Mattress Firm, a major mattress retailer in the United States, grew quickly, both organically and after several acquisitions. The company’s continued rapid growth strategy exposed a decentralized IT infrastructure that was labor intensive, difficult to manage, and not scalable. Recognizing the shortcomings of its legacy IT solutions, Mattress Firm implemented a new system in partnership with Microsoft Services that provided them with a scalable solution built to meet the needs of the future business.

As part of its continuous effort to increase efficiency, ABB Switzerland—which provides industrial power and automation products—searched for a new process diagramming solution. Specifically, the company needed an application that provided support for both the Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0 standards. ABB Switzerland executives were eager to evaluate the latest release of Microsoft Visio. They sought to take advantage of numerous product enhancements designed to make it easier to create and share diagrams. After participating in an early adoption program for the technology, the company deployed Visio Professional 2013. ABB Switzerland now uses Visio 2013, together with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 to enable employees to collaboratively create BPMN 2.0-compliant diagrams—60 percent faster than before.

Georgia-Pacific is a leading producer of building products and paper goods for consumers worldwide. To address rapid business growth, the company’s Building Products unit needed a higher-performing, more scalable data warehouse. In response, the firm implemented Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track data warehouse, which has greatly improved performance and provides faster and more reliable access to crucial business information. The solution also increases scalability and will offer a better view of data.

Retail Solutions, a leading global provider of software-as-a- service (SaaS) products, strives to improve profitability for its major customers, so it implemented an interactive business intelligence (BI) solution based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise. Major suppliers and retailers worldwide use the solution to gain millions of dollars in ROI through increased sales and better supply-chain management. In addition, Retail Solutions is expanding its business 40 percent annually by taking advantage of a Microsoft platform.

Solutions provider Manhattan Associates wanted to reap business rewards from social networking by combining Yammer social functionality with Microsoft SharePoint. It now enjoys collaboration that transcends organizational and geographical silos and a mobile workforce that taps into corporate “tribal knowledge” anytime, anywhere. Savvy knowledge management means successes are replicated, significantly boosting productivity and the bottom line.

Tenaris, a leading provider of steel pipe and related services for the world’s energy industry, needed to increase insight into global industrial systems and streamline the creation of enterprise business intelligence (BI). In June 2012, the company deployed a new foundation for a global BI solution with the Microsoft platform. With it, Tenaris speeds the deployment of unified BI processes at international sites twice as fast as a custom solution, refreshes reports six times faster, boosts service, and improves control.

Shinola is a design and manufacturing company that needed the most efficient solution to streamline its processes and reduce manufacturing costs to gain a competitive advantage. In April 2012, three Shinola employees began using tablets running the Windows 8 Pro operating system. The company plans to use the tablets for shipping and receiving, inventory control, point-of-sales discussions, and monitoring plant security cameras. Shinola benefits from an intuitive interface, robust functionality, and near-seamless mobility.

Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc., a specialty retailer of beauty supply products based in Denton, Texas, faced a tangled mess in dealing with international product and service management. CIO Chad Ehmke discusses this competitive environment and how Microsoft Dynamics helps the company manage their business operations, which last year generated $3.3 billion in sales across more than 16,000 SKUs.

The continued success of Hanesbrands depended upon delivering the right products to the right retailers in the right quantities at the right times. That was a lot to have to get right, especially with 100,000 SKUs, tens of thousands of stores, and a business intelligence system that aggregated partial, inconsistent retail data, and did so slowly. Hanesbrands solved this problem by adopting a Business Intelligence (BI) solution: a demand signal repository, based on VMT’s Velocity® Solution Suite running on Microsoft technologies. The time to access reliable, actionable information was shortened from weeks to days. Hanesbrands now makes better, faster decisions across its enterprise by relying on a centralized database. In just 18 months, Hanesbrands has used the solution successfully as part of its overall efforts to reduce inventory carrying costs and generate additional cash flow.

Amalfi Semiconductor pioneered high-performance radio frequency (RF) semiconductors for the cellular handset market based on standard, low-cost complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Experiencing rapid growth from its success, the company needed more financial and manufacturing management capabilities than Intuit QuickBooks could provide. Working with Microsoft partner Tensoft, the company implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP and complementary add-in solutions. The company has already saved US$75,000 in duplicate vendor invoicing and realized significant efficiencies. With the business management software in place, Amalfi has a solution that takes advantage of purchasing controls to support regulatory compliance. In addition, executives, operations employees, and finance managers now have the insight and control they need to help the company reach its growth goals.