Past Winners

Project Goal: Founders Federal Credit Union, a regional credit union based in South and North Carolina, has planned and implemented a major overhaul of our entire data center centered on business and cyber resilience. After several regional enterprises were hit by ransomware in 2018-19, we planned a digital transformation with the ambitious goal of resuming full business operations after an incident within one hour – our KPI of success. The business reason: to stay competitive in this high-volume, online transaction-based industry.

Innovation:

• Full-functioning data center in our isolated cyber recovery vault, monitored by AI
• Automated analytics and daily reporting to flag malware, identify known-good copy
• Holistic, cloud-friendly environment – integrated servers, storage, data protection, virtualization

Project Results:

• Refreshed data center with a full suite of integrated solutions from a single vendor, including an air-gapped cyber recovery solution containing a full operational data center
• Flexibility to operate on-prem, in public/private cloud, at edge locations/colocations
• Plug-and-play, no-downtime IT expansion easily meets our 40% YoY growth rate
• Trusted resilience for business and our 85K mobile channel users
• Ability to switch over to vaulted datacenter in 1 hour – no need to pay ransomware or revert to suspect data touched by bad actors

In 2019, Tapestry embarked on a journey to digitally transform our infrastructure and core operating platforms. We branded this effort “Digital Core Transformation” (DCX) and it has been foundational to support Tapestry’s aggressive growth targets and resulted in triple-Digit Increase in Global Digital Sales.

The three key tenets of the transformation included shifting to an API first strategy, migrating to a cloud-native enterprise data platform, and optimizing our data center footprint.

• The cloud-native enterprise data platform enabled the elastically to support over 1 million API calls/day and process 1 billion rows of data.
• Optimized our data center footprint and reduced the infrastructure costs by 15%
• Enabled the company to reimagine existing processes, migrate our websites to headless commerce to enrich customer experience, re-usable and extensible API First strategy.
• Gained 60% performance and quality efficiencies leveraging RPA, ML & AI technologies, and drive sales based on consumer behavior using Test & Learn methodology.
• Became the first Retail company of our size to successfully migrate the 100+ server S4 Ecosystem to the Google cloud in a record 6-month timeline.

DCX has provided Tapestry with a greater level of agility, flexibility, scalability, and risk mitigation while unlocking the use of advanced technologies.

Toyota Financial Services (TFS) was a captive financial services company focused on serving Toyota and Lexus brands, supported by a traditional IT function built on legacy technologies and on-premises infrastructure. We saw an opportunity to challenge industry norms by becoming a platform company to service brands beyond Toyota and Lexus. Achieving TFS’ goals required radical modernization, behavioral shift, and complete re-imagination of IT Infrastructure into “Mobility-Finance-as-a-service” business model.

Under senior management leadership, team developed an infrastructure transformation strategy with an “if we are born today” mindset. This was pivotal in the launch of Mazda Financial Services business, the first tenant on our new, 100% cloud-based, multitenant, multi-brand, platform called ‘mFin’, or “Mobility-Finance-as-a-service”. We built this new infrastructure from the ground up at an enterprise scale, requiring an intense assembling of diverse systems from software-as-a-service, platform-as a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service with partnerships across 20+ suppliers. The complex assembly of platforms delivered a multi-tenant, multi-brand ecosystem where each brand resides on the same system but maintains segregation of data. This resulted in launching a 100% cloud-based Automotive/Mobility Financial Services business with Mazda. This was a “first ever” in automotive finance industry in U.S. and “speed to market” was 7 months, versus initially estimated 19 months.

In the digital world Jotun no longer sells products but outcomes focused on efficient ship hulls that continue to perform in all types of weather and waves. Jotun’s customer differentiator was to provide antifouling coats so ships can sail smoothly in the water, but Jotun wasn’t satisfied to just compete in the market, so the company set a new vision of being the leading marine coating company.

The next step involved taking their product, tying it to technology to drive and prove more efficiency, and then added in a maintenance service so product erosion or issues could be found worldwide across all customers’ vessels in real time with IoT sensors. During this change, efficiency and performance had to be measured but there was no standard. Jotun created one, the ISO 19030, which prescribes practical methods for measuring changes in ship-specific hull and propeller performance. This move had the potential to save the shipping industry as much as $30 billion in annual fuel costs. The standard was published in November 2016 and in response the company adapted its Hull Performance Solutions (HPS) guarantee to ensure it is fully ISO 19030-2 compliant. Poor hull and propeller performance is estimated to account for around 10% of the world fleet’s energy costs. ISO 19030 prescribes measurement methodology and defining performance indicators for hull and propeller maintenance, repair and

Raise Green is an impact investing portal for community-driven climate projects, like community solar. Raise Green uncovered a gap for community-based organizations like schools, churches, community centers, non-profits, and small businesses to get financing for solar and renewable energy projects.

Raise Green offers a toolkit — an Originator Engine — for these types of organizations to develop and finance climate projects through an online public offering of stock. The organization then offers these projects up to individuals or institutions that want to do impact investing in support of these organizations to see the projects come to fruition and benefit from shared ownership. Renewables must make up 70%-85% of electricity by 2050 to combat the dire effects of climate change according to the 2018 IPCC report. The U.S. need a massive increase of invested capital (>$1T per year) to hit climate goals set under the Paris Agreement, and individuals need self-efficacy and agency in the face of climate change. Raise Green chips away at the global climate finance gap, by chipping away at the community-level climate finance gap, by empowering everyone to be part of originating, financing and owning their own climate solution projects.

Synaptic Health Alliance joins leaders in health care to explore how blockchain technology can help address some of the toughest problems in the industry. Founding members include Aetna, Humana, MultiPlan, Quest Diagnostics and UnitedHealth Group.

The intent of the alliance is to leverage this emerging technology to facilitate reaching across industry and competitive lines, creating a care provider data exchange. This shared source of high-quality provider data could streamline healthcare administrative burden and relieve friction between providers and multiple payers. The Synaptic Health Alliance has demonstrated in pilot initiatives that collaborative use of blockchain technology can help improve the efficiency of updating directories people use to select health care providers. Typically, each insurer maintains its own directory, which can be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. If the information in these directories is inaccurate, it can delay claim and payment processing and can lead to fines from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Roughly $2.1 billion is spent annually across the health care system maintaining provider data. A recent review by CMS found that 52% of provider directory locations listed had at least one inaccuracy. Because managed care organizations typically maintain separate copies of provider data, changes to the data files affect only the copy in which they are made. When discrepancies are found, efforts to reconcile them are time-intensive, costly and sometimes ineffective.

Today’s government agencies, especially within the Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. military, must accelerate the training of their workforces and warfighters to complete their missions in a very short time frame.

The U.S. Air Force Air Education and Training Command leverages SAIC’s Virtual Mission Trainer (VMT) harmoniously blending the latest advancements in emerging technologies, commercial gaming, leading-edge software, cloud-native infrastructures, biometrics and analytics to deliver a low-cost experiential immersive training platform. The VMT delivers synthetic realities with immersive environments developed by SAIC’s game studio, Big Timber Games, through commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, such as extended-reality goggles and headsets. Instead of scheduling and conducting training via costly simulators, VMT enables training at the point of need via accessible hardware and SAIC-developed software. VMT enabled the Air Force to overcome its challenge of rapidly training more pilots but without more planes, equipment, or instructors. In SAIC’s first implementation of prototype VMTs in support of an experimental Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) program in 2018, we decreased the course duration from 12 months to six months, where students were conducting solo flights ~40% sooner than traditional UPT classes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, flight schools stopped in-person instruction and their students were forced to remain in their quarters. Cohorts using VMT in the Air Force’s Pilot Training Next (PTN) program faced a training delay of only two weeks and were able to complete 95% of required activities on VMT. The U.S. Air Force PTN cohorts confronted the tremendous shift of remote work due to the pandemic because of the enabling power of VMT.

The energy industry is long known for investments in technology to optimize outcomes from energy exploration and recovery, so it comes as little surprise that energy giant Shell is focusing on leveraging artificial intelligence to improve its operations.

Working in conjunction with partners Microsoft, C3 AI and Baker Hughes, the company took the modern approach of creating an open initiative that is intended to be used by other organizations in the industry. The Open AI Energy Initiative (OAI) offers a collection of AI models that can be used by other energy producers to monitor health of key components such as compressors, pumps, submersible pumps and control valves, allowing for identification of at-risk components which then can be pre-emptively repaired or replaced.

Mattel is a large manufacturer of products focused on children, including toys and educational products. The company’s 200+ brands include iconic names such as Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price and Barney.

With such a diverse portfolio, the company’s embrace of digital technology varied substantially by individual brand. To establish a consistent approach to embracing digital enhancements, the company created its Mattel Connected Products Platform (MCPP) as a platform for all the company’s brands to use. One of the first brands to embrace MCPP is Fisher-Price, which has used the platform along with agile development techniques to produce a consolidated dashboard for parents to manage any Fisher-Price Smart Connect products that are in use within their homes. The technology is now being used by other brands such as Hot Wheels and Barbie.

The pandemic disrupted the economy as well as upsetting our lives in terms of health. Families whose income was cut with the lockdown could not pay their bills.

In the face of the emerging need, Istanbulites who had the opportunity wanted to help. The Pay-It-Forward Project is a solidarity platform in which Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality acts as an intermediary, offering a website where people in need can upload their utility bills and people who want to lend a helping hand can pay the bills. In May 2020, the water and gas bills of 100,000 families were paid each week on average. The system was set up in about a week and also offered aid packages to families and education support packages.

Damen is committed to helping clients realize their ambitions to increase profitability despite market induced challenges. With its Triton platform, Damen is transforming its operating model from “ships as a product” to “vessel as a service.”

Using digital twin and other technologies, Damen is introducing smart ships which are connected and can be updated and upgraded over their lifespan, pushing the performance limits of vessel in operation by exploiting Damen’s design-data and knowhow. The Triton platform connects stakeholders that contribute to the profitability of ships, allowing Damen and system suppliers to support operators throughout the lifetime of their vessel by delivering services and performance upgrades to maximize the effectivity and profitability of the ship.

Public.com’s goal was to positively verify as many applicants’ identities as possible, while staying within regulatory rules and reasonable fraud management. We chose innovative software to accomplish this goal by partnering with Socure to create a collaborative process that leverages expertise, increases the coverage and scope of the data, and incorporates an innovative approach to the underlying logic calibration. In previous models, we had to balance a compromise between fraud risk, regulatory compliance, and friction. Socure identity verification and fraud platform transformed our ability to positively identify and onboard our applicants, resulting in a 15% increase in positive identification of applicants, which corresponds nearly perfectly to a 15% increase in our enterprise value. We also saw an enormous reduction in manual reviews of identities, with a roughly 30% reduction in manual costs associated with onboarding new applicants. We were able to save significant personnel power and use their skills in more strategic ways.

As part of its digital transformation, Clark County in Southern Nevada deployed Adobe Document Cloud’s e-signature solution, Adobe Sign, to create reliable digital workflows and help maintain services in any type of remote, in-person, or hybrid work environment. Clark County piloted Adobe Sign in its IT department, which processes paperwork for the county’s 300 technology vendors and 10,000 employees. With Adobe Sign, these digital workflows reduced paper waste by 75 percent and the time it takes to process invoices from days to hours. Just a few months after the IT department started expanding the use of Adobe Sign, Clark County was already processing 700 documents per month, with CIO Nadia Hansen predicting that number to rise to 30,000 a month within a year. The county also digitized public facing forms and processes, like Next of Kin declarations, and plans to create more opportunities to easily submit digital paperwork for its citizens.

Entegris is a global manufacturer of material and process solutions, primarily for semiconductors and life sciences industries. Like other global organizations, COVID-19 brought significant challenges for traveling to geographically dispersed sites. However, the pandemic also created a catalyst to jumpstart their training operations and strategy via digital transformation.

Entegris selected Augmented Reality (provided by PTC) as the cornerstone of their future training strategy (Connected Experience program) to better scale their seasoned employees domain knowledge and engage with a younger workforce. Specifically, Entegris is using AR to capture workflows from RealWear headsets of the domain knowledge from its experts and leverage it as a lucrative data source for newer, younger, and remote employees across global operations.

This Connected Experience program is achieving an array of worker benefits including more quickly onboarding from increased learning retention across the globe and lower overhead costs from better scaling training expertise. This generates derivative effects from upskilling the workforce including improved productivity, product quality, and safety.

Like many companies, PVH transitioned to a fully remote workforce at the onset of Covid-19. Unlike most other organizations, we embraced the opportunity, transforming our ways of working by creating a task force to become more collaborative, communicative and digital in the face of unprecedented uncertainty. It has never been more important to clearly communicate technical solutions to our associates. Our Ways of Working (WoW) Task Force knew that in order to enable new skills, we needed to be hyper-responsive to our co-workers. Needs arose that had not existed previously. By paying close attention to challenges faced by our associates, we were able to adapt existing solutions while delivering new innovations to drive productivity, human connection, and physical/ environmental solutions.

WoW changed how we onboarded, trained, interacted, drove global technology enhancements, and connected associates and business teams around the world. We created a repeatable framework to drive business value going forward, regardless of the environment or physical presence or location.

What was innovative about WoW was not the new technology solutions upgraded, deployed, or developed. It was the new ways of thinking, partnering, and delivering innovative solutions that were most impactful, contributing to a 25% rise in associate satisfaction.