Today's healthcare providers face a daunting challenge: sustaining or improving patient care levels despite shortages of clinicians and nurses, increasing competition, and financial pressure.

Lordan needed a manufacturing automation system that could identify bottlenecks, reduce downtime and waste, and improve overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). Requirements included the ability to view overall throughput and track mission-critical manufacturing information in real time directly from the production floor, rather than rely on periodical assessments.

Emerald worked with Cisco to shrink the time to production for its manufacturing process automation system. The leadership team sought self-deployed solutions that would drastically decrease installation time, reduce complexity, and increase security.

For many manufacturing companies today, the opportunity to connect people, process, data, and things created by the Internet of Everything (IoE) presents a new way to look at factory automation. The opportunity for digital innovation often arises when a company is expanding capacity or building a new production facility. Mahindra and Mahindra, one of India’s leading automakers, seized the opportunity to deploy a connected factory of the future at their new Chakan facility.

The plant manager and safety teams needed a solution that provided near real-time visibility of gas detection and personnel location, with easy to understand visualization and alerting dashboards. This would enable them to improve productivity through decreasing the time taken to start work, optimize evacuation route planning, and to meet critical staff safety and compliance goals.

The challenge for Cisco IT was to continue providing a global wireless LAN that could serve as a primary access medium and deliver more bandwith and coverage to more users, while satisfying the company's business requirements. The next-generation WLAN would also need to provide native support for wireless video and voice, with high levels of accessibility, availability and security to reduce service-impacting incidents. 

To address the challenges of proactively monitoring the very large Cisco Unified Communications global network and to achieve reliability and service quality goals, Cisco IT turned to the Cisco Unified Communications Management Suite. The Cisco® internal Unified Communications network is a very large global deployment, having more than 85,000 IP phones spread over six continents.Being in new and uncharted territory in the initial stages, the Cisco IT team first had the challenge of defining methodologies and metrics for measuring and monitoring the key components of service quality: Availability (Can I pick up the phone and get dial tone? Does my call connect? Can I leave and retrieve voicemail?)Performance (How is the voice quality? Did I get disconnected mid-call? How does the voicemail sound? How fast is the voicemail prompt?)The team also had the additional challenge of figuring out approaches, techniques, and tests to:Detect configuration issuesReduce recovery time in the event of a service failure 

Prior to purchasing Observer, Cisco Systems experienced a lack of visibility during and after network events.“I needed large data captures and a way to manipulate them,” says Eric Arnold, Service Provider Video TAC Manager for the company.Arnold states that Cisco Systems chose Observer over competitors because of the packet capture and storage capabilities.