African Bank, one of South Africa's leading financial firms, has successfully adopted visualization as a strategy to dramatically cut application consolidation project cost and accelerate delivery of critical business systems. By visualizing the final product before coding, African Bank measured a dramatic reduction in late stage rework on a new accounts receivable system, which translated into an overall project savings of 20%. As a result of this project success, visualization is now being mandated for all large projects at African Bank.

"Text-based requirements simply don't work for fast moving companies in competitive industries like ours. Using iRise we can now agree on business needs in real time; no wasted motions or confusion about what to build. The result has been transformational for our organization. We get more done with less cost and have happier business customers."

• Anthony Gischen
• Senior IT Manager
• African Bank

Agilent (NYSE: A) visualized a new commercial website in days, breaking months of stalemate on the requirements for the new design. Agilent measured a 9% overall improvement in task completion rates for the new site and some tasks were improved by up to 17%. The iRise visualization delivered strong stakeholder alignment in half the time of text and static screen mockups.

"We comfortably saved half the time usually required to gain buy-in around a very different design and navigation concept."

• Martin Wischhusen
• Director of eBusiness Programs
• Agilent

Allied North America Insurance, a leading insurance brokerage focused on the construction industry, adopted iRise to speed up the delivery of new business software. One of the initial projects visualized with iRise was a system used by clients and employees to automate the issuing and tracking of tens of thousands of certificates of insurance for construction projects. The project was delivered 40% faster than with traditional requirements methods, which has driven Allied to now adopt iRise on a broad range of new projects.

"Improving business efficiency is a major goal of IT. Visualization has turned out to be a game changer that has not only improved our definition process but enabling us to partner even closer with the business."

• Ira Schwartz
• CIO
• Allied North America Insurance

Ally Bank (NYSE: GJM) needed a way to quickly visualize the next generation of their online banking applications and quickly get meaningful feedback from a variety of stakeholders. The bank was able to successfully visualize the entire future of their online presence, get buy-off from all the stakeholders and deliver into production much faster.

Ascendant Technology (Atech) is a leading provider of end-to-end web-based solutions to enterprises worldwide. Atech creates business agility by accelerating the adoption and implementation of technology to increase the speed at which organizations innovate. Atech's IDEA™ Solution Framework (Insights Driven Engineering Approach) unites business ideas with technical execution, enabling solutions that are designed and built based on research and insights to deliver the intended business results. Atech is an iRise partner and has leveraged visualization successfully on a number of projects.

With over 4,000 customer service agents servicing over 60 million wireless customers, Asurion is the leader in insurance and warranty management for mobile devices. By visualizing their new call center system before building, Asurion delivered on time, with literally zero rework. iRise allowed them to uncover missing and incorrect requirements early in the process, when it was easy to fix and before any coding happened.

Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) has adopted iRise and IBM Rational Requisite Pro to manage over 2,000 projects, reduce development cost and get software built faster.

BB&T is one of the top 15 financial holding companies in the U.S. and has leveraged iRise visualization across a broad range of Web-based banking solutions to cut requirements cycle time by 25%.

"Something special happens when a group of people interact with visual simulations instead of text-based documents. It's much easier for business people to envision the final result, which leads to better requirements, faster. The collaboration features built into iRise accelerated the whole process."

• Guy T. Garrett III
• Vice President of Online Implementation
• BB&T

BCBS Michigan used iRise to visualize a new member portal in record time, speeding up the requirements cycle time and getting the system to market early.

BP (NYSE: BP), one of the world's largest energy companies, has adopted solutions from iRise with the intent of visualizing and fully experiencing new software applications before development.

Recently Brink's (NYSE: BCO) encountered something that they had never seen in the history of IT at the company. On a strategic mission critical project the IT organization found zero defects during testing.

CACI (NYSE: CACI) provides professional services and IT solutions needed to prevail in the defense, intelligence, homeland security, and federal civilian government arenas. CACI leveraged iRise on a complex electronic medical record system at the Veterans Health Administration, speeding delivery and cutting cost.

Capgemini is one of the world's foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. Capgemini has standardized on visualization solutions from iRise in North America to engage with clients from initial discovery through solutions delivery. Visualization technology allows users of IT applications to actually see and experience how IT systems work even before these systems are developed.

"In today's fluctuating markets and economic climate, companies are looking at new ways to have technology services implemented, and how the success of the project is quantified and measured. Capgemini is leading the way in working with clients to find new ways of delivering sustainable results and value. Visualization is a clear competitive advantage because it is a proven strategy that is aimed at improving our clients' ROI, reducing risk and cutting rework costs by potentially up to 70 percent, enabling us to deliver projects faster."

• Lanny Cohen
• CEO
• Capgemini U.S. LLC.

Cardinal Health (NYSE: CAH) has adopted iRise for a series of internal and externally facing applications to speed up delivery and cut cost.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel is a global leader specializing in business travel management. They have adopted iRise across a broad range of business software projects to drive lower IT cost and speed delivery of high quality applications. The collaborative iRise platform is being utilized by business leaders, product managers, business analysts and developers in different geographies to better coordinate requirements on IT projects and reduce confusion about what to build. CWT has cut an average of 15% of its software project cost when using iRise visualization; largely achieved by eliminating at least 50% of rework on these projects.

"With our team members spread around the globe, we simply couldn't get consensus fast enough without the iRise platform. Visualization has allowed us not only to move faster, but to cut significant cost out of these projects by giving our business analysts the ability to drive high quality requirements to the rest of the team early in the process."

• Shawn Smith
• Vice President of Global IT
• CWT

The Citi Cards division of Citigroup (NYSE: C) standardized on the use of iRise on all applications for credit card customers when they experienced a significant impact on time to market and cost when using visualization on eBusiness initiatives.

The IT organization at CNA (NYSE: CNA) leveraged iRise to simulate a new help desk portal and sent the visualization offshore for development.

Comerica (NYSE: CMA) had to manage a large group of stakeholders towards a common agreement on the design and implementation for a new online banking application. The team experienced a 30% acceleration in requirements cycle time and an 80% reduction in functional defect rates.

"iRise enabled all stakeholders to focus and visualize a common solution and direction. It provided a value-added WOW factor! It was a big time saver for everyone. I couldn't imagine doing the project without it!"

• Becky Siewert
• VP of Treasury Management Product Development
• Comerica

CompuCredit Corporation (NASDAQ: CCRT), a specialty finance company and marketer of branded credit cards and related financial services, leveraged iRise to help build a new online credit card portal for customers. By using an iRise simulation before building the application, the company was able to reduce the overall project lifecycle time by 25%, cut the requirements phase time by 50% and deliver an application which customers rated highly.

"CompuCredit's challenge was to continue providing a high level of service for customers and introduce an easy-to-use portal for valued card holders. We're in a highly competitive market and getting to market fast is imperative. Application simulation is leaps and bounds more efficient than cobbling together text, static screen shots and flow diagrams to envision new applications. iRise does for our development team what spreadsheets did for finance ages ago—it gives us the flexibility to rapidly test different scenarios and take the risk and guesswork out of projects."

• Guido Sacchi
• Chief Information Officer
• CompuCredit

Using a visualization of a new member portal, CSAA was able to get quick consensus from stakeholders and successfully communicate requirements to their global sourcing partner to get the new system built, shaving 20% - 30% off project cost in the process.

"We're in a hurry to build so having a common vision with the business is critical. iRise gives us that bond."

• AJ Goldsmith
• V.P., IT Business Development
• CSAA

CSC is a global leader in providing technology-enabled solutions and services through three primary lines of business. These include Business Solutions and Services, the Managed Services Sector and the North American Public Sector. CSC's advanced capabilities include systems design and integration, information technology and business process outsourcing, applications software development, Web and application hosting, mission support and management consulting. CSC is building a center of excellence capability around visualization from iRise.

Deloitte Consulting is a strategic partner of iRise and have leveraged visualization across hundreds of client projects to cut rework, speed up delivery and improve customer experience.

"It takes away the mystery. You don't see the technology so you're really able to focus on whatever the business problem is. They can see it and they can work with it so you don't get surprises like you used to."

• Carol Lindstrom
• Vice Chairman
• Deloitte Consulting

The usability team at Delta Airlines (NYSE: DAL) has used iRise successfully on a variety of customer facing applications from check-in kiosks to new updates to the Delta website. Visualizations are used to capture requirements but also test different customer experience designs directly with consumers.

ePrize is the worldwide leader in interactive promotions chose iRise to visualize promotions it creates and manages for global companies. By mocking up the concepts in high fidelity and iterating solutions from there, ePrize is able to present clients with a life-like representation of what the promotion will really look like before going through the expense of coding the final version.

"Our customers understand the positive viral nature of promotions and brand power they generate. We chose iRise because of its sophistication and ease of use. In terms of overall project scope, we've experienced an improvement in time savings of 25%, in addition to the bigger benefit of eliminating rework, confusion and ambiguity. Our clients couldn't be more impressed and it's all because we can quickly simulate in iRise."

• Drew Bennett
• Senior Vice President of Product Development
• ePrize

Evoco is one of Canada's fastest growing companies and a leading provider of project management software solutions for construction and facilities management. The product team at Evoco are using iRise visualizations to speed up the design and delivery of next generation products.ï¾  By visualizing and testing new solutions with iRise early in the process, Evoco expects a significant drop in project cost and accelerated time to market.

"Our investment in iRise has paid back multiple times over. iRise has made it easier for our team to ensure a common vision for our solutions, validate market requirements early in the process and improve usability."

• Brian Reimer
• Vice President of Product Management & Design
• Evoco

FedEx (NYSE: FDX) began leveraging enterprise visualization from iRise to enhance their eCommerce strategy. The initial projects were so successful that FedEx now has hundreds of business analysts using iRise across a broad spectrum of projects.

"The real story that lurks out there, plaguing every CIO, is the complexity of it all," Carter says. "How can we introduce things faster? How do we enable a business to move more quickly? That's where we can create the most value." The ability to dynamically and visually show what a developing product will look like generates "a lot of excitement and speed in the front-end processes," the CIO adds. "That's the primary time when you're working with business."

• Rob Carter
• CIO
• FedEx

Fireman's Fund (parent company is Allianz SE) needed decided to consolidate multiple broker facing systems into a single portal but needed a way to visualize and test the new software before handing it off to their systems integrator partner. iRise was used to create high fidelity models of the new system and it worked so well that the integrator got it right the first time. And in the first month of the roll out to thousands of agents, less than 1% of contact center calls were related to usability issues for the new portal.

Like many of the world's largest organizations, First American is constantly looking for ways to move more job functions to a global sourcing model. Using iRise, First American was successful in training and mentoring business analysts in India and now are able to visualize requirements and accelerate the requirement definition process with a lower cost model.

"There's no question that we will improve the quality of business applications and system enhancements we deliver with iRise. A picture is worth a thousand words and iRise makes it easier to work with requirements in a visual model, make changes and see those changes reflected in the project vision right away. By having application requirements represented in a visual way, as opposed to in text, that process reduces miscommunication around how an application should look, feel and interact. We look forward to working with iRise to track key metrics down the road, such as reduction in application rework and change requests."

• Jayson Murray
• Vice President of the Project Fulfillment Group
• First American Title Insurance Company

Largely considered the founder of the biotech industry, Genentech used visualization from iRise to model and design a new physician portal. The visualization empowered the UX and BA teams at Genentech to quickly test designs and functionality in short burst meetings with clinicians that don't have much time for giving stakeholder feedback. The entire requirements process was streamlined through this collaboration and resulted in the new portal being delivered on time to rave reviews.

After successfully using visualization to consolidate 200 separate dealer support systems into one global portal, General Motors adopted iRise for all application development and mandated the use of visualization as the standard way to communicate with global sourcing partners.

"For a century, GM has successfully and consistently built high quality cars and trucks by first creating product simulations or models. Applying this expertise to visual modeling of software enables GM to deliver increasingly collaborative, innovative and user-centric products to our employees and customers. We are glad to be working with a strong ecosystem of partners to standardize IT visual modeling across our enterprise and the industry."

• Fred Killeen
• Chief Systems & Technology Officer
• General Motors

Group O is a leading provider of marketing, packaging and supply chain solutions. The company has leveraged iRise to accelerate the design and delivery of customized consumer facing rebate and reward processing websites. iRise visualizations are used to improve client engagement and Group O credits visualization with accelerating the design of the resulting websites by 30%-50%.

An innovative global leader in the office furniture business, Haworth successfully leveraged visualization from iRise on a broad range of projects including a redesign of the Haworth website, a custom SAP module and the company's first iPhone app.

"We wouldn't dream of designing workspaces or furniture with text, so why would we design mission-critical software without visualizing first? iRise empowers our global organization to fully experience projects early in the process, eliminating confusion about what to build. Now that we've proven that visualization saves us time and money, we've mandated the use of iRise on dozens of new projects."

• Ann Harten
• Vice President of Global Information Services and Human Resources
• Haworth

IWD is a state agency that links job placement and skill development into a system of lifelong learning and opportunity. They have leveraged iRise on a $20 million project to modernize the state tax system for unemployment insurance. The new Web-based application replaces a legacy mainframe system and is designed to help employers, accountants and payroll firms manage unemployment insurance tax accounts.

"iRise visualization solves the fundamental disconnect that can happen between business and IT. The static text documents and screen shots we used before iRise caused delays and confusion on critical modernization efforts. Now we can get everyone on the same page quickly and virtually eliminate reworking the solution once it's coded, saving us time and money."

• Erich Grubert
• Business Project Director
• IA Dept. of Workforce Development

Digital Insight, now part of Intuit, provides a shared online banking platform to small and medium-sized banks and credit unions. The usability group at Digital Insight used iRise to design and model a next generation platform for their customers and directly test usability without having to write any code.

"iRise was something I hadn't seen before in my 20-plus years in applying user centered design. iRise let us design and test new capabilities with our clients faster than ever before - with a fully functional user experience prototype that took hours-to-days, instead of weeks to put together. The feedback we received was invaluable in fine-tuning our product and getting to market quickly. iRise gives us the ability to deliver world-class services to our customers in a fraction of the time it used to take."

• David Rubini
• Director of Product Usability
• Digital Insight

Inventure Solutions is Vancity Credit Union's information technology subsidiary. VanCity Credit Union is Canada's largest credit union with $14.5 billion in assets and more than 400,000 members, has adopted iRise software solutions to streamline its business application development process. By using fully interactive software visualizations early in the definition process, business stakeholders at Vancity will be able to quickly collaborate on application requirements and drive faster delivery of business-critical software.

"It's paramount for us to have a complete view of Vancity members. We are always looking for ways to further improve our customer interaction and with iRise visualizations; our business analysts can now quickly preview different versions of applications with stakeholders and perform usability testing directly with member-servicing staff earlier in the process."

• Catherine Boivie
• CEO
• Inventure Solution

A stalwart in the financial services world, JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) has used iRise successfully on a broad range of projects including eCommerce initiatives and internal portals.

KeyBank (NYSE: KEY) incorporated visualization into an Agile design and development process on a broad range of custom development projects that cut development time and cost by 30%.

"iRise is a rapid, iterative definition solution that helped the bank get the most out of our Agile development approach. iRise lets us get more done faster."

• Alan Buffington
• Executive Vice President
• KeyBank

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center embarked on an ambitious 5 year project to build their own custom electronic medical record (EMR) system. They trained former nurses to act as business analysts and use iRise to visualize clinician applications. M.D. Anderson moved their entire development process to a rapid, iterative model using iRise and the results were amazing ﾖ they cut 50% off the original schedule for the first few modules of the EMR.

"M.D. Anderson's goal is to make cancer history, and we see technology as a way to get us there faster. To achieve that goal, we need to move at a more rapid pace and grow the organization. Our center requires a more efficient way for our business analysts, often clinicians, to talk to the users of these systems. iRise's simulation capability gives us the mechanism to communicate the desired application clearly, and therefore, speed the delivery of new, critical care systems. Now we have more time to spend on improving patient success and eradicating cancer."

• Dr. Lynn Vogel, Ph.D.
• Vice President and CIO
• M.D. Anderson

The world's largest employment services provider, Manpower (NYSE: MAN) used iRise to visualize a new online registration process for their clients. By visualizing early in the process, Manpower delivered the new system early, with lower cost.

The global wealth team at Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America (NYSE: BAC)) leveraged visualization from iRise on a new account opening application that was delivered 50% faster than expected, with half the cost.

Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) used iRise to quickly visualize extensions to SAP in a few days. Northrop cut requirements cycle times dramatically by giving the business the ability to fully interact with the proposed system without expensive sandbox environments.

Northwestern Mutual Life needed to consolidate and modernize broker facing systems into a single portal and used iRise to visualize the system and test designs directly with key broker stakeholders.

School Specialty (NASDAQ: SCHS), a leading education company that provides innovative and proprietary products, programs and services to help educators engage and inspire students of all ages and abilities to learn, utilized iRise to design and deploy improvements to its website, an Oracle-based eCommerce portal that enables customers to browse and purchase products online. By visualizing the enhancements before building, School Specialty was able to deliver the new portal functionality with very limited change orders.

“Visualizing software before it’s built simply makes sense as a strategy to cut cost and accelerate new systems delivery. We have seen first-hand the change that visualization can bring to our organization. We’re now integrating visualization as a standard practice into our web application development.”

• Bob Grawien
• CIO
• School Specialty

Sentara Healthcare, a not-for-profit healthcare provider in the Mid-Atlantic States, used iRise to visualize a new internal HR portal that was delivered 50% faster than expected, with significantly less cost.

"By simulating applications and visually validating requirements prior to development we are prescribing to the adage, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. With a clear, concise set of requirements in place before development we are able to significantly reduce rework costs as well as begin other post-development activities such as testing and training in parallel."

• Phil Lanzafame
• Product Manager of Internet Products
• Sentara

STCU, one of the largest credit unions in the Pacific Northwest serving more than 80,000 members, chose iRise to visualize software projects before coding as way to speed delivery and cut cost. iRise has already been used to simulate enhancements to existing Web-based systems and will soon be used in new software applications that provide enhanced online services to STCU's members.

"Using static text requirements documents and screen shots was not working for us. Visualization is a dramatically better experience for our business stakeholders and helps us speed up the process of gaining consensus on what to build. Without rework, we should be able to deliver higher quality applications faster, with less cost."

• Danny Jones
• Software Development Manager
• Spokane Teachers Credit Union

Sundt, a $1.2 billion construction company, has accelerated mission-critical business application delivery at least 50% by leveraging high fidelity iRise visualizations during the definition and development phases for a subcontractor management system built on Web-based Microsoft technology. The new system was delivered to the Sundt user community with virtually no rework.

"We were missing a key capability to quickly mock-up and demonstrate applications in a way that drove faster buy-in from our business stakeholders. With iRise we've been able to bring business and IT together in a model that drives faster agreement with less confusion and friction. Overall, we've experienced at least 50% faster delivery on these projects and plan on expanding the use of visualization in the future."

• Chris Lake
• Vice President and Director of IT
• Sundt Construction

In 2004 SunTrust (NYSE: STI) merged with NCF and focused on building a next generation internet banking platform that would optimize customer experience. iRise was used to quickly visualize the new system that merged best practices from both banks. The visualization was used to gain business approval, steering committee buy-in and marketing approval. They also used the visualization to directly test the proposed new site with bank customers, assuring adoption. Using iRise, they were able to get the application into production 5 months early, with zero rework. The retail business leaders had set a goal of 85% retention within 180 days; actual retention was 93% within 30 days.

"The benefits of compelling online products and services are impressive in terms of impact to the bottom line, increased loyalty and customer acquisition. As we began the project to deliver an enhanced online experience for our customers, we knew we needed a more effective way to validate user requirements. With iRise simulations, we are able to ensure that we are building the right applications for our customers the first time."

• David Nix
• Vice President of Online Banking
• SunTrust

UPS (NYSE: UPS) has transformed their application development design and development process by adopting visualization as a standard across all lines of business and hundreds of business analysts. All application development projects with a user interface are now required to be visualized as a standard procedure within UPS.

VHA is a group purchasing organization in the health care industry with tens of thousands of member hospitals and clinics. VHA works with its members to drive down supply cost and improve their performance. The IT team at VHA is using iRise on a broad range of new initiatives to visualize before building.

Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC), transformed their entire development process by moving to a user-centric design approach leveraging visualization from iRise. Wachovia now performs usability testing before coding as a strategy to dramatically improve customer experience and cut down on contact center calls. After implementing this approach Wachovia was able to reduce contact center calls related to usability by 58%.

"Before we started working with iRise, building complex online financial systems was a time-consuming, risky and pressure-filled proposition. Because we can rapidly generate highly interactive, life-like simulations in iRise, we're able to get developers and stakeholders on the same page. Using iRise is mission-critical for us; it brings the threshold for usability testing way down, translating to Web sites that our customers have found to be really intuitive."

• Carter Hansen
• Senior Vice President of User Centered Design
• Wachovia Corporation

Washington Mutual (now part of JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM)) leveraged iRise to design an innovative new online checking account opening process that took the average time to open an account from 10 days to 6 minutes.

A global consulting services firm, Watson Wyatt adopted iRise in the human capital management group as a strategy to ensure that the right business requirements were gathered early in project lifecycles.

"Text-based requirements gathering and validation is no longer viable for complex business systems. By using iRise simulations, we can dramatically improve the process of defining software applications. Visual simulations are more engaging for the stakeholders and far superior to static, text based descriptions in communicating business needs. The result should be less rework and reduced project risk. We can now have a high degree of confidence that there will be no big surprises when we get to see the real system for the first time."

• Melvin Brandman
• Chief Technology Officer
• Watson Wyatt, LLP

Westfield Insurance adopted visualization as a strategy to improve customer experience but quickly found that iRise was critical to improving collaboration and communication.