit of management. Andy found his engineering team was still stretched thin as they struggled to handle the robust data infrastructure required to build machine learning technology and run the in-depth analyses needed for insights. “I probably would have had to assign a full-time manager,” Andy explains. “It was too easy to make a change to a helper file and kill all the DAGs. If I broke something, I broke everything. There was no testing framework. It simply wasn’t efficient.”

AE Home Group is a business based on Customer Data management. Their addvalue to the market is their capability to adjust to their clients’ particular situations and needs. That’s why their customers’ categories go from broad segments as “Retirement House” or “Growing Families” to specific segments such as “Military Relocation”, “Inheritance House” or “Luxury Buyer”. A big challenge for them is to reach out to all of these segments with the customised attention they offer each and every customer.

Gluhub’s core business is to deliver effective marketing communication that connects their clients with customers. Managing customer bases is a complex process due to the different services offered by Gluhub and its sister brand under Aimtrac Group Ltd. Gluhub’s SaaS Stack includes MailChimp for email marketing, FullContact for contact enrichment, Stripe for billing, and Xero for accounting. The challenge was to ensure seamless and accurate data flow across these platforms to maintain personalized communication and prepare for GDPR compliance.

The Von Rick team faced a significant challenge in managing and synchronizing lead data across multiple apps. They were using various applications, including client apps, to capture lead data, which needed to be transferred from one app to another. Initially, they used Leadsbridge for this purpose, but it wasn't an optimal solution as new leads from different apps created a mess. As the company began managing more clients and campaigns, the need for up-to-date contact information across all apps became critical. They realized they needed a two-way syncing solution to keep data synchronized between all the apps they were using.

ARACON consulting knew very early on that they wanted the best, more intuitive software to streamline their sales process and keep track of leads. With multifarious choices on the market, they decided the best way to make a selection was to test as many CRMs as possible. They tested multiple CRM systems for 12 hours straight to find the one that is simple to implement, and easily adopted by employees.

Epic Design Labs, a Portland-based web services business, faced challenges in maintaining a 360° view of each client as they grew. The increase in team size led to the use of more cloud apps, creating a customer knowledge gap between departments. This made it difficult to keep client information centralized and up-to-date. Kalon Wiggins, a Digital Marketer at Epic Design Labs, was tasked with finding a solution to manage contact data effectively. Before PieSync, there was no procedure to manage contact data, leading to scattered information across various apps and departments.

Clive Hornsby, a former Data Analyst and Marketing Expert, faced the challenge of managing contact data efficiently. After detecting new customers or prospects via social media or personal contact, Clive would add them to his Outlook account. However, he and his team needed to centralize all their contact data into one central source of truth to get a 360° view of their customers and prospects. The Conflux team chose Insightly CRM to fulfill this role, but there was a lot of trial and error before they discovered PieSync.

Founder Jerry Bergner left the finance industry after working in it for 25 years to begin Integrated Life and Financial Planning. He initially used ACT for managing his database but found it lacking in contact management capabilities. Bergner then tried Redtail CRM, but it proved to be non-intuitive and difficult to use, especially when importing contacts. The lack of an import function and the need for a consultant to map data led to significant delays and frustration. Bergner realized that he needed a more efficient and user-friendly CRM system to manage his rapidly growing business.

Ander Group, a fast-growing brand strategy and digital design agency, faced the challenge of managing and synchronizing a large volume of contact information across multiple platforms. With over 5,000 contacts stored in Nimble, they needed an efficient way to ensure that their CRM, email marketing, and contact management systems were always up-to-date. The agency often undertakes complete digital transformations for their clients, which includes creating websites, content, and implementing CRM systems. As a HubSpot Partner, they required a seamless integration to keep their contact data synchronized across various tools without manual intervention.

Brian Kichler, VP of Customer Operations at RxSafe, had been searching for a seamless way to share contacts between Google Contacts and Capsule CRM bidirectionally. RxSafe attempted to create their own bidirectional sync using APIs and ad-hoc methods, but they found they were unable to detect and delete duplicates. Kichler was also looking for a way to cut down on data entry work into Capsule CRM.

When Pocket Gems began building War Dragons in 2013, they intended for the game to be heavily reliant on multiplayer interactions. However, they soon realized the importance of social interaction for player engagement and retention. Initially, they built their own in-game chat, which allowed for simple text exchanges. This solution worked for private chats but was insufficient for real-time battles where players needed to communicate quickly and effectively. The challenge was to provide a robust, real-time chat solution that could handle the high volume of messages and users during large-scale battles and events.

Prior to PubNub, Swiggy handled customer support inquiries primarily through agents in a call center and secondarily through customer support chat in their platform. As a result, even simpler requests—like a customer needing to cancel an order— were usually resolved through a phone call. For customers, this often led to resolution times of up to five minutes. And for support agents, significant manual work and time was spent on minor inquiries. With their previous phone support system, simple requests would turn into multiple questions that would lead to agents needing to navigate through multiple dashboard screens and customers sometimes needing to wait for agents due to limited availability. As Swiggy grew and regularly needed to handle up to 200,000 customer inquiries a day with a peak concurrency of 2,000 users, they turned their focus to adapting their support model to better scale. To accomplish this, they focused on building out their chatbot support.

Bates, the co-founder and CTO of Hearo, faced significant challenges while developing a new core feature for their remote patient monitoring platform. Initially using SignalR for messaging components, Bates encountered limitations when trying to implement a feature that allowed customers and patients to send messages to multiple or specific users, groups, channels, and locations. This issue became critical as he prepared for a tradeshow, realizing that the existing solution would not scale to meet future needs. Frustrated and in need of a quick solution, Bates turned to PubNub, a platform recommended by his developer community. PubNub's extensive client libraries and built-in complex messaging workflows provided the necessary capabilities to overcome the limitations Bates faced with SignalR.

The company wanted a simple way to measure the revenue lift, margin impact, and effectiveness of promotional campaigns before they were rolled out nationwide. They relied on historical campaign performance to select future promotions, which limited their ability to understand initial campaign performance before making significant investments. The company tasked Antuit with developing an analytics-powered solution to measure the impact of promotional campaigns, planogram changes, and other marketing initiatives before rolling them out nationally.

This beverage company’s promotional efforts were falling flat for three key brands. Their strategy was to heavily promote their flagship product during major sporting events to drive top line revenues and earn greater market share. With some success, this strategy became costly and did not generate the return on investment the company was looking for. In addition, other promotions were not sufficient to drive brand profitability as well. The company was lacking insights into the ways that their key three brands should be positioned in three major sales channels – the huge mass retailers, supermarkets, and convenience stores. What was the best way to invest promotional spend to drive revenue, be competitive, and return a greater profitability by brand by channel? Promotions were an important part of this beverage company’s strategy, but company executives realized that they needed better analysis and a simulation tool to understand how to carry out that strategy. They turned to Antuit and asked for a set of “golden rules” that could guide them in terms of what to do – and what not to do – for future promotions.

KW Micro Power faced the challenge of reducing the weight of their aerospace-grade Auxiliary Power Units (APUs) for commercial aviation and military applications. The primary concern was to make the APUs lightweight without compromising on performance, as every gram counts in aerospace applications. Additionally, they needed to improve the thermal management of their high power density generator to ensure optimal performance and safety. The original CNC machined housing was heavy and did not offer integrated cooling solutions, which posed a significant challenge in achieving their goals.

Preziosa Francesco SRL faced a significant bottleneck in their automated press brake bending machine due to the long lead times of CNC machining new sets of custom robot grippers. This bottleneck threatened the efficiency and reliability of their robotic cell, which was a substantial investment. The challenge was to find a way to produce these grippers more quickly and reliably to ensure the smooth operation of their manufacturing process.

LifeNabled, a non-profit organization, has been providing prosthetic solutions to amputees in northern Guatemala for the past 15 years. The traditional manufacturing process for prosthetics is expertise-intensive and laborious, making it difficult to scale and cost-effective. The organization aimed to digitize the entire workflow to bypass these challenges and make the process scalable and cost-effective. The goal was to improve the quality of life for amputees in developing countries by providing advanced prosthetic and orthotic devices.

The engineering team at Aerojet Rocketdyne faced the challenge of redesigning legacy systems from the Apollo-era using modern propulsion, design, and manufacturing technologies. The goal was to drive down costs, speed up development time, improve performance, and make the production of over 600 thrusters economically sustainable for NASA’s Artemis program. The legacy Reaction Control System (RCS) consisted of four quad-thruster modules that controlled the spacecraft’s yaw, pitch, and roll. The initial design, 'Mark I,' was not optimized for weight, manufacturability, and cost, necessitating a more efficient solution.

The engineers of the Irish Manufacturing Research (IMR) and Renishaw aimed to develop an additively manufactured Anterior Cervical Interbody Device (ACID) using nTopology. The goal was to create a device that could help restore intervertebral height in patients suffering from conditions such as degenerative intervertebral disc disease, vertebral fusion, spondylolisthesis, herniated disc, osteoporosis, and spinal stenosis. The challenge was to design a spinal implant with a porous lattice that promotes osseointegration and vascularization while matching the mechanical properties of bone. This required precise control over design variables and efficient design cycles to ensure the implant's effectiveness and safety.

Lattice structures that improve osseointegration of orthopedic implants are one of the most prominent medical applications of Additive Manufacturing. However, scaling up the design processes using traditional tools can be time-consuming and prone to errors. SI-BONE faced the challenge of developing a lattice that yields consistent results and passes regulatory requirements. Additionally, they needed to automate the design workflow to apply the standardized osseointegrative structure to a product line of more than 70+ parts efficiently.

Cobra Aero, a US-based manufacturer of UAV drone engines, faced the challenge of staying competitive in the market. They invested in a Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) system to redesign key parts of their engine for Additive Manufacturing. The team aimed to achieve multiple advantages, including improved efficiency, weight requirements, and minimal support during manufacturing. They sought alternatives to traditional fin designs for heat transfer and became intrigued by lattice structures used in heat exchanger design. The challenge was to optimize the lattice structure for heat transfer while meeting the performance and manufacturing requirements.

The U.S. Air Force’s Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO) held an advanced engineering competition. Teams were presented with some of the Air Force’s most pressing technical problems. This year’s challenge in the Approval Sprints category: produce a stronger, more durable hydraulic line clamp for the U.S. Air Force’s fleet of F-16 aircraft with Additive Manufacturing. The US Air Force has thousands of these hydraulic tube clamps in service across its fleet. The clamps fail after a certain amount of time due to exposure to vibrations, chemicals, and heat. For this reason, replacement parts must always be in stock. For full-flight qualification, the list of design requirements that the engineering teams had to pass within the 30-day time frame included: dimensional requirements, tubing retention, inertial loads, handling loads, flammability, temperature, freeze-thaw, vibrational loads, jet fuel exposure, hydraulic fuel exposure, engine oil exposure.

Amphenol Fiber Optic Products, a leading provider of connectivity equipment, faced significant challenges in managing design changes for hundreds of products across its global engineering teams located in the United States, Mexico, China, and Vietnam. The company needed a robust Product Data Management (PDM) system to streamline collaboration and reduce communication delays. The existing CAD system was insufficient, leading to siloed work environments, version control issues, and significant IT overhead. The need for a more integrated and efficient solution was critical to support the rapid customization of fiber optic splitting boxes for major telecommunications clients.

Haptic technology pioneer Actronika integrates its touch-sensitive screen processors into other companies’ hardware, including automobiles, phones, video games, and other consumer products. Working with multiple partners using multiple CAD systems, the Actronika engineering team was spending a considerable amount of time importing, exporting, and managing CAD files. The company was seeking a cloud-native product development platform that would eliminate the hassles of data management and speed up communication with manufacturing partners.

Doris Dev, a product development agency based in New York and Hong Kong, faced challenges in sharing designs with internal stakeholders and external partners. They needed a CAD and data management platform that would enable easier sharing of designs, allowing marketing and sales to influence the final product earlier. The company aimed to create a dishwasher-safe humidifier, the Canopy, targeted at fashion-conscious consumers focused on skincare and aromatherapy. The humidifier needed to be easy to clean, avoiding the common issue of mold and bacteria growth in traditional humidifiers.