business process management case study

Business Process Management Cases

Digital Innovation and Business Transformation in Practice

• © 2018
• Jan vom Brocke 0 ,
• Jan Mendling 1

Institute for Information Systems, University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

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Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics & Business, Vienna, Austria

• The first book to present an extensive collection of real-world cases on Business Process Management
• Includes cases from world's leading organizations in various sectors
• Presents cases from a wide range of regions around the world

Part of the book series: Management for Professionals (MANAGPROF)

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Table of contents (32 chapters)

Front matter, frameworks for business process management: a taxonomy for business process management cases.

• Jan vom Brocke, Jan Mendling

Strategy and Governance

How to move from paper to impact in business process management: the journey of sap.

• Corinne Reisert, Sarah Zelt, Joerg Wacker

Developing and Implementing a Process-Performance Management System: Experiences from S-Y Systems Technologies Europe GmbH—A Global Automotive Supplier

• Josef Blasini, Susanne Leist, Werner Merkl

Establishment of a Central Process Governance Organization Combined with Operational Process Improvements

• Christian Czarnecki

BPM Adoption and Business Transformation at Snaga, a Public Company: Critical Success Factors for Five Stages of BPM

• Andrej Kovačič, Gregor Hauc, Brina Buh, Mojca Indihar Štemberger

Enabling Flexibility of Business Processes Using Compliance Rules: The Case of Mobiliar

• Thanh Tran Thi Kim, Erhard Weiss, Christoph Ruhsam, Christoph Czepa, Huy Tran, Uwe Zdun

Comprehensive Business Process Management at Siemens: Implementing Business Process Excellence

• Bartosz Woliński, Saimir Bala

People-Centric, ICT-Enabled Process Innovations via Community, Public and Private Sector Partnership, and e-Leadership: The Case of the Dompe eHospital in Sri Lanka

• Wasana Bandara, Rehan Syed, Bandula Ranathunga, K. B. Sampath Kulathilaka

Fast Fish Eat Slow Fish: Business Transformation at Autogrill

• Stijn Viaene, Joachim Van den Bergh

The NESTT: Rapid Process Redesign at Queensland University of Technology

• Michael Rosemann

Kiss the Documents! How the City of Ghent Digitizes Its Service Processes

• Amy Van Looy, Sabine Rotthier

Application of the Design Thinking Approach to Process Redesign at an Insurance Company in Brazil

• José Ricardo Cereja, Flavia Maria Santoro, Elena Gorbacheva, Martin Matzner

Collaborative BPM for Business Transformations in Telecommunications: The Case of “3”

• Thomas Karle, Kurt Teichenthaler

Process Management in Construction: Expansion of the Bolzano Hospital

• Elisa Marengo, Patrick Dallasega, Marco Montali, Werner Nutt, Michael Reifer

Exposing Impediments to Insurance Claims Processing

• Robert Andrews, Moe Wynn, Arthur H. M ter Hofstede, Jingxin Xu, Kylie Horton, Paul Taylor et al.

Mining the Usability of Process-Oriented Business Software: The Case of the ARIS Designer of Software AG

• Tom Thaler, Sabine Norek, Vittorio De Angelis, Dirk Maurer, Peter Fettke, Peter Loos

Improving Patient Flows at St. Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital’s Emergency Department Through Process Mining

• Robert Andrews, Suriadi Suriadi, Moe Wynn, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Sean Rothwell
• Case Studies
• Business Process Management
• Teaching Cases
• Professional Cases
• Real-World BPM Cases

About this book

“The book is a useful and comprehensive summary of several real-life case studies for organizations and researchers. It is a valuable resource in the form of empirical evidence.” (Bálint Molnár, Computing Reviews, July, 2018)

Editors and Affiliations

Jan vom Brocke

Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics & Business, Vienna, Austria

Jan Mendling

About the editors

Bibliographic information.

Book Title : Business Process Management Cases

Book Subtitle : Digital Innovation and Business Transformation in Practice

Editors : Jan vom Brocke, Jan Mendling

Series Title : Management for Professionals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58307-5

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Business and Management , Business and Management (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer International Publishing AG 2018

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-319-58306-8 Published: 29 August 2017

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-319-86372-6 Published: 14 August 2018

eBook ISBN : 978-3-319-58307-5 Published: 10 August 2017

Series ISSN : 2192-8096

Series E-ISSN : 2192-810X

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XVI, 610

Number of Illustrations : 290 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour

Topics : Business Process Management , Information Systems Applications (incl. Internet) , Business Information Systems , Organization , Organizational Studies, Economic Sociology

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New Year’s Resolution: Do Experiments, Not Projects

• Susan Cramm
• December 30, 2008

How to Actually Execute Change at a Company

• B Tom Hunsaker
• Tom Hunsaker
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Break Down Change Management into Small Steps

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• Rafee Tarafdar
• May 03, 2021

Research: How to Get Better at Killing Bad Projects

• Ronald Klingebiel
• April 02, 2021

Creating a Culture of Quality

• Ashwin Srinivasan
• Bryan Kurey
• From the April 2014 Issue

Pitfalls in Evaluating Risky Projects

• James E. Hodder
• Henry E. Riggs
• From the January 1985 Issue

How Process Enterprises Really Work

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• Steven Stanton
• From the November–December 1999 Issue

How to Be an Effective Executive Sponsor

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Innovate at Your Own Risk: Deborah Wince-Smith on Competitiveness

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3 Project Management Strategies for a Hybrid Workplace

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The Dirty Little Secret of Project Management

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How to Manage Scope Creep

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Why Bad Projects Are So Hard to Kill

• Isabelle Royer
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It’s Time to End the Battle Between Waterfall and Agile

• Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
• October 10, 2023

Why Agile Goes Awry - and How to Fix It

• Lindsay McGregor
• October 01, 2018

To Jumpstart Growth, Flip the Company's Priorities

• R “Ray” Wang
• May 11, 2015

Look Beyond Obvious Risks

• Mihir A. Desai
• June 16, 2015

Explaining XML

• Eileen Roche
• From the July–August 2000 Issue

Are You Ready to Rebound?

• Donald Sull
• From the March 2010 Issue

Why Diversity Programs Fail

• Frank Dobbin
• Alexandra Kalev
• From the July–August 2016 Issue

Sales Misconduct at Wells Fargo Community Bank

• Suraj Srinivasan
• Dennis Campbell
• Susanna Gallani
• Amram Migdal
• June 30, 2017

HBR Guide to Project Management

• Harvard Business Review
• January 29, 2013

Applying the Service Activity Sequence in the World of Culture

• Beatriz Munoz-Seca Fernandez-Cuesta
• Susana Llerena
• September 21, 2012

Ellen Moore (B): Living and Working in Korea

• Gail Ellement
• Henry W. Lane
• Jeanne M. McNett
• February 21, 2012

Performance Goals at Tractors, Inc.

• Mark E. Haskins
• September 25, 2020

Bengaluru Airport: Crisis Leadership through a Pandemic

• Somnath Baishya
• February 08, 2022

Play@Work at Yonyou: A Warm Cultural Empowerment Tool

• Chuanjiang Mao
• May 30, 2019

Nanxi Liu: Finding the Keys to Sales Success at Enplug

• Paul Orlando
• Megan Strawther
• October 12, 2016

Topco Pharmaservices, Inc.: Quality Improvement in the Clinical Supply Outsourcing Process

• Damian Beil
• Wallace Hopp
• February 19, 2019

Project Scoping

• Yael Grushka-Cockayne
• Griffith Ridgway
• November 13, 2023

Eliminating Avoidable Blindness Outreach Activities at Aravind Eye Care System

• Kamalini Ramdas
• March 01, 2018

Ellen Moore (A): Living and Working in Korea

• Chantell E. Nicholls
• January 30, 1998

Pumping Iron at Cliffs & Associates: The Circored Iron Ore Reduction Plant in Trinidad

• Christoph H. Loch
• Christian Terwiesch
• December 06, 2002

Vitreon Corp.: The Hyalite Project

• Roy D. Shapiro
• October 02, 2006

Madison Avenue: Digital Media Services (B)

• Steven J. Spear
• Anne D. Karshis
• June 22, 2001

Medisys Corp.: The IntensCare Product Development Team

• Anne Donnellon
• Joshua D. Margolis
• October 30, 2009

Inside Intel Inside

• Youngme Moon
• Christina Darwall
• June 05, 2002

Performance Management at Afreximbank

• Robert S. Kaplan
• Siko Sikochi
• Josh Steimle
• March 22, 2020

A&D High Tech: Technology Portfolio Management: Microsoft Project Workshop

• Mark Jeffery
• January 01, 2006

Danone: Changing the Food System

• David E. Bell
• Federica Gabrieli
• Daniela Beyersdorfer
• November 15, 2019

Airbnb, Inc., Teaching Note

• Frank T. Rothaermel
• February 23, 2019

The Vanguard Group, Teaching Note

• February 03, 2019

Stryker Corporation: Capital Budgeting, Teaching Note

• Timothy A. Luehrman
• September 24, 2012

The Value SPC Can Add to Quality, Operations, Supply Chain Management, and Continuous Improvement Programs

• Victor Sower
• January 02, 2014

Electronic Medical Records at the ISS Clinic in Mbarara, Uganda, Teaching Note

• Julie Rosenberg
• Rebecca Weintraub
• May 18, 2012

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Jan vom Brocke, Jan Mendling, Michael Rosemann (Eds.)

Business process management cases, my front page, leading organizations.

Includes cases from world’s leading organizations in various sectors

Presents cases from a wide range of regions around the world

The first book to present an extensive collection of real-world cases on Business Process Management

This Springer book is the first to present a rich selection of real-world cases on Business Process Management. It reports on best practice as well as lessons learned from organizations that have leveraged Business Process Management (BPM) to innovation and transform their business.

With economic and societal sectors of all kinds being challenged by disruptive changes due to digital technologies, in particular, this book shows how process thinking enables organizations to master digital innovation and transformation. The real-world cases presented in this book show how organizations leverage BPM capabilities both for exploitation and exploration in a digital world.

The book intends to bring together the experience of organizations using BPM. The focus in neither on academic case studies, nor on offerings from consulting companies. The intent is to learn from the experience organizations using BPM have made. That said, both academic institutions as well as consulting companies may well be involved in the case, but the case has to be developed from the perspective of the BPM-adopting company and the way BPM was used to solve contemporary organizational challenges.

The cases provide valuable examples for practice, as well as interesting cases for students. All case descriptions follow a unified schema making the case knowledge easy accessible for readers.

This Springer book is the first to present a rich selection of real-world cases on Business Process Management. It reports on best practice as well as lessons learned from organizations that have leveraged Business Process Management (BPM) to innovation and transform their business...

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All cases follow a unified structure that makes the relevant case knowledge easily accessible and transferrable to other contexts...

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Case Studies

Leadership insights.

The case study explores the blended operations strategies implemented for a leading manufacturing company with a global presence. The strategies resulted in streamlined operations, achieving significant milestones in terms of low attrition, improved KPIs, and substantial cost savings.

• Global Enterprise: Understand the client’s operations and their worldwide presence, which include 14 state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities and more than 10,000 employees in 180 countries.
• Team & Performance: Explore how assembling a skilled team with an attrition rate below 2% facilitated the consistent attainment of Collections and Order Processing KPIs.
• Cost Reduction: Evaluate how optimal manpower utilization contributed to a significant cost reduction, saving 16.67% compared to previous year’s expenses in collections management.

Renewal Operation for A Leading Life Insurance Co.

The case study explores a renewal operation project conducted for a leading life insurance company, a joint venture between two Indian banks and a Japanese firm. The project’s objective was to optimize and enhance customer interaction through various outbound calling operations, aiming to increase retention and encourage timely premium payments. The operation managed to significantly reduce callback percentages and operating costs, while also improving customer satisfaction through effective campaign management and system integration.

• Collaborative Effort: The operation represents a collaboration between a renowned life insurance company serving 9.2 million customers in India and a strategic partner with expertise in customer engagement and communication.
• Objective and Strategy: The project aimed to augment retention rates and timely premium payments by engaging customers through various outbound calling strategies, underlining policy benefits, and alternative payment channels.
• Notable Outcomes: The operation achieved considerable success, with a reduction in call-back percentages, cost savings, and increased customer satisfaction, underpinned by an efficient campaign management system and seamless backend integration.

One of the Leading Life Insurance Providers in India

The case study examines a leading life insurance provider in India, highlighting its robust customer service framework and substantial growth. It covers the company’s background, details of operations including inbound call handling and after-sales support, and the benefits delivered through their efforts, such as successfully rerouting calls during force majeure conditions and expanding the scope of service due to exceptional performance.

Deep Dive: 

• Explore the resilience and adaptability of the insurance provider’s customer service, evidenced by the successful handling of increased call volumes during unforeseen circumstances.
• Understand the comprehensive after-sales support mechanisms in place, which encompass complaint registration, status updates, complaint resolution, and customer satisfaction calls.
• Assess the growth and expansion of the company’s service scope within a short period due to excellent performance, including additional services like verification calling for HNI customers and welcome calls.

Acquiring & Issuance Operations for a Leading Private Bank

This case study reviews the acquiring and issuance operations of a leading private bank listed on NASDAQ. The bank, renowned as a global fintech and payments leader, made significant improvements to its business scope, cost management, and customer satisfaction levels through strategic initiatives and workflow optimization.

• Expansion of Business Scope: The bank extended its lines of business to include data entry and quality control for merchant acquiring applications, which was made possible through a consistent performance record.
• Cost Savings through Workforce Management: The bank implemented robust workforce management measures, such as mitigating intra-day spike challenges and cross-training initiatives, resulting in substantial cost savings of 22%.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction: The introduction of the Email-to-Service Request campaign led to better end-to-end resolutions and resulted in a notable 31% increase in overall customer satisfaction.

 Pre-Screening Operations for A Leading Broking Company

The case study examines the process and impact of streamlining pre-screening operations for a top online broking firm, whose operations grew significantly over 24 months. This transformation resulted in a diversified business model, enhanced productivity, efficient resource management, and strategic consulting services, ultimately minimizing disruption during peak periods and doubling the company’s productivity.

• Rapid Operational Expansion: The company expanded its operations from 75 to 1,400 seats within two years, introducing new lines of business including Customer Service, Email Response Management, Back Office, and Web-chat Response handling.
• Efficiency Enhancement: Effective CRM integration led to improved data allocation, thus doubling productivity within four months, which significantly improved overall throughput.
• Strategic Resource Management and Consulting: Implementation of cross-training resources and a best-in-class dialer solution improved volume distribution and minimized SLA impact during peak business periods, such as the IPL in October ’21.

Blended Operations for A Leading Broking Company

This case study documents the successful transformation of a leading broking company’s customer service operations, blending traditional and digital channels to enhance customer experience and drive operational efficiency. This innovative approach enabled the company to improve customer retention and reactivate dormant accounts while boosting operational capacities, all leading to a significant return on investment.

• Technology Integration: The company effectively leveraged AI/ML-based Customer Interaction Platforms, indicating a strong commitment to technological innovation to enhance the customer experience.
• Multi-Channel Customer Support: The company offered comprehensive customer support through various channels including inbound and outbound calling, email response handling, and web-chat, thus catering to the diverse preferences of its extensive customer base.
• Operational Efficiency and ROI Improvement: The broking firm managed operational capacities efficiently even during high volume inbound calls and strategically transformed its support team from a cost center to a profit center, yielding a significant 14% improvement in ROI.

Outbound Calling for a Leading Private Bank

This case study evaluates the outbound calling strategy of a leading Indian private bank recognized for its significant market presence and commendable accolades. The bank’s approach involves actively engaging with its customers, providing assistance for VKYC/OTP/Wallet account opening, promoting its Secured Credit Card to Fixed Deposit customers, and providing funding support to those who have applied for a Debit Card.

• Understanding the bank’s heritage: A leading financial institution with nationwide reach, lauded by both domestic and international awards.
• Scope of Work: The bank’s outbound calling initiative encompasses VKYC/OTP/Wallet Account assistance, Secured Credit Card promotion, and Debit Card funding support.
• Customer Engagement: The bank’s strategic outreach is aimed at improving customer experience, enhancing service offerings, and driving customer loyalty.

This case study explores how an esteemed private bank effectively implemented an outbound calling strategy to enhance customer engagement and business growth. Leveraging business intelligence and advanced CRM integration, the bank significantly increased productivity, expanded its account opening activities, and introduced new lines of business, such as secured credit card and debit card funding.

Deep Dive into Sections:

• Company Background: An established private bank recognized internationally, offering an extensive array of BFSI services with a substantial presence across India.
• Scope of Work: Implementation of an outbound calling strategy aimed at assisting potential leads, pitching secured credit cards to FD customers, and following up with applicants of the bank’s products/services.
• Performance and Scaling: Consistent performance led to the expansion of business activities, driven by advanced BI tools and real-time dialer management, along with robust CRM integration to streamline VKYC processes.
• Growth and Productivity: An impressive increase in workstations led to a substantial growth in productivity for VKYC/OTP/Wallet Account activities and ‘Secured Credit Card’ and ‘Debit Card’ funding activities over a period of six months.

Collections for one of the Leading NBFCs in India

This case study details the successful management of collections by a leading non-banking financial corporation (NBFC) in India. Through proactive measures such as timely collections calls, awareness campaigns for online payments, and prompt customer service for loan foreclosure requests, the NBFC significantly enhanced their collections performance. Key metrics used for evaluation included contactability rates, conversion rates, proportion of online payments, and region-specific collection performance. The company’s efforts resulted in a remarkable improvement in collections performance and cost savings, along with an increase in customer awareness and online payments.

• Collections Management: Timely collections and cheque bounce calls played a crucial role in preventing escalation to higher risk categories.
• Technology and Process Re-engineering: The implementation of a dynamic dialer strategy and CRM customization led to significant cost savings and improved online payment adoption.
• Scalability and Adaptability: The company’s ability to transition to a work-from-home model during the pandemic and consistent performance facilitated expansion of services and workforce augmentation.

Back Office Operations for A Leading Private Bank in India

The case study explores how a leading Indian private bank streamlined and expanded its back office operations for loan origination systems. Initially managing inbound calls and data entry, the bank scaled up its operations over six years, launching new business lines and expanding its services across the country. Additionally, it optimized operations through strategic automation, thereby reducing staff requirements and boosting overall efficiency.

• Operational Scale-up: Remarkable growth in Loan Origination Systems over six years.
• Service Diversification: Successful launch of new business lines including personal loans, home loans, and working capital.
• Automation for Efficiency: Implemented strategic automation to reduce staff requirements and increase overall throughput.

How a leading healthcare provider revolutionized customer experience

Healthcare businesses are involved in dealing with people on many fronts. Patient satisfaction, improved health outcomes, and better financial performance can all be linked to the overall impression patients have of the healthcare system. In this case study we examine how a leading healthcare provider managed to ensure high-quality patient care by prioritizing customer experience.

Deep-dive into:

• Leveraging omni-channel engagement, automation and self-service in the burgeoning competition.
• A consulting approach to mapping customer experience gaps.
• How the healthcare player achieved 40% increase in CSAT scores.

Our mission is simple – to digitally transform business processes, optimise cost, and drive greater returns.

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Case Studies of Business Process Management Transformation

By: Author Alex Lim

Posted on Last updated: October 26, 2020

Home > Case Studies of Business Process Management Transformation

Emerging industry processes will require businesses to learn to use automated tools, like low-code platforms, in order to streamline business process management. Read on this article which dives into the prevalence of low-code and 3 insightful case studies.

Table of Contents

Table of contents

The cloud widens the community of developers, automation and rules that write themselves, case study: modernization leads to self-service at bp, case study: asahi tekko achieves real-time production management, case study: bbva ramps up customer experience, digitally.

The cloud widens the community of developers Automation and rules that write themselves Case study: Modernization leads to self-service at BP Case study: Asahi Tekko achieves real-time production management Case study: BBVA ramps up customer experience, digitally Conclusion

Digital enterprises, employing artificial intelligence, cloud, and data analytics in innovative ways, are delivering superior customer experiences, faster response times, and more intelligent operations. Every company—no matter how large, how old, or in what industry— can potentially evolve into a digital enterprise, operating with the same agility of a startup.

Achieving this digital nimbleness requires relying on software and data resources that make use of legacy data, as well as the many new sources of data available today, and extend well beyond the traditional capabilities of IT departments. Digital nimbleness is an enterprise initiative, in which employees and executives from all parts of the business play an active role in designing and building solutions.

Enabling a wider group within the enterprise to design or redesign process-driven applications represents the most expedient and effective way to successfully navigate the digital transformation journey. Business processes evolve and change as rapidly as the business changes—meeting customer preferences, releasing new products, pivoting to new markets, and forging new partnerships. Today’s generation of business process management (BPM) and business rules management systems (BRMS) solutions offer a way to rapidly build modern applications with a minimum drain on precious and expensive IT resources.

The only way to advance and compete is to open up software innovation across enterprises— to business users who typically do not have traditional programming skills, but who need to be able to harness the power of technology. This means evolving the way applications are being built and deployed. Indeed, a survey of 324 companies found 76% indicating that at least some portion of their applications were developed outside of their traditional IT departments or IT service providers.

“Without low-code and no-code development, organizations are going to find it increasingly difficult to keep pace with their competitors,” reports SD Times, which quotes Rob Koplowitz, VP and principal analyst at Forrester3: “If we look at basic issues companies have now, what we often hear is, ‘I can’t build applications fast enough and by the time I build them the specs have changed.’

The rise of user-driven development and digital business process management is being made possible in two ways:

• The cloud makes application development accessible to a wider audience. Having online, easy-to-use, front-end tools available to non-developers opens up new ways of conceiving and building applications.
• Automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning enable a much wider variety of manual processes and tasks to be automated. AI-based engines are now being integrated into business process management, producing rules that write themselves. Low-level tasks also can be rapidly automated through robotic process automation (RPA), in which tasks are managed by intelligent software.

The path to digital transformation varies from organization to organization, of course, since they have invested in countless systems and applications over the years. But all successful efforts have certain common ingredients as well.

In every digital transformation project, new applications and next-generation architectures are built on today’s open standards, using on-demand resources.

For many organizations, digital transformation also means optimizing existing systems and application resources—integrating, replacing, or abstracting key pieces of their infrastructures into services.

By enabling a wider group within the enterprise to do design or redesign process-driven applications represent the most expedient and effective way to successfully navigate the digital transformation journey. Business processes evolve and change as rapidly as the business changes— meeting customer preferences, releasing new products, pivoting to new markets, and forging new partnerships. Today’s generation of business process management (BPM) and business rules management systems (BRMS) solutions offer a way to rapidly build modern applications with a minimum drain on precious and expensive IT resources.

For decades, only individuals with “developer” or “programmer” in their job titles held the keys to the applications that ran their organizations. This was for good reason—most enterprise applications tend to be very monolithic, difficult to understand, and difficult to change. The move from monolithic to microservices, as well as a move from traditional developers to a diverse mix of developers and business people, are reshaping the way applications are created, developed and deployed.

• From monoliths to microservices : The process of application development is changing. And the technology employed to build applications is rapidly changing—to containers and microservices architectures that address the monolithic problem, making applications much easier to deploy, easier to change, and easier to understand. As a result, applications are becoming easier to create, deploy, and change. Cloud and container technologies now enable the breaking down of larger, monolithic applications into smaller components which can be managed and modified independently and deployed and scaled.
• From traditional developers to diverse mixes of developers and businesspeople : Self-service environments make it possible for business users to develop and maintain applications without going through IT departments. The next generation of applications won’t be built purely by IT or traditional developers, but rather by teams that include business users, all contributing their knowledge and experience to these new microservices-based applications. These applications won’t require hard-core coding skills to change or adapt — rather, they need to be interfused with business logic and business know-how. Business users can’t necessarily write code, but they can produce models of their business that include business rules, along with the policies and decisions they make. Essentially, these models serve as source code for applications that can automatically be deployed within a microservices architecture.

Automation is also changing the game, delegating routine manual tasks and decision management to machines, thereby reducing manual work. Digital BPM and BRMS pave the way to AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation, which is revolutionizing the handling of the countless routine and manual tasks that slow down productivity.

Here’s how today’s systems are taking on the heavy lifting of today’s enterprises.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning : Artificial intelligence and machine learning are dramatically reshaping the way enterprises approach business automation. With machine learning, rules are derived automatically from historical records. This is in contrast to traditional decision management and business rules approaches when rules are created based on users’ experiences, and then built out in applications. Machine learning leverages historical data to derive predictive models that can be applied to new information for the next set of decisions.

For example, an application that helps determine whether insurance claims should be paid or denied can leverage predictive models built from historical claims information. The historical data provides an understanding of how claims decisions were made in the past. The claims application can use the predictive model to make decisions about new claims, which will be consistent with past behaviour.

Evolving standards are also facilitating the integration of AI and machine learning into business automation solutions. Predictive Model Markup Language, or PMML, enables predictive models to be encoded and shared among different systems. A relatively new standard, Decision Model & Notation, or DMN, is a graphical language for encoding the rules that make up a decision. DMN makes it easier for business users to create the source code for their decision applications, and to encode complex business logic. In addition, DMN enables business users to incorporate a predictive model into their DMN diagrams as easily as they can incorporate business rules. They can combine both the output of a predictive model with a set of rules in order to arrive at a decision.

In the big picture of application development, this means business users can create DMN logic, which can be employed within a container as a decision service. Or they can automatically feed predictive models from training data into that same process.

Robotic Process Automation : A recent survey by Deloitte finds a majority of enterprises, 53%, are now employing robotic process automation, or RPA. That number is expected to increase to 82% within the next two years.4 RPA enables the creation of software robots that perform repetitive and routine work that might otherwise be done by human workers. The benefits to organizations are reduced costs and headcount by automating work.

In many workplaces today, much time is spent on simple repetitive tasks, such as copying and pasting information from a back-office database into a spreadsheet. RPA enables enterprises to automate many of these routine tasks and functions. Essentially, the software robot records the work people are doing and replays it, with varying levels of intelligence applied. Basically, building out RPA is another approach to developing applications. Ultimately, these robots will be deployed as microservices through containers, supported by the cloud.

4 The robots are ready. Are you? Untapped advantage in your digital workforce, Deloitte, 2018.

BP, a global energy company, had a complex operational management challenge, with hundreds of product teams using various delivery models, affecting application development and deployment. The company wanted to explore a robust, modern, open-source technology infrastructure that could operate worldwide and be accessed by thousands of business users and millions of end customers. It needed a reliable, modern technology infrastructure to speed application development and deployment.

To accomplish this, BP worked with Red Hat to simplify and modernize technology and processes, increasing security and agility and speeding provisioning from two to three weeks to seven minutes. BP used Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build the Application Engineering Services’ Digital Conveyor. This platform provides process automation that empowers product delivery teams with self-service capabilities, a DevOps approach, and a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

“The combination of microservices, containers, and a fully automated CI/CD platform provides what developers have been asking for years,” said Paul Costall, head of application engineering services at BP. “They now have full self-service to deliver change from the initial idea, through the innovation, right through to production, as quickly as humanly possible.”

To keep pace with orders, automobile parts manufacturer Asahi Tekko Co., Ltd., needed to speed just in time workflows without expanding its physical footprint. The company needed to replace manual data collection with automated machine monitoring to track and manage quality and productivity.

Achieving these improvements would require increasing machine capacity, but the manufacturer simply did not have the space to accommodate additional machines needed to fulfil larger order volumes. “Although we had a business potential to accept orders up to about three years ahead, the factory’s space was about 3,000 meters too short to accommodate manufacturing all of them,” said Tetsuya Kimura, president and representative director of Asahi Tekko.

To better understand its physical resource use, the company collected operational data from its factory machines, such as production quantity and downtime. However, machine production counters were reviewed and recorded manually, a time-consuming process that lead to incorrect or incomplete entries.

Asahi Tekko employed enterprise open source solutions from Red Hat to create an Internet of Things (IoT) mechanism and business rules engine for automated data collection and real-time insight into machine operations. As a result, Asahi Tekko has cut capital expenditure by around ¥300 million, reduced employee over-work, and even created a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering for other manufacturing companies.

The company created a cycle time monitor, an IoT mechanism that would automatically collect and display operational data to eliminate manual errors and improve productivity. Employees can use this data to focus on repairing or improving slow and broken machines instead of checking each machine’s data. The company deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as the foundation for this solution.

In addition, the company deployed Red Hat Decision Manager (formerly Red Hat JBoss BRMS) as its rules engine, which includes complex event processing (CEP) capabilities that detect the relationship between massive volumes of information in real time. With these capabilities, Asahi Tekko’s IoT solution automatically detects and visualizes necessary site data—such as line production number and stop time—in real time.

BBVA, a financial group that provides financial services to more than 73 million customers in more than 30 countries, needed to update its technology to better support its digital transformation goals and improve its customer experience. “Customers demand 24-hour-a-day functionality from anywhere,” said José María Ruesta, global head of infrastructure, service, and open systems at BBVA.

“We have to achieve a balance between innovation and reliability. But as a bank, trying to translate these values into technology is difficult. Imagine a datacenter full of different operating systems, languages, and interfaces. There’s no room for innovation.”

BBVA wanted to create a single, global, cloud-native platform that is fully automated and self-service, combining real-time and batch data to help developers work efficiently and to ensure high service availability and reliability. As new functions increased the transaction volume handled by BBVA’s backend systems and applications, the group sought to update its IT environment as part of its digital transformation journey.

The company turned to enterprise open source software—including Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform—to build a unified global cloud platform that is fully automated, self-service, and data-centric. With this new platform, the company has increased efficiency and integration to provide a better customer experience and support innovation.

With a global open source platform, BBVA’s developers can quickly and easily deploy code across its branch network, speeding time to market for updates and new services. “Our proprietary platforms created isolation that prevented agile development of new products in line with customer demand,” said Ruesta.

“BBVA is a company with more than 150 years of experience, but the future is never certain. Digital transformation is critical to survival and competitive advantage,” said Ruesta. “Innovation means reinventing ourselves. It’s finding new ways to develop products and services that break the mold of traditional banking.”

The power to accomplish game-changing digital transformation is now available to the business user, who ultimately decides and directs what solutions the business needs. Ultimately, the purpose and intent of such transformation is to deliver value to the customer—quickly, with continuous delivery of quality and functionality. By empowering business users to engage in digital business process management and business rules management systems, enterprises can rapidly deploy and configure business technology to ever-changing processes, when and where it is needed.

Source: Red Hat

55 Process Improvement Case Studies & Project Results [2024]

Cem is the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per Similarweb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Business leaders know that process improvement reduces costs and increases customer satisfaction. Therefore, businesses follow process improvement methodologies or deploy tools such as process modeling, process mining and RPA to discover, modify and automate their processes. However, it can be difficult for process experts and business analysts to understand the different process improvement approaches and the results they should expect.

Read our process improvement approaches guide for a categorization of process improvement approaches so you can rely on a framework to structure your process improvement initiatives. In this article, we share typical process improvement project results and case studies. Our aim is to provide benchmarks so business analysts and leaders can set targets for their own initiatives.

What are the typical project results?

Process improvement solutions help businesses define weaknesses and take action to solve these problems. In the case studies we collected, the most common project results that we came across are as follows:

1- Improved efficiency:  Most businesses increase the efficiency of their processes by adapting process improvement methodologies. After defining their problems, companies eliminate unnecessary steps in processes, reduce their costs, and shorten process times. As a result, they achieve faster processes and higher quality output with fewer resources. 

For example, in a process mining case study, a manufacturer leveraged IBM Process Mining to analyze the procure-to-pay processes. It is claimed that the manufacturer detected and managed deviations, mismatches and early payments, which lessened maverick buying and saved $60,000 in reworking cost. The firm improved purchase order and invoice processes by automating 75% of line creation and delivery activities. As a result, the company decreased the invoice registration and approval time.

2- Enhanced customer satisfaction: The increasing quality of output and faster processes can also reflect on customer satisfaction. Process improvement solutions help businesses reduce waiting time and focus on customer value. For example, it is claimed that by adopting the Kaizen methodology, Tata Steel has shortened its response time and delivered more on-time orders to its customers.

3- Harmonization of different teams/processes:  For large companies, handling different processes simultaneously can be a big challenge. Teams should be informed about what others do, and processes need to work in sync to avoid problems. With process improvement solutions, businesses can have a full understanding of all their companies and align different processes successfully.

Here is an extended list of case studies which are collected from different resources. You can filter the list by the process improvement solution, service provider, industry, or process and investigate the achieved results.

Further Reading

  If you want to learn more on process improvement, these articles can also interest you:

• Process Improvement: In-depth Guide for Businesses
• Lean Process Improvement Guide for Your Business

Check out comprehensive and constantly updated list of process mining case studies to process mining real-life examples and compare them to process improvement case studies.

If you want to manage and improve your processes, check out our data-driven and up-to-date list of vendors for:

• Workflow management software
• Business process management software
• Low-code/No-code development platform
• Onboarding software
• Process mining
• Business process automation software

If you still have questions about process improvement, we would like to help:

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

AIMultiple.com Traffic Analytics, Ranking & Audience , Similarweb. Why Microsoft, IBM, and Google Are Ramping up Efforts on AI Ethics , Business Insider. Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI to pursue artificial intelligence that’s smarter than we are , Washington Post. Data management barriers to AI success , Deloitte. Empowering AI Leadership: AI C-Suite Toolkit , World Economic Forum. Science, Research and Innovation Performance of the EU , European Commission. Public-sector digitization: The trillion-dollar challenge , McKinsey & Company. Hypatos gets $11.8M for a deep learning approach to document processing , TechCrunch. We got an exclusive look at the pitch deck AI startup Hypatos used to raise $11 million , Business Insider.

To stay up-to-date on B2B tech & accelerate your enterprise:

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What is process workflow & top 4 benefits & case studies in '24, process innovation in '24 & 3 best practices to achieve it, how to implement process improvement in 6 steps in 2024.

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Hi Cem, Thank you ver much for your interesting article. I am interested in getting a deeper look into some of the case studies: How exactly did they approach the problem? ….Would it be possible to get a closer look at the case studies? Thanks in advance. Adrian

Hi Adrian, please feel free to get in touch with us via [email protected] . Happy to discuss these in more detail once we know which types of case studies you are interested in

Related research

18 Best Process Analysis Tools & Techniques in 2024

Enable Process Transformation in 6 Easy Steps in 2024

7 Favorite Business Case Studies to Teach—and Why

Explore more.

• Case Teaching
• Course Materials

FEATURED CASE STUDIES

The Army Crew Team . Emily Michelle David of CEIBS

ATH Technologies . Devin Shanthikumar of Paul Merage School of Business

Fabritek 1992 . Rob Austin of Ivey Business School

Lincoln Electric Co . Karin Schnarr of Wilfrid Laurier University

Pal’s Sudden Service—Scaling an Organizational Model to Drive Growth . Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School

The United States Air Force: ‘Chaos’ in the 99th Reconnaissance Squadron . Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School

Warren E. Buffett, 2015 . Robert F. Bruner of Darden School of Business

To dig into what makes a compelling case study, we asked seven experienced educators who teach with—and many who write—business case studies: “What is your favorite case to teach and why?”

The resulting list of case study favorites ranges in topics from operations management and organizational structure to rebel leaders and whodunnit dramas.

1. The Army Crew Team

Emily Michelle David, Assistant Professor of Management, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS)

“I love teaching  The Army Crew Team  case because it beautifully demonstrates how a team can be so much less than the sum of its parts.

I deliver the case to executives in a nearby state-of-the-art rowing facility that features rowing machines, professional coaches, and shiny red eight-person shells.

After going through the case, they hear testimonies from former members of Chinese national crew teams before carrying their own boat to the river for a test race.

The rich learning environment helps to vividly underscore one of the case’s core messages: competition can be a double-edged sword if not properly managed.

Executives in Emily Michelle David’s organizational behavior class participate in rowing activities at a nearby facility as part of her case delivery.

Despite working for an elite headhunting firm, the executives in my most recent class were surprised to realize how much they’ve allowed their own team-building responsibilities to lapse. In the MBA pre-course, this case often leads to a rich discussion about common traps that newcomers fall into (for example, trying to do too much, too soon), which helps to poise them to both stand out in the MBA as well as prepare them for the lateral team building they will soon engage in.

Finally, I love that the post-script always gets a good laugh and serves as an early lesson that organizational behavior courses will seldom give you foolproof solutions for specific problems but will, instead, arm you with the ability to think through issues more critically.”

2. ATH Technologies

Devin Shanthikumar, Associate Professor of Accounting, Paul Merage School of Business

“As a professor at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business, and before that at Harvard Business School, I have probably taught over 100 cases. I would like to say that my favorite case is my own,   Compass Box Whisky Company . But as fun as that case is, one case beats it:  ATH Technologies  by Robert Simons and Jennifer Packard.

ATH presents a young entrepreneurial company that is bought by a much larger company. As part of the merger, ATH gets an ‘earn-out’ deal—common among high-tech industries. The company, and the class, must decide what to do to achieve the stretch earn-out goals.

ATH captures a scenario we all want to be in at some point in our careers—being part of a young, exciting, growing organization. And a scenario we all will likely face—having stretch goals that seem almost unreachable.

It forces us, as a class, to really struggle with what to do at each stage.

After we read and discuss the A case, we find out what happens next, and discuss the B case, then the C, then D, and even E. At every stage, we can:

see how our decisions play out,

figure out how to build on our successes, and

address our failures.

The case is exciting, the class discussion is dynamic and energetic, and in the end, we all go home with a memorable ‘ah-ha!’ moment.

I have taught many great cases over my career, but none are quite as fun, memorable, and effective as ATH .”

3. Fabritek 1992

Rob Austin, Professor of Information Systems, Ivey Business School

“This might seem like an odd choice, but my favorite case to teach is an old operations case called  Fabritek 1992 .

The latest version of Fabritek 1992 is dated 2009, but it is my understanding that this is a rewrite of a case that is older (probably much older). There is a Fabritek 1969 in the HBP catalog—same basic case, older dates, and numbers. That 1969 version lists no authors, so I suspect the case goes even further back; the 1969 version is, I’m guessing, a rewrite of an even older version.

There are many things I appreciate about the case. Here are a few:

It operates as a learning opportunity at many levels. At first it looks like a not-very-glamorous production job scheduling case. By the end of the case discussion, though, we’re into (operations) strategy and more. It starts out technical, then explodes into much broader relevance. As I tell participants when I’m teaching HBP's Teaching with Cases seminars —where I often use Fabritek as an example—when people first encounter this case, they almost always underestimate it.

It has great characters—especially Arthur Moreno, who looks like a troublemaker, but who, discussion reveals, might just be the smartest guy in the factory. Alums of the Harvard MBA program have told me that they remember Arthur Moreno many years later.

Almost every word in the case is important. It’s only four and a half pages of text and three pages of exhibits. This economy of words and sparsity of style have always seemed like poetry to me. I should note that this super concise, every-word-matters approach is not the ideal we usually aspire to when we write cases. Often, we include extra or superfluous information because part of our teaching objective is to provide practice in separating what matters from what doesn’t in a case. Fabritek takes a different approach, though, which fits it well.

It has a dramatic structure. It unfolds like a detective story, a sort of whodunnit. Something is wrong. There is a quality problem, and we’re not sure who or what is responsible. One person, Arthur Moreno, looks very guilty (probably too obviously guilty), but as we dig into the situation, there are many more possibilities. We spend in-class time analyzing the data (there’s a bit of math, so it covers that base, too) to determine which hypotheses are best supported by the data. And, realistically, the data doesn’t support any of the hypotheses perfectly, just some of them more than others. Also, there’s a plot twist at the end (I won’t reveal it, but here’s a hint: Arthur Moreno isn’t nearly the biggest problem in the final analysis). I have had students tell me the surprising realization at the end of the discussion gives them ‘goosebumps.’

Finally, through the unexpected plot twist, it imparts what I call a ‘wisdom lesson’ to young managers: not to be too sure of themselves and to regard the experiences of others, especially experts out on the factory floor, with great seriousness.”

4. Lincoln Electric Co.

Karin Schnarr, Assistant Professor of Policy, Wilfrid Laurier University

“As a strategy professor, my favorite case to teach is the classic 1975 Harvard case  Lincoln Electric Co.  by Norman Berg.

I use it to demonstrate to students the theory linkage between strategy and organizational structure, management processes, and leadership behavior.

This case may be an odd choice for a favorite. It occurs decades before my students were born. It is pages longer than we are told students are now willing to read. It is about manufacturing arc welding equipment in Cleveland, Ohio—a hard sell for a Canadian business classroom.

Yet, I have never come across a case that so perfectly illustrates what I want students to learn about how a company can be designed from an organizational perspective to successfully implement its strategy.

And in a time where so much focus continues to be on how to maximize shareholder value, it is refreshing to be able to discuss a publicly-traded company that is successfully pursuing a strategy that provides a fair value to shareholders while distributing value to employees through a large bonus pool, as well as value to customers by continually lowering prices.

However, to make the case resonate with today’s students, I work to make it relevant to the contemporary business environment. I link the case to multimedia clips about Lincoln Electric’s current manufacturing practices, processes, and leadership practices. My students can then see that a model that has been in place for generations is still viable and highly successful, even in our very different competitive situation.”

5. Pal’s Sudden Service—Scaling an Organizational Model to Drive Growth

Gary Pisano, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

“My favorite case to teach these days is  Pal’s Sudden Service—Scaling an Organizational Model to Drive Growth .

I love teaching this case for three reasons:

1. It demonstrates how a company in a super-tough, highly competitive business can do very well by focusing on creating unique operating capabilities. In theory, Pal’s should have no chance against behemoths like McDonalds or Wendy’s—but it thrives because it has built a unique operating system. It’s a great example of a strategic approach to operations in action.

2. The case shows how a strategic approach to human resource and talent development at all levels really matters. This company competes in an industry not known for engaging its front-line workers. The case shows how engaging these workers can really pay off.

3. Finally, Pal’s is really unusual in its approach to growth. Most companies set growth goals (usually arbitrary ones) and then try to figure out how to ‘backfill’ the human resource and talent management gaps. They trust you can always find someone to do the job. Pal’s tackles the growth problem completely the other way around. They rigorously select and train their future managers. Only when they have a manager ready to take on their own store do they open a new one. They pace their growth off their capacity to develop talent. I find this really fascinating and so do the students I teach this case to.”

6. The United States Air Force: ‘Chaos’ in the 99th Reconnaissance Squadron

Francesca Gino, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

“My favorite case to teach is  The United States Air Force: ‘Chaos’ in the 99th Reconnaissance Squadron .

The case surprises students because it is about a leader, known in the unit by the nickname Chaos , who inspired his squadron to be innovative and to change in a culture that is all about not rocking the boat, and where there is a deep sense that rules should simply be followed.

For years, I studied ‘rebels,’ people who do not accept the status quo; rather, they approach work with curiosity and produce positive change in their organizations. Chaos is a rebel leader who got the level of cultural change right. Many of the leaders I’ve met over the years complain about the ‘corporate culture,’ or at least point to clear weaknesses of it; but then they throw their hands up in the air and forget about changing what they can.

Chaos is different—he didn’t go after the ‘Air Force’ culture. That would be like boiling the ocean.

Instead, he focused on his unit of control and command: The 99th squadron. He focused on enabling that group to do what it needed to do within the confines of the bigger Air Force culture. In the process, he inspired everyone on his team to be the best they can be at work.

The case leaves the classroom buzzing and inspired to take action.”

7. Warren E. Buffett, 2015

Robert F. Bruner, Professor of Business Administration, Darden School of Business

“I love teaching   Warren E. Buffett, 2015  because it energizes, exercises, and surprises students.

Buffett looms large in the business firmament and therefore attracts anyone who is eager to learn his secrets for successful investing. This generates the kind of energy that helps to break the ice among students and instructors early in a course and to lay the groundwork for good case discussion practices.

Studying Buffett’s approach to investing helps to introduce and exercise important themes that will resonate throughout a course. The case challenges students to define for themselves what it means to create value. The case discussion can easily be tailored for novices or for more advanced students.

Either way, this is not hero worship: The case affords a critical examination of the financial performance of Buffett’s firm, Berkshire Hathaway, and reveals both triumphs and stumbles. Most importantly, students can critique the purported benefits of Buffett’s conglomeration strategy and the sustainability of his investment record as the size of the firm grows very large.

By the end of the class session, students seem surprised with what they have discovered. They buzz over the paradoxes in Buffett’s philosophy and performance record. And they come away with sober respect for Buffett’s acumen and for the challenges of creating value for investors.

Surely, such sobriety is a meta-message for any mastery of finance.”

More Educator Favorites

Emily Michelle David is an assistant professor of management at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). Her current research focuses on discovering how to make workplaces more welcoming for people of all backgrounds and personality profiles to maximize performance and avoid employee burnout. David’s work has been published in a number of scholarly journals, and she has worked as an in-house researcher at both NASA and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Devin Shanthikumar  is an associate professor and the accounting area coordinator at UCI Paul Merage School of Business. She teaches undergraduate, MBA, and executive-level courses in managerial accounting. Shanthikumar previously served on the faculty at Harvard Business School, where she taught both financial accounting and managerial accounting for MBAs, and wrote cases that are used in accounting courses across the country.

Robert D. Austin is a professor of information systems at Ivey Business School and an affiliated faculty member at Harvard Medical School. He has published widely, authoring nine books, more than 50 cases and notes, three Harvard online products, and two popular massive open online courses (MOOCs) running on the Coursera platform.

Karin Schnarr is an assistant professor of policy and the director of the Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) program at the Lazaridis School of Business & Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada where she teaches strategic management at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels. Schnarr has published several award-winning and best-selling cases and regularly presents at international conferences on case writing and scholarship.

Gary P. Pisano is the Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean of faculty development at Harvard Business School, where he has been on the faculty since 1988. Pisano is an expert in the fields of technology and operations strategy, the management of innovation, and competitive strategy. His research and consulting experience span a range of industries including aerospace, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, specialty chemicals, health care, nutrition, computers, software, telecommunications, and semiconductors.

Francesca Gino studies how people can have more productive, creative, and fulfilling lives. She is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author, most recently, of  Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life . Gino regularly gives keynote speeches, delivers corporate training programs, and serves in advisory roles for firms and not-for-profit organizations across the globe.

Robert F. Bruner is a university professor at the University of Virginia, distinguished professor of business administration, and dean emeritus of the Darden School of Business. He has also held visiting appointments at Harvard and Columbia universities in the United States, at INSEAD in France, and at IESE in Spain. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books on finance, management, and teaching. Currently, he teaches and writes in finance and management.

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Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies of 2021

Two cases about Hertz claimed top spots in 2021's Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies

Two cases on the uses of debt and equity at Hertz claimed top spots in the CRDT’s (Case Research and Development Team) 2021 top 40 review of cases.

Hertz (A) took the top spot. The case details the financial structure of the rental car company through the end of 2019. Hertz (B), which ranked third in CRDT’s list, describes the company’s struggles during the early part of the COVID pandemic and its eventual need to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 

The success of the Hertz cases was unprecedented for the top 40 list. Usually, cases take a number of years to gain popularity, but the Hertz cases claimed top spots in their first year of release. Hertz (A) also became the first ‘cooked’ case to top the annual review, as all of the other winners had been web-based ‘raw’ cases.

Besides introducing students to the complicated financing required to maintain an enormous fleet of cars, the Hertz cases also expanded the diversity of case protagonists. Kathyrn Marinello was the CEO of Hertz during this period and the CFO, Jamere Jackson is black.

Sandwiched between the two Hertz cases, Coffee 2016, a perennial best seller, finished second. “Glory, Glory, Man United!” a case about an English football team’s IPO made a surprise move to number four.  Cases on search fund boards, the future of malls,  Norway’s Sovereign Wealth fund, Prodigy Finance, the Mayo Clinic, and Cadbury rounded out the top ten.

Other year-end data for 2021 showed:

• Online “raw” case usage remained steady as compared to 2020 with over 35K users from 170 countries and all 50 U.S. states interacting with 196 cases.
• Fifty four percent of raw case users came from outside the U.S..
• The Yale School of Management (SOM) case study directory pages received over 160K page views from 177 countries with approximately a third originating in India followed by the U.S. and the Philippines.
• Twenty-six of the cases in the list are raw cases.
• A third of the cases feature a woman protagonist.
• Orders for Yale SOM case studies increased by almost 50% compared to 2020.
• The top 40 cases were supervised by 19 different Yale SOM faculty members, several supervising multiple cases.

CRDT compiled the Top 40 list by combining data from its case store, Google Analytics, and other measures of interest and adoption.

All of this year’s Top 40 cases are available for purchase from the Yale Management Media store .

And the Top 40 cases studies of 2021 are:

1.   Hertz Global Holdings (A): Uses of Debt and Equity

2.   Coffee 2016

3.   Hertz Global Holdings (B): Uses of Debt and Equity 2020

4.   Glory, Glory Man United!

5.   Search Fund Company Boards: How CEOs Can Build Boards to Help Them Thrive

6.   The Future of Malls: Was Decline Inevitable?

7.   Strategy for Norway's Pension Fund Global

8.   Prodigy Finance

9.   Design at Mayo

10. Cadbury

11. City Hospital Emergency Room

13. Volkswagen

14. Marina Bay Sands

15. Shake Shack IPO

16. Mastercard

17. Netflix

18. Ant Financial

19. AXA: Creating the New CR Metrics

20. IBM Corporate Service Corps

21. Business Leadership in South Africa's 1994 Reforms

22. Alternative Meat Industry

23. Children's Premier

24. Khalil Tawil and Umi (A)

25. Palm Oil 2016

26. Teach For All: Designing a Global Network

27. What's Next? Search Fund Entrepreneurs Reflect on Life After Exit

28. Searching for a Search Fund Structure: A Student Takes a Tour of Various Options

30. Project Sammaan

31. Commonfund ESG

32. Polaroid

33. Connecticut Green Bank 2018: After the Raid

34. FieldFresh Foods

35. The Alibaba Group

36. 360 State Street: Real Options

37. Herman Miller

38. AgBiome

39. Nathan Cummings Foundation

40. Toyota 2010

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• LEGACY MIGRATION AND MODERNIZATION
• LOW CODE PLATFORM
• MANAGED COMMUNICATIONS
• MANAGED IT SERVICES
• MANAGED PRINTING
• MOBILE PAYMENT
• PAYMENT AND CARD
• PRESCRIPTIVE ANALYTICS
• PROCESS ORCHESTRATION
• PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
• PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
• PROFESSIONAL SERVICES AUTOMATION
• PROJECT MANAGEMENT
• QUALITY MANAGEMENT
• RISK ANALYTICS
• SCHEDULING SOFTWARE
• SMART INFRASTRUCTURE
• SUBSCRIPTION AND BILLING
• TRANSLATION SOFTWARE SOLUTION
• UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS
• VIDEO SOLUTIONS
• CONTRACT MANAGEMENT
• DIGITAL MARKETING
• HUMAN RESOURCE
• PROCUREMENT
• SUPPLY CHAIN
• Whitepapers
• Conferences

Tegna Design Tank: The need for a new way to manage assets

Tegna Design Tank

Know About Elimination of Paper-Based Manual Process

Check here about managing a worldwide, diversified and distributed sales channel

Case Study on Document Management & Workflow Automation

Century Business Technologies, Inc

Best solution to quickly create and validate applications

The best solution to handle the day to day demands of the fast moving distribution operation

Blue Ocean Systems, LLC.

How to automate the supplier creation process?

AutomationEdge

Case Study on Finance and Accounting Operations

Aeries Technology Group

The best solution for internal time tracking, project management

Upland Software, Inc.

Case study on cost savings from case management system

NetDirector

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Business Process Management 2023

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