With the new Zero Downtime Option, SAP is delivering a groundbreaking concept for the future of software maintenance.

The SAP project team responsible for developing the idea was recognized for its efforts when it received the prestigious Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award on October 20. This prize is awarded annually to employees who demonstrate innovative flair, entrepreneurial spirit, and a willingness to take risks in the pursuit of an exceptional goal.

Businesses and IT managers are painfully aware of the financial losses that occur when production stops or when inventory starts piling up in the warehouse. Even planned system maintenance downtimes can result in follow-on costs running into many millions of euros. Today’s global corporations, in particular, expect to be able to operate their systems 24/7 without interruption. And it is precisely this group of customer “heavyweights” that has been putting pressure on SAP to finally remove the curse of downtime for upgrades once and for all.

But the main motivation for the project was not purely financial, as project lead Christoph Luettge from SAP Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM) explains. Enterprises, he says, tend to drag their heels when it comes to importing new software versions or performing system maintenance. He knows from experience that businesses tend to view any upgrade project as a “a taboo that is best avoided if possible.” But, as long as customers continue to hold on to their outdated versions, they cannot take full advantage of new features or innovative processes.

Which is why the topic of reducing downtime has been on SAP’s agenda for years. Although some progress had been made in the past, the real breakthrough didn’t come until recently, when Christoph and his fellow team members succeeded in developing a procedure known as the “Zero Downtime Option” that totally eliminates technical downtime. This is highly significant when you consider that a conventional ERP upgrade puts systems out of action for between 24 and 36 hours. A single hour of downtime costs a consumer goods manufacturer about US$1 million; in the financial sector, that loss figure is closer to US$8 million. The Zero Downtime Option is designed to allow customers to perform their upgrades whenever they want to and as often as they need to. And that applies equally to customer-specific systems containing custom enhancements and modifications. In either case, the system continues to operate normally throughout the upgrade.

What makes the Zero Downtime Option particularly attractive is that it is integrated in the Software Update Manager that customers use to install Support Packages and import enhancement packages. So there are no extra licensing costs to pay, and system administrators can perform upgrades as they did before.

Zero Downtime Maintenance video.

Complete rethink

The new procedure promises a welcome escape from a dilemma that has plagued customers for years. Currently, when a company wants to import new software or maintain its systems, it has no option but to factor in a certain amount of downtime. This is to avoid conflicting database access between application users and the upgrade. One common solution to this problem is to create a complete system copy, or “clone”, for the upgrade. But this is both time-consuming and costly.

Mariusz Debowski from SAP Active Global Support explains, “In the past, our discussions focused on cloned systems – on how to replicate data efficiently. Ultimately, the solution we came up with was actually very different. But we didn’t make the crucial breakthrough in our project until we managed to abandon old ways of thinking.” It was only then the team realized database access conflicts actually only affect about a tenth of a percent of the entire database. The solution was therefore to replicate individual database tables rather than the entire system. This means that users can continue to access data in the original system during the upgrade; files are then intelligently merged once the upgrade is complete.

Hand in hand with customers

Close collaboration with customers was also key to the project’s success. As Volker Driesen, the project’s architect, reports, there were frequent discussions with customers right from the initial concept phase. This meant that the team could verify its proposals at an early stage and adapt them as the project progressed. Mariusz explains: “The downtime issue had been hanging over us for years, and the pressure from our customers to solve it was mounting. Ultimately, we were able to deliver a solution by collaborating closely with the customer base.”

The Zero Downtime Option has so far been developed for SAP ERP and SAP Extended Warehouse Management and has been available for deployment in projects at pilot customers since October. The first customers are already preparing to test the Zero Downtime procedure in their system environments and to deploy it for live upgrades. It will support other SAP solutions, including SAP Customer Relationship Management and those used in the banking sector, in the future.

No-downtime shift to the cloud

The Zero Downtime Option solves a significant problem for SAP’s installed customer base, but the project team is already turning its attention to SAP’s cloud operations as well. Gerhard Oswald, Member of the Executive Board and Head of the Scale Quality & Support Board area, comments: “This puts us in a league above other cloud companies and cements our lead in the cloud market.” That’s because, as a cloud supplier, SAP needs to guarantee the availability of its own systems, particularly if it wants to deliver innovations to its customers quickly and flexibly via this route.

Chris Lewis from SAP Active Global Support, who supports pilot customers for the Zero Downtime procedure in North America, agrees: “SAP is aiming for more than 50 million cloud users. In this new reality, there is no longer room for traditional SAP upgrades. New innovation without a single minute of downtime is an absolute necessity.”

The Zero Downtime project has resulted in more than ‘just’ a solution to a business necessity. In Christoph Luettge’s eyes, it reflects the mentality of SAP’s founders and their determination to see opportunities that others had overlooked in the past. “Zero downtime is an area where we can justly claim to have arrived there first,” he says.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award has boosted awareness of the winning teams among customers and colleagues — and hasn’t been bad for their careers either.

Anyone searching for evidence that an innovation award can move the needle on a product and its people need not look any further than SAP’s Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award. Introduced in 2014 to promote entrepreneurialism among SAP’s 75,000 employees, the award was won by two development teams: the SAP HANA Spatial team and the Zero Downtime team.

Fast and accurate spatial data processing is one of the biggest technical challenges facing digitalization today. It connects Big Data, mobility, and the Internet of Things visually so business users can gain new insights and make better-informed decisions. The job of the SAP HANA Spatial team is to improve the processing and visualization of spatial data using SAP HANA, the company’s in-memory database platform.

Real-time processing of spatial data has already opened up completely new opportunities in industries such as insurance, energy, utilities, transportation, and retail. But what’s happened to the project, and what’s been the effect on its team members since they won the award in October 2014?

“The biggest accomplishment of my career”

One of the biggest changes to the team has been the promotion of SAP HANA Spatial development manager, Gerrit Kazmaier, to lead the development of two of SAP’s most important cloud products, SAP Lumira and the SAP enterprise performance management suite.

“Winning the award has without a doubt been the biggest accomplishment so far in my career. The experience was both breathtaking and flattering for me personally. But more importantly it gave me the affirmation that it is worth the effort to constantly push forward, never hesitate, and never surrender when you believe in a goal,” said Kazmaier.

Kazmaier believes the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is important because it “highlights the core values of SAP: technical excellence and innovation translated into business value. The urgency and striving to take SAP to the next level is a tradition worth holding onto. It is part of our DNA.”

The experience has also helped Kazmaier in his current role by giving him a sense of confidence about how to create great solutions. The only way to do this, he believes, is through open and constructive dialog with customers, turning them into true innovation partners.

Kazmaier’s ties with the SAP HANA Spatial team remain strong. He recently invited the team to a joint workshop in Vancouver with a new customer to integrate SAP HANA Spatial features into the newly developed SAP Lumira cloud applications. “During this week I felt like I never left the team,” he remarked.

A new team lead

Kazmaier’s former team member Hinnerk Gildhoff has now stepped up to lead SAP HANA Spatial – and has never looked back.

“The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award generated a great deal of interest for the topic internally,” says Gildhoff , who now spends a lot of his time with customers and partners instead of programming code. “We had more inquiries than we could possibly answer, from teams that wanted to implement spatial capabilities in their software, to employees who wanted to work join our team.”

One example is the digital farming solution that became a showcase at CeBIT in March.

To be a SAP HANA Spatial developer, you need excellent C++ programming skills, a strong hand in logic and algorithms, not to mention a solid math background. For Gildhoff, however, C++ coding has taken a back seat to travelling worldwide to customers and partners to present the capabilities of the SAP HANA’s spatial capabilities. And he is enjoying his new externally facing role. “It’s an extremely exciting area to work in,” says Gildhoff, “but there is still an awful lot to be done.”

Customer and partner interest

Customers and partners have apparently been lining up to find out what the real-time visualization of spatial data can do for their businesses.

“We built a proof of concept for a well-known energy company in Germany to perform a risk analysis on their underground pipes and cables,” notes Gildhoff. “We showed them that they could reduce the analysis time from several days to fraction of a second with SAP HANA Spatial. They had no idea that the process could be automated.”

For Lufthansa Systems, which is already a SAP HANA customer, the SAP HANA Spatial team built a prototype 3D flight surveillance monitor that allows an overview of the status of all flights, including which routes are affected by weather conditions. The prototype was used as a showcase at SAP’s annual customer event in May. Lufthansa now plans to implement it as a product.

Retailers and banks are interested because they want to visualize their data in order to choose the location for their next store or branch office. This is an optimization calculation combining geospatial data and demographic information such as population density and average income. And because more and more customers are requesting standard software for the visualization of geospatial data, the SAP HANA Spatial team is working closely with the development group from SAP Lumira to ensure these features are provided right out of the box.

In addition to ESRI, with whom SAP has had a longstanding partnership, Gildhoff notes that there are new partners who are eager to connect their applications to SAP HANA. Examples are Intergraph, which is focused on the European market, and Safe Software’s FME, which enables the migration of spatial data from an Oracle database to HANA.

Crunching spatial data from satellites

According to Gildhoff, one of the next big areas of development involves solutions applying satellite data. SAP is therefore cooperating with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the German National Aeronautics and Space Research Center (DLR) to make use of data from Copernicus earth observation satellites in SAP’s geospatial solutions.

In one of the simplest use cases, an insurance company could, for example, compare two satellite images from the same area, before and after a major flood, to see what objects have been affected. In another application, SAP HANA could be used to create composite satellite maps from the images of different satellites. Instead of taking 2-3 days to crunch the spatial data, processing of with the spatial engine within SAP HANA would take only seconds. The Spatial team is currently working on the algorithms to do this.

SAP will also provide a toolkit for deriving so-called “geocontent” from satellite produced images which show population density, wind speeds, water pollution, or other data. The technical challenges in accurately processing and visualizing spatial data are formidable, but the potential benefits in industrial and scientific applications are so promising that it keeps the SAP HANA Spatial team motivated to push on at a strong pace with entrepreneurial spirit, much like that of SAP’s founding fathers.

Learn More

Upgrade without any downtime? SAP customer ATB Financial proved that it can be done.

“The easy stuff is for the other customers,” sums up ATB Financial’s attitude as it opted to break new ground and become the first SAP customer to embrace a new zero downtime upgrade method. The topic of zero downtime also made a huge splash in 2014, when one of the winning teams for the prestigious Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award made this their goal.

ATB Financial’s reasons for taking this bold step were compelling. In today’s business world, downtime is no longer an option. Particularly so in the banking sector, where customers expect to be able to perform transactions at ATMs and online around the clock.

“If we’re going to be competitive in the financial industry, we have to be able to support this,” explains Cathy Pasula-Jones, Vice President, Enterprise Services at ATB.

All of the standard options the SAP MaxAttention team presented to minimise upgrade downtime were unacceptable to ATB as they all incurred business downtime in one form or another. The ball was back with SAP to determine an acceptable solution and this is where the team proposed the zero downtime method. Both sides agreed to proceed, but with caution – as there was not yet a single reference customer for this novel approach.

“For many years, the standard upgrade method had not been questioned,” notes SAP Solution Architect Chris Lewis. “It had been adapted and optimized, but the focus had always been to reduce times for various upgrade elements. To actually get to zero though, you have to change the whole order of doing things. You have to change your preconceptions. Start with a clean slate.”

It was the prospect of being able to solve the downtime issue once and for all that finally tipped the scales. Pasula-Jones explains why. “If you don’t want to have a twelve-hour outage, what is the option? You don’t have one. That’s ultimately why our leadership was all in to try zero downtime.” Having crossed the first hurdle, the SAP team then faced a second.

“The customer set the bar high,” recalls Lewis. “They needed us to prove that every transaction would be processed within four seconds during the upgrade. That’s the entire roundtrip, from, say, the card swipe through the network to the SAP system and back again.” Exceeding this limit would lead to a third-party taking over requests and exposing the bank to certain fraud risks.

Despite some jangling nerves in the run-up to the live upgrade on March 8, everything went “completely like clockwork”, says SAP Chief Support Architect Mariusz Debowski.

“We showed that the seemingly impossible is feasible after all.” SAP Service Architect Zawisza Pierzchalski has been involved in shaping the zero downtime concept from the get-go. “We spent several years working on our idea without really knowing whether it could ever become reality.”

A born optimist, Pierzchalski was nevertheless convinced that the breakthrough would happen at ATB. And he’s certain of one thing, “If we’d allowed doubts to creep in, we’d never have achieved what we did!”

According to Dan Earl-Gray, SAP Engineering Architect, “The customer’s investment in this project was worth every penny. The measure of our success is that nobody even noticed that something was happening.” The upgrade went smoothly and without disruption to customers ‒ an invaluable competitive advantage in ATB’s eyes.

The SAP team members praise the excellent collaboration with the customer. “The project required both sides to be bold, because we were trying something that hadn’t been tried before,” says Lewis. Winning the trust of the customer’s IT department and getting all the project stakeholders on board was therefore critical. “The human factor is immensely important in a project like this,” adds Pierzchalski.

For Debowski, this project confirms the need for SAP to “listen to its customers and their requirements”. In his view, an “it-can’t-be-done” response is simply not good enough.

The zero downtime upgrade was executed as a co-innovation project between SAP MaxAttention and ATB Financial. If Cathy Pasula-Jones had her way, zero downtime would be built into SAP’s base product.

She’ll be delighted to know that SAP Development is already well on its way to a promising procedure known as the Zero Downtime Option.

More about Alberta Treasury Branches (ATB) Financial

Over 75 years in business
Assets of C$43.1 billion
More than 5,000 employees
More than 697,000 customers
242 Alberta communities
130 agencies and 172 branches
364 days per year Customer Care Center
Core banking solution from SAP

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Forget the checkbook! The AribaPay system is set to transform B2B payments making them simpler, more secure and more like their consumer counterparts like ApplePay and PayPal.

AribaPay, an innovative new paperless B2B payment system that makes it easier, more reliable and more secure for companies to pay their suppliers, has won the 2015 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award, SAP’s “innovation Oscar.”

SAP CEO Bill McDermott played master of ceremonies opening the envelope containing the name of this year’s award winner at a ceremony in New York. He paid tribute to the team that developed AribaPay, which he said embodied the true spirit of the award that he introduced for the first time last year in honor of SAP Co-Founder Hasso Plattner. “I think this truly is the most prestigious award in the information technology industry and I’m extremely proud of it.”

AribaPay was picked from among 10 finalists and 187 nominations involving more than 1,800 employees for the award this year. Over $10 billion in payments have been processed on the AribaPay platform since it was launched in July last year. If legacy volume from a prior platform that is being merged into AribaPay is included, the number rises to more than $40 billion.

McDermott said it had been “a real challenge” to pick the winner, but he praised the AribaPay developers for their courage, teamwork, and dedication in developing a truly innovative and useful application that he said has the potential to fundamentally change the way B2B payments are handled and make them as simple, certain and secure as consumer payments.

McDermott’s comments were echoed by Steve Singh, SAP Global Managing Board member, Business Network Group, and CEO of Concur. “With AribaPay the team demonstrated out-of-the-box thinking, and entrepreneurial spirit by turning the traditional payments industry on its head. And it is catching fire among companies around the world,” said Singh.

“A sincere thanks and congratulations to the entire AribaPay team for having the courage to take risks. And for pushing the limits of what is possible for us – and our customers around the world. These are the risks that the SAP founders took in 1972 – and this is why you have been so deservedly recognized.”

Accepting the award on behalf of his team Phil Beck, general manager of the AribaPay business, described the win as “unbelievable.” He added, “It hasn’t been easy, but I’m supported by a wonderful team.”

Beck noted that the team had set out with a big goal: “We weren’t interested in building a new product that used the same old approach to payments. We wanted to create something totally new that would completely redefine how a B2B payment is done.”

Despite the growth of the digital economy, more than six out of every 10 B2B payments between businesses in the U.S. are still made using checks, which then have to be reconciled to other information, for example purchase orders and invoices. That means lots of paper and inefficiencies that cost companies billions each year.

AribaPay overcomes these problems and improves upon AHC (automated clearing house) electronic payments by linking an electronic payment directly to the remittance data and giving companies and their suppliers more confidence, more efficiency and more visibility into their payments.

It also allows on-demand payment track-and-trace capability — permitting for the first time a bird’s-eye view on where payments are at any time in the settlement process — something that ACH cannot provide today.

This means it eliminates the need for suppliers to make phone calls chasing payments and the need for buyers to store and secure supplier bank account information. With AribaPay, buyers can complete the procure-to-pay process simply, securely, and with a high degree of certainty about who is paying, to whom, for what, and when.

This story originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.

Six months after winning SAP’s prestigious innovation award, AribaPay continues to spark the digital B2B payment transformation.

Before Apple Pay, there was AribaPay. Launched in July 2014 by SAP Ariba, the solution promised to transform business-to-business (B2B) payments by making them as simple, certain and secure as consumer payments. It seemed far-fetched. Would companies ditch their manual ways and paper checks? Was it any better than standard electronic payment methods like ACH? How secure could it really be?

The AribaPay team knew they’d face challenges in bringing the solution to market. But they never stopped believing in its promise. Or themselves. And for this, they were awarded SAP’s 2015 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award. What’s been happening with AribaPay and the team behind it since?

The Little Payment Engine that Could

What was once seen as a moonshot has sparked a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way B2B payments are exchanged. Just as consumers have ditched their wallets in favor of mobile devices, many business are abandoning their paper-laden manual ways and moving toward of more efficient digital processes.

Picking Up Steam

More than $60 billion in payments have been processed using AribaPay to date. And what started in North America is catching fire globally. The solution is now available in Canada, and through partnerships with Discover Financial Services and First Data Corporation, will be rolled out in Germany, France and the UK later this year. And the AribaPay team isn’t letting up, with plans for Latin America inked on its roadmap.

“We want to bring the power and scale of AribaPay to the world,” said AribaPay general manager Phil Beck.

To do this, the team is expanding, adding to its sales and enablement capabilities across the US, Canada and Europe. And it can’t move fast enough. “Urgency has always been a top priority. But we feel the pressure to always move faster.”

The road to its early success hasn’t been without bumps. “It’s hard work to build a new market – especially inside a large company,” said Randy Domke, vice president, Payables Network, SAP Ariba. Yet the team feels empowered to deliver. “Winning the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award made it very clear that SAP believes in the future of payables, recognizes the effort we are putting forth and will make the required investments to ensure that we don’t just succeed, but dominate.”

Changing the Game

For companies like 487 Consulting who signed on to AribaPay earlier this year, the service has been a boon. “I didn’t have any reliable visibility into when invoices would be paid,” said principal consultant and owner Ken Crouse. “And when payments were received, they could be hard to reconcile, especially if I was getting paid for multiple invoices in a single payment. Some invoices were getting paid while others would lag for several months.”

Crouse used to spend three to four days a month reconciling invoices and payments. “Now, I’ve got that down to under a couple hours, which keeps me focused on the business and what my customers pay me to do for them,” he says.

Changing Lives

AribaPay isn’t just changing the game for companies around the world. It’s changing lives.

“While I was working on AribaPay, I was going through an excruciatingly painful time personally,” recalls senior software engineer Tanvi Shah. “My marriage was breaking up and I was suddenly a lonely soul lost in a foreign country with no support system.”

She considered returning to India, but decided instead to focus on her job. Work became her coping mechanism. “My colleagues rallied around me and supported me through one of the darkest times in my life like a surrogate family,” Shah said.

And this gave her a new perspective on work and life. “Winning the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award proved to me that the work we do at SAP Ariba stretches beyond a paycheck,” Shah said. “The 15 minutes I spent with Bill McDermott, Steve Singh and Alex Atzberger at the award ceremony were truly life changing. When someone as phenomenal as Bill looks you straight in the eye – in the middle of a room full of people – and tells you how proud he is of what you have done – it gives you the inspiration and motivation to believe in yourself and to keep aiming higher.”

Karen Master is Vice President of Communications at SAP Ariba.

SAP Fieldglass Agile Cloud Hosting accelerates international expansion through a simplified private cloud infrastructure.

As SAP accelerates business growth and expansion to new countries there comes a need to deploy additional regional data centers to scale the business. But how do you deploy systems that are more and more complex in areas with ever-changing regulations and compliance issues?

A team from SAP Fieldglass solved this problem by redefining their agile cloud hosting technology solution with hardware, software, and infrastructure that is secure and simple to replicate and maintain. The best-in-class innovative infrastructure solution delivers a low cost, sustainable hyper scale platform.

The team is now a finalist in the 2016 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award for the Business Networks and Applications Board Area. Learn more:

The quest for a new infrastructure solution began in 2014, shortly after SAP acquired Fieldglass. To quickly and sustainably scale their business, Jeff Basso, vice president of IT for SAP Fieldglass, realized his company needed to change the way its infrastructure was built.

Gone were the days when its four-server-rack infrastructure was good enough. Now to remain competitive in the marketplace, it had to be much smaller, faster, and agile. Basso challenged his team to create a half-server-rack infrastructure.

At the time some engineers didn’t think it was possible, but the team was able to shift perceptions and make it a company effort by working across silos, from networking to virtualization to development.

“Our team took a look at what worked and what did not with our current platform, and then pushed themselves to leave behind old tried and true practices for newer simplified modern ones,” Basso said.

By enrolling engineers to think radically different, the SAP Fieldglass team was able to shrink its four-server-rack solution down to only a half-server-rack solution consisting of just seven servers and two switches.

“The real innovation was having the team control complexity while still delivering a solution that was resilient,” Basso commented.

The reduction of physical components required to deploy and host the SAP Fieldglass solution also results in cost savings of more than 50 percent across all aspects of the business, while delivering higher performance, reducing management efforts, and simplifying auditing. The solution also offers faster delivery timelines and shorter maintenance windows.

“We want to be prepared to run anywhere,” Basso stated. “Our goal is to be able to deploy the whole infrastructure in a weekly basis.”

However, SAP Fieldglass expects its agile infrastructure to only be a part of the bigger solution. They expect the solution to be running everywhere including their new infrastructure, SAP infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.

“The design is a stepping stone of our evolution,” Basso declared. “We expect as we give developers an easy to consume platform we will see a different way of thinking emerge, allowing for more possibilities within the SAP Fieldglass application and its ecosystem.”

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission title: SAP Fieldglass Agile Cloud Hosting
Board area: Business Networks and Applications
Team: SAP Fieldglass Information Technology
Number of employees: 28
Achievement: Agile, simple infrastructure that allows SAP Fieldglass to accelerate deployment globally
Impact: Agility to swap out components easily, handle regulations and compliance issues as they come up, and propel innovation across SAP Fieldglass

Wyatt Fay is an intern in the SAP Business Networks and Applications Group.

By pulling all relevant organization data into one hub, a services team from SAP helped DuPont reap the benefits of SAP HANA immediately — in real time and without disruption.

When DuPont announced its merger with Dow — and the plan to split off into three different companies — the need to harmonize company data become not just necessary, but urgent. Luckily, the Digital Business Services’ North America Center of Excellence & Data Management & Landscape Transformation (DM&LT) team had a plan to help DuPont consolidate its IT system into one single SAP platform.

That plan centered on a concept called the Data-In Hub, which provided DuPont with a holistic, technology-neutral tool to approach its data needs, and which allowed them to get up and running with parts of an SAP HANA implementation in two months.

By pulling all relevant organization data into one hub, and using that as the basis for all implementation activities, the SAP team helped DuPont start to reap the benefit of SAP HANA immediately – in real time, without disruption on their systems of records.

And for this, the team – SAP employees Bernhard Wallner, Alexandre Garske, and Koustubh Waikar – has been selected as the finalist for the 2016 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award in the Digital Business Services Board Area.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission title: “Data-in Hub: Autobahn to SAP S/4HANA”
Board area: Digital Business Services
Team: Autobahn to S4
Number of employees: 3
Achievement: Data-In Hub leverages SAP HANA and SLT to solve the problem of extended SAP S/4HANA adoption timelines by eliminating the need for incremental upgrades, conversions, and migrations.
Impact: Tangible results for the customer, fast!

According to Bernhard Wallner, who works on the product development side of DM&LT, the beauty of this technology is that is proven for high throughput and is optimized to minimize business downtime. ‘Because it is an evolution of technologies, rather than a revolution, the Data-In Hub minimizes risk and has little to no effect on source systems. DuPont didn’t need a huge blueprint; instead we started working on the data right away, getting to the quality they needed iteratively while showing early results.’

In order to get such a complex customer running on SAP HANA in two months, the team divided the work into four parallel work streams:

Replicating real time data for report creation: With the Data-In Hub, DuPont was using live reports within eight weeks
Master Data profiling: With real-time data available in Data-In Hub, users were able to identify relevant master data based on various business parameters within the first two months, and they were able to filter and approve master data that was required to be migrated to the target environment.
Data transformation to help DuPont transform, merge, and split data objects for the divested entities.
Preparation of a target environment on SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA with the required base configuration and organizational structures in a merged scenario.

Alexandre Garske, who is director of Global Center of Excellence, System Landscape Optimization, North America, says this parallel work was also key to the success of the Data-In Hub, because both the project and the DuPont team were able to look at the data while also looking at their processes.

“By getting the data of their ERP system and into the Data-In Hub meant that we could use our Landscape Transformation tools to replicate, cleanse and transform their data in the consolidated system. Within weeks we were doing analytics and reporting out of the consolidated SAP HANA system in real time, without disruption.”

By repurposing their data into a unified environment via the Data-In Hub, DuPont was quickly able to see the benefits of SAP HANA – especially in terms of reporting. They were getting real-time work reports on the unified data within seconds, instead of within days.

According to Koustubh Waikar, who is team lead for Delivery, DM&LT Center of Excellence, North America, what was ground-breaking about the Data-In Hub is that it removed multiple test cycles: “With the DiH, we always work on live data in real time, so that when users pointed out issues with the data, we could fix it immediately.”

Impact for Other SAP Customers

The greatest impact of Data In-Hub will be to accelerate the SAP S/4HANA migration process and offer SAP’s biggest customers a fast-track transition to SAP S/4HANA while minimizing the time to business value. Because Data-In Hub utilizes an agile approach, it also helps reduce transformation risk, because customers are able to test systems in real time during the actual transformation, instead of only when the migration project is complete. As a result, customers can identify issues on the fly and proactively work with SAP to correct them.

Wallner, Garske, and Waikar all say they are honored to be nominated for the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award. Says Waikar: “This is an award of the highest caliber across SAP and carries an aura of creativity. It gives me a feeling of satisfaction that the risks we took on something different to meet our customer’s expectations had such a phenomenal result.”

Wolfgang Faisst and Johann Freilinger, the creators and founders of SAP Exchange Media (XM), share their story about building a new product in a start-up-like manner within SAP.

Since 2013, Dr. Wolfgang Faisst and Johann Freilinger have been pursuing their novel business idea with diligence, dedication, and plenty of support from their colleagues and managers at SAP, not to mention their customers and partners. They recruited an 80-member team that has turned that idea into a novel product.

Meanwhile, the two founders of SAP XM concede that the path to realizing groundbreaking ideas at a large company isn’t without its stumbling blocks. It requires new processes and ways of thinking that challenge all those involved to broaden their horizons.

Company Within a Company

What began as a mere concept in late 2013 crystallized into a business plan. Faisst and Freilinger presented to their manager the following year. In the six months leading up to that point, the two had devoted time outside of their normal jobs to the project, which resulted in some long evenings and short weekends. It all turned out to be worth it.

“It’s not that we’re these geniuses,” Freilinger admits. “You just identify a challenge customers are facing that you can solve in a way that ultimately means new business for the company and its customers”, he continues.

SAP XM shows the great potential opened up by tapping into new business areas

While free-enterprise innovators with a solution like this typically set about searching for venture capital, those employed by companies go looking for budget resources. The mechanisms of each process, however, are the same: entrepreneurs need to convince investors and other supporters that their ideas are both promising and feasible. The financial risks individuals have to bear may be smaller for those at a company within a company, but Wolfgang and Johann still feel a particular obligation to their investors – especially their colleagues and supervisors, but also to their partners and customers. Luckily, they already have several milestones to celebrate: The two evaluated their idea along with customers back in 2015 and brought SAP XM to market just in time for SAPPHIRE NOW in 2016.

Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE and responsible for Products & Innovation, said that SAP needs to constantly renew its passion for new ideas: “SAP XM represents the innovative spirit that will make us successful in the long term.”

The Idea, The Resulting Product

Based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP XM brings together buyers and sellers of advertising space in digital media on an online platform. This enables customers to purchase digital ad space, assess the direct efficacy of ad campaigns, and optimize them in near-real time. In that sense, SAP XM is essentially a digital media business network in the cloud. Moreover, SAP XM is connected with other SAP systems such as SAP Hybris Marketing, ensuring seamless and integrated end-to-end processes for customers.

While today’s agencies buy ad space and then plan, implement, and evaluate ad campaigns for their customers, this network now makes it quick and easy for companies to plan their campaigns themselves, tailor them to their own clients, and monitor their success up to the second from start to finish.

The fully integrated digital media network SAP XM provides uses the insights offered by big data, learns from users’ preferences, and makes it possible to place suitable ads in locations that are relevant to the target audience in question. One of the network’s goals is to make advertising meaningful again in the face of rising spending on digital ad-blocking solutions. Ads that get back to offering relevant information to individuals present a great deal of potential for all of the parties involved. After all, wer are all consumers respond more favorably to content tailored to their needs than they do to catch-all advertising campaigns.

The Team

When Wolfgang and Johann began assembling their team, they knew they would need to recruit colleagues from a wide variety of areas to turn their idea into reality. A multidisciplinary team with enthusiasm and a sense of responsibility for their common goal would be essential to their success. This meant bringing together not just a range of skillsets, but also new members with in-depth knowledge of the advertising industry.

Today, the team embodies diversity in its combination of young and more experienced members as well as technology and marketing experts. Development, product design, and operations are based in Walldorf, while sales and marketing are headquartered in Hamburg and New York. They all share that same objective: making advertising relevant again.

More information:

sapexchange.media
SAP Exchange Media on YouTube

Christiane Kubach is internal communications lead for Products & Innovation in Global Corporate Affairs at SAP.

SAP employees offer hope for refugees who are challenged by starting new lives in a foreign culture.

The 2015 refugee crisis displaced more than 65 million refugees from war or conflict-struck countries. One million sought refuge in Germany alone. But for European host nations, accepting refugees is just the tip of the iceberg. The integration into everyday life is the actual challenge, including adapting to a new culture and pursuing a fulfilled working life.

In 2015, SAP pledged to foster refugee integration through education & employment

At SAP, embracing differences and helping people to integrate easily is quite the standard. With several formal and informal initiatives, the multicultural workplace at SAP has assimilated all colleagues into the life-thread of corporate and societal culture. So in September 2015, when SAP Executive Board Member Stefan Ries pledged to foster refugee integration through education and employment, it was only natural for colleagues in HR to spring into action.

SAP’s “Engaging for Refugees: Integration via Employment and Education” was formed immediately after the announcement with the goal to help refugees compete in the German job market with a level of training comparable to native applicants and thereby securing financial independence through successful careers. The idea of providing internships and vocational trainings exclusively for refugees was born, opening options for long-term employment where applicable.

The cross-team initiative under the leadership of Global HR Service Delivery aimed to create paid internships for refugees in all Board Areas and dual study positions to qualify refugees with SAP work experience and/or a university degree.

Shaping the Program

Building the program was a mammoth task that required collaboration across SAP Legal, SAP HR Shared Services, the Federal Labor Office, Office of Foreign Affairs and the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW) in Mannheim, and the Cooperative State University Dresden.

Turbo-boosted by the first face-to-face encounters with eager and determined refugees, the team started to collect the positions in various departments and set up the legal framework for refugee employment. In less than four weeks, 100 positions were published and only few weeks later the first contracts were signed. At the same time, 14 dual study positions were created: 12 in the DHBW in Mannheim and two in Dresden. The study program in DHBW was specially equipped with a preparatory course containing language courses and intercultural trainings amongst others.

The study program started in the third quarter of 2016 for the 14 students and is proceeding successfully. Another refugee apprenticeship was offered in Walldorf in September 2016. To date, more than 100 refugees have started their internships. Through their determination and hard work, 24 have found subsequent employments at SAP. The team has already started to create and recruit for another 100 internships and 10 more dual-study positions for 2017.

Challenges

Work with refugees often presents itself in intangible and confusing ways. It took a while for everyone to figure out the legal setup, which was often non-existent, and barriers in accepting refugees. Even the basics of the recruiting process suddenly seemed insurmountable. How do you get in contact with people who were accommodated in schools, gyms or former warehouses without access to home phones or Internet? How do you assess the skills and qualifications of people with missing or unclear education and documents? How do you communicate in foreign languages other than English, German, Spanish, or French?

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission title: “Engaging for Refugees”
Board area: Human Resources
Team: Engaging for Refugees: Cross Team Initiative under the leadership of Global HR Service Delivery
Number of employees: 16
Achievement:
- 2017 goal: 100 internships and 10 vocational training positions
- 2016: 100 internships (74 contracts have ended and 24 are in subsequent employments), 14 vocational students,1 apprentice

Through the close collaboration of authorities, the determination of the project team, and importantly that of managers, buddies, and interviewers in the internship departments, the challenges were worked out one by one. Different state and civil authorities helped set up a legal framework, interviewers assessed skills meticulously, and managers and buddies spent time with their interns and proved to be strong pillars of support.

The Impact

The largest impact “Engaging for Refugees” has been the hope to those it supports through an introduction into the western culture as well as a training for the job market. In the words of one Syrian refugee, Tarek Sheikh Awad, at an HR People Week event: “I lost many loved ones including my father in Syria. SAP is my new family.”

Participating SAP employees were deeply moved by listening to and subsequently supporting the refugees and have expressed their admiration for SAP as an organization that promotes the virtue of compassion. Colleagues are often inspired by the unusual skills that refugees possess. For example, many refugees from Arabic countries have shown proficiency in drawing and arts, which stirred ideas on how they could impact software design and user experience. The 21 subsequent employments are a true testimony to the talent of this group. Using this experience as a stable foundation, many interns have also moved on to pursue other successful ventures outside SAP.

Today, the impact has gone beyond SAP. The program was featured in many media reports in Germany as a model for integrating refugees in the job market. Due to the experience gained, the “Engaging for Refugees” team has been asked to support other university and academic programs. Other companies have started refugee programs after learning about “Engaging for Refugees.”

The program can be best summarized by the words of a refugee intern: “This is the stepping stone for a new life, now with self-confidence and recognition by others.”

Africa Code Week brings coding education to hundreds of thousands of youth in 30 countries and demonstrates the power of public, private, and non-profit partnerships.

The evolving digital economy offers some of the greatest opportunities today for improving peoples’ lives. Those with access to these opportunities will be at the forefront of a revolution. SAP’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) team in EMEA recognized this opportunity and asked the question: How can we help ensure that the African continent will be included?

Their answer was Africa Code Week, the 2016 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award finalist for the Office of the CEO Board Area.

The initiative began in 2014 with a sponsorship of EU Code Week, which taught coding skills to children across Eastern and Western Europe. The concept inspired Claire Gillissen-Duval, director of CSR in EMEA, who had a strong feeling that something bigger was possible. The CSR EMEA team recognized a unique opportunity. SAP could take coding – something core to the company’s DNA – and combine it with employees’ personal talents to help tackle the looming digital skills gap and massive youth unemployment on the fastest growing continent.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: “Africa Code Week: Bringing Free Coding Education to Tens of Thousands of Children & Youth in Africa”
Board area: Office of the CEO
Team: SAP Corporate Social Responsibility EMEA
Number of employees: 3
Achievement: Brought coding education workshops to 89,000 youths in 17 African countries
Impact: Africa Code Week targets primary and secondary students in order to create and sustain a full lifecycle of skills support for young people in Africa
Objectives for 2016: Engage 150,000 youths in coding workshops in 30 countries between October 15-23

Claire, in partnership with her manager, Rebecca Nicholson, head of Employee Communications and CSR EMEA, and Sunil Geness, head of Government Relations and CSR in Africa, set about making the vision of Africa Code Week come to life in one of the world’s most challenging regions.

Claire took the idea to a trusted SAP partner, the Galway Education Centre, which had conducted more than 500 code week workshops as part of EU Code Week. Its director Bernard Kirk believed the key to success was engaging government, NPOs, parents, teachers, schools, and kids. Claire asked the critical question: Could code week work in Africa? When Bernard said he thought it was possible, Claire recruited him for the steering committee.

It wouldn’t be an easy task. As Sunil explained: “There is a lack of internet connectivity. You have to travel great distances to reach the school children in countries with totally different regulatory frameworks.”

The team saw past these challenges. “It was a massive opportunity to build bridges with more partners,” said Rebecca. “We saw a model of private/public/non-profit partnership develop to deal with one of society’s biggest problems. Everyone, from governments and educational institutions to NPOs and corporations, has a role to play. The opportunity to scale the program is significant.”

The team launched the program in June 2015 hoping to reach 20,000 in 10 countries. Forty SAP colleagues conducted “train the trainer” sessions on Scratch, a free coding language developed by MIT. The team worked closely with non-profit partners like the Cape Town Science Centre in South Africa, Ministries of Education, and local governments to bring coding instruction to young people, many of whom had never touched a computer.

Ultimately, the program reached 89,000 students in 17 countries. Based on the success, the team will keep building partnerships and hopes to reach 500,000 students in 30 African countries in the next three years.

For Alicia Lenze, global head of CSR, the initiative shows the power of CSR: “This initiative demonstrates how effective CSR can be in driving the digital economy. The work we’re doing with Africa Code Week today will position these young people to be technological leaders in the next 15 to 20 years.”

“The colors of SAP shine through the passion and ability of our people to help ensure the next wave of people from Africa are not just consumers of technology – they will be creators of technology,” said Sunil. “As a South African and an African, it’s something that makes me immensely proud.”

Courtney Robinson is senior director of executive communications in Global Corporate Affairs at SAP.

A program to turn employees from SAP’s Global Finance & Administration board area into agents of change went viral, delivering tangible business benefits to business units across the globe.

What do Transformers and SAP’s Global Finance & Administration (GFA) finalist for the Hasso Plattner Founders‘ Award have in common? More than you probably think.

First and foremost, they have their own comic series. What, you don’t picture finance people as comic heroes? Then think again. It all started as a grassroots initiative in the mid-2015 with a clear goal: GFA employees were asked to expand their roles from being excellent stewards and even better business partners to becoming true transformation agents.

But don’t think about machines that transform from cars into… well: Transformers. Think of colleagues working alongside each and every employee. With all their experience and knowledge, they should challenge the status quo and co-drive profitable growth for the company. But how would the GFA colleagues learn what makes up a great transformation agent so they can act accordingly? This is where GFA’s finalist team for the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award comes into play.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: GFA Transformation Agent Movement
Board Area: Global Finance & Administration
Team: 16 SAP employees across GFA
Achievement: Through this social and business movement, the finalist created a bottom-up change management approach. With a train-the-trainer-approach around the globe, not only executives but also experts led the workshops in addition to their formal roles.
Impact: The finalist team contributed largely to a change in mindset of the GFA board area, thus enabling SAP to deliver on its strategy.
Credits: Go to the finalist team and all other colleagues who contributed to making this happen.

“At the beginning of this year we knew exactly where we needed to go with regards to this role,” Joel Bernstein, head of Global Field Finance, and one of the executive sponsors for the transformation agent role remembers. “However, we needed to find ways to engage people’s hearts and minds. We wanted to make sure people don’t just understand what being a transformation agent means but that they can also act accordingly. This is why we set up a few workshops in the first place.”

And these workshops went viral. In the end, more than 80 GFA experts and specialists became trainers for the sessions, and 1,500 GFA employees worldwide were brought up to speed in 30,000 hours of training. The participants worked on actual business topics with their counterparts in SAP market units worldwide. They identified problems and jointly worked on solutions to overcome these obstacles. These were problems such as ‘What is hindering SAP’s performance in certain markets?’, ‘Why are discounts on our products so high?’, or ‘When will we harmonize internal processes?’.

The results of all worldwide sessions were brought together into one document revealing the top five global business challenges, their solutions, as well as next steps. “This paper is a hands-on deliverable,” says Joel. “Our goal was to equip people with a methodology to challenge the status quo, and in addition to that, to also come out of the workshops with something tangible for the benefit of SAP.”

The project included a transformation agent handbook translated into eight languages, a selfie wall on the corporate intranet with participant pictures from the workshops to engage people, a comic series to reach colleagues in a new and different way, and finally the conclusion document to make the outcome and results transparent and tangible. This is what the GFA Transformation Movement is about and this is what made them GFA finalist.

If you would like to see a transformer – pardon – transformation agent, then just reach out to one of the colleagues in Finance & Administration. They are working right next to you, and they are not just excellent stewards and business partners, but now also even better transformation agents.

Stephanie Rieder is on the Integrated Employee Communications team at Global Corporate Affairs at SAP, responsible for GFA internal communications.

By simulating a startup, a small group of employees are bridging the skills gap in Africa, giving a future to young people who are previously disadvantaged and expanding SAP’s influence on the rising continent.

Perhaps in no other place is SAP’s vision to help the world run better and improve people’s lives put to a greater test than on the African content. In most African countries, the majority live below the poverty line and many have limited opportunities to better themselves. The only way up is through education and employment.

But there is hope, and help. Africa currently has the fastest growing working-age population of any other region, and seven of the 10 fastest growing economies are in Africa. But the challenges facing even the most motivated youth are formidable. Less than 1% of African children currently leave school with basic coding skills and general STEM education levels are very poor.

Government, private sector, and non-profits are struggling to find suitable candidates for open positions. The human cost associated with the lack of skilled tech resources is even greater than the business cost, because a single breadwinner is relied on to support up to six dependents.

SAP Skills for Africa Program is Born

Integral to the SAP Africa Growth Plan, announced in August 2014, is the up-skilling of the next generation of IT leaders and professionals by training up to 10,000 consultants by 2020 in close collaboration with local governments and universities. SAP Africa needs local professionals in the job market who understand SAP’s products and have the vision and skills to implement them. In so doing, this will not only address the skills shortages and provide much needed income to young professionals, but it will ultimately also grow the SAP business on the continent. This is the goal behind the SAP Skills for Africa program, a finalist for the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award 2016.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: SAP Skills for Africa Initiative
Board Area: Global Customer Operations
Team: Meena Confait, Tarryn Naidoo, Malese Ndhlovu, Chris van der Merwe
Number of employees: 4
Achievement: Placed 418 associate consultants in SAP ecosystems in Africa. Working with partners and customers. Countries: Kenya, Morocco, South Africa (Cape Town, Johannesburg).
Future Plans: Launching in Francophone Africa, South Africa & East Africa in 2017.
Impact: Providing work to thousands of African families.

SAP Skills for Africa delivers on SAP’s vision because it addresses Africa’s skills gap in a simple yet extremely effective way.

Using a hybrid approach of classroom and e-learning training, the three-month program is run free of cost for select unemployed graduates in key African regions.

Tangible and Direct Impact on People’s Lives

SAP Skills for Africa started in a humble way in Kenya in 2013 with only a handful of recruits. Other countries have been added since, including Morocco and South Africa, with Francophone Africa planned in 2017, covering countries such as Ivory Coast, Algeria and Morocco in its recruitment drive.

“We’re like a pop-up shop. Where ever we go we carry no infrastructure costs,” explains Meena. “There is no overhead, and when we go into the country we ask for sponsored training venues. That makes the program very lean, entrepreneurial and unique.”

“We have a tangible and direct impact on people’s lives,” says Chris van der Merwe, senior talent acquisition specialist and talent delivery lead for SAP Skills for Africa. “When you hear the stories of how the program helped young people get a start on their future, it makes you very proud to be an SAP employee.”

Many companies invest in well-meaning skills development programs for Africa as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility programs, but most don’t result in jobs. SAP Skills for Africa is different because job creation is part and parcel of the program. “SAP Skills for Africa is a job creation motor that fully leverages the power of SAP’s existing ecosystem,” says Chris.

Continuing to Evolve

“The SAP Skills for Africa program was truly run on design thinking principles,” says Mehmood Khan, chief operating officer at SAP Africa. “Input was collected from partners, customers, and students, and the model was adapted to each new set of circumstances and cultural nuances, undergoing numerous refinement cycles to reach what it is now.”

The results now speak for themselves. SAP Skills for Africa has already placed 418 associate consultants in SAP ecosystems in Africa, and more are on the way in 2017.

“SAP partners and customers are now vying for the graduates as they become available, which is a huge validation of our efforts,” says Meena. Other market units are now interested in replicating the program.

Chris is proud of what the team has achieved so far: “We’re creating the next vanguard of talent in our organization and ecosystem,” he concludes.

This year, SAP’s highest employee award goes to the SAP Skills for Africa team, which placed over 400 consultants in jobs in Kenya, Morocco, and South Africa, and is expanding to Ivory Coast and Algeria.

The winners of the SAP Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award this year are four employees from SAP Africa who launched and grew a jobs-creation program that fills Africa’s skills gap in the IT sector. The employees, Meena Confait, Tarryn Naidoo, Malese Ndhlovu, and Chris van der Merwe, received the award January 24 at SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany.

190 nominations, 1,700 employees, 38 countries

Launched in May 2014 by CEO Bill McDermott, The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award represents the highest employee recognition at SAP. In 2016, 190 teams were nominated by their peers with a total of 1,700 employees from 38 countries, a significant increase over previous years. Submissions are evaluated for breakthrough thinking, simplicity, and boldness.

“The Award has turned into something very important and inspirational at SAP,” said Torie Clarke, head of Global Corporate Affairs, who moderated the awards ceremony.

Handing the trophy over to the winning team, Bill McDermott said: “Hasso Plattner is the soul and inspiration of SAP. The award’s association with him and all five founders makes it one of the most prestigious in the world.”

Africa’s Employment Challenge

Although Africa currently has seven of the ten fastest growing economies, it has the world’s fastest growing working age population, thus the challenges facing even the most motivated youth to find work are formidable. The only way up is through education.

The SAP Skills for Africa Program delivers on SAP’s vision because it addresses Africa’s skills gap in a simple yet extremely effective way.

“SAP not only trains and certifies young and dynamic graduates through this program, it also puts them into employment, creating our own sustainable skills pipeline and enhancing SAP’s long term viability,” says Meena Confait, head of SAP Skills for Africa at SAP Africa. Using a hybrid approach of classroom and e-learning training, the three-month program is run free of cost for select unemployed graduates in key African regions.

Meena was visibly moved by the award’s ceremony, saying “We have the best jobs at SAP because we get a chance to make a difference in these graduates’ lives, offering them opportunities they wouldn’t normally have had.”

SAP Africa CEO Brett Parker said of the team, “You cannot do this unless you have people with passion in their hearts, because it is a lot of hard work. But it’s clearly been worth the effort, because in 2016 we had a positive impact on 1000 lives.”

A Job Creation Motor

“SAP Skills for Africa is a job-creation motor that fully leverages the power of SAP’s existing ecosystem,” says Chris van der Merwe, Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist and Talent Delivery Lead for SAP Skills for Africa. “The managers and directors of our partners and strategic customers in the region trust us to find and train the right talent, who have jobs waiting for them three months later when they receive their certificates,” says Chris.

SAP Skills for Africa has already placed 418 associate consultants in SAP ecosystems in Africa.

About the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award, which was launched in 2014 by SAP CEO Bill McDermott, is the highest employee recognition at SAP. Awarded annually to one individual or one team whose inspirational and extraordinary achievement best delivers on SAP’s Vision and Strategy and who best reflects the SAP founders’ spirit and legacy of innovation, entrepreneurialism, and courage.

In the words of SAP CEO Bill Mc Dermott, “Few companies can lay claim to being the originator of an entire industry. SAP is one of the exceptions.”

Forty-five years ago, the founders of SAP set off to start an ERP company, armed with an untainted sense of courage and a lot of entrepreneurial passion. Since then, Hasso Plattner and the company’s founders have inspired countless young professionals to boldly pursue their academic, business, and technology passions and build something new.

To ensure that the legacy is alive and well within SAP, Hasso Plattner and the SAP Executive Board conceived the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award in 2014. Granted annually by the CEO to a deserving employee or team, the award has become the highest internal recognition possible at SAP. The award now needs a deserving candidate for 2017. The winner will receive a crystal glass lens trophy, a grand of prize a €100,000 in cash and equity, in addition to other ways of recognition.

To ensure that its entrepreneurial legacy is alive and well, SAP conceived the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award

Last year, 190 teams were nominated by their peers with a total of 1,700 employees from 38 countries, marking a significant increase over previous years.

The SAP Skills for Africa team stood out from the crowd and was selected as the winner of the 2016 award.

The four employees from the winning team launched and grew a jobs creation program that fills Africa’s skills gap in the IT sector. More than 400 consultants have now been placed in jobs in Kenya, Morocco, and South Africa, and the project is currently expanding to the Ivory Coast and Algeria.

SAP Africa CEO Brett Parker praised the team for their hard work, saying: “It’s clearly been worth the effort, because in 2016 we had a positive impact on 1,000 lives.”

At SAP, we recognize that an innovation-led culture with an abundance of entrepreneurial thinking is the key to future success and to improving people lives.

The award seeks to reward employees who took a risk, charged ahead with their new ideas, and showed a new vision for the future — just like the SAP founders did. We eagerly await the winner of the Hasso Plattner Founder Award 2017.

Note: The award is open only to the SAP’s worldwide employee base, as stated in the competition rules.

A new test-automation-as-a-service platform helps certify cloud products with less effort, greater confidence, and higher speed.

Test automation, or using a software to test the quality of an application, is not a new practice. It has existed for a while, but is not without its share of discontent.

For example, test-automation software needs to be built and updated every time the application gets updated. The more layered and complex the application technology is, the more difficult the automation development is. The time and resources taken for automation development far offsets its advantages.

The complexity also mandates that the automation software is built wholly by engineers. Business experts are therefore not very involved and actual business scenarios are not properly integrated in the test environment.

Case for Change: Test-Automation-as-a-Service

With 2,000 customers, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central is one of the fastest-growing core HR solutions on the market, growing 49% in number of customers over the past year alone. With innovative solutions and a changing cloud landscape, the solution is built on a myriad of back-end technologies and has an architecture that is open for future integrations. One can imagine that it is a mammoth task to build a high-quality test-automation platform for such an intricate application in time with every release.

Here is where a Bangalore-based group of quality experts came to the rescue. A team with varied expertise ranging from UI design, API, performance, database, and user experience took up the challenge under Srinivasan Subramanian, leading the vision of test-automation-as-a-service.

Flying the Eagle

The objective was to have a simple but highly adaptable automation interface that all stakeholders, including business experts, could work on and certify product quality.

As customers are currently migrating to next-generation cloud solutions, it was also imperative to ensure that any new test automation would support future multiple generations of software delivery. The project team looked into existing automation frameworks that could be used as a base for this agile transformation, but the options weren’t satisfactory.

It was time to build something new. The team pulled up their sleeves and created a completely new test-automation platform: Eagle Drones. They used a decentralized architecture and distributed computing powered by microservices as the backbone of their Eagle Drone. It was built on the following principles

Pulling in existing microservices that can be added by the user to create their own test scenarios
A user-friendly interface hiding the complexities of the technologies in each microservices
Drag-and-drop features for easy functioning

The strategy was bold, considering it had not been done before. But it paid off. In just four months, the team provided a next-generation test-automation-as a-service-platform that could certify products in the cloud. The product was used to validate 222 features well within development sprints of four weeks each and ran more than 1,500 scenarios during the past two quarterly releases. With in-built intelligence and an easy-to-use interface, the platform has helped release the product with less effort, greater confidence, and much higher speed.

This platform embraces principles of agility, re-usability, and Run Simple with an exemplary user interface where all stakeholders can now participate and add to product quality.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: Eagle Drones – Simplifying Automation through Microservices
Board area: Cloud Business Group
Team: SAP SuccessFactors
Number of employees: Eight
Achievement: Eagle Drones platform was created in four months, with 222 features validated well within development sprints of four weeks each and ran more than 1,500 scenarios during the past two quarterly releases
Impact: Eagle Drones has disrupted traditional automation paradigms making it a simple and fun endeavor, and enables all stakeholders to contribute toward improving product quality and customer success

When you think of legal departments, do you think of rigid processes and bone-dry text? Think again. The intrapreneurs from Global Finance & Administration (GFA) at SAP are generating true value for customers.

Two years ago, the contract team in Global Legal at SAP faced a difficult decision: Should they continue to optimize their existing processes and tools, squeezing out the last few percentage points, or should they tackle the issues they had identified head-on and put everything under the microscope? The former choice was surely the simpler one: It would have allowed them to stay on familiar ground and take the beaten path to ensure that things worked as expected.

So what was it that encouraged the team to take the path less traveled, turning everything inside out and subjecting it to thorough scrutiny?

“We saw that each line of business had its own processes for archiving contracts,” says Kai Jacob, who is responsible for legal information management at SAP. “We quickly recognized that we needed a central store and a common understanding for staging contracts.”

Drafting contracts – whether for sales contracts, supplier contracts, or others – was a highly manual process that generated a major workload not only for the attorneys, but also for everyone else involved. And because the different contracts were often saved on different servers as well, the entire process was highly susceptible to errors.

The situation at other companies’ legal departments is similar – often combined with the mantra of having to do more with the same or fewer resources. Attorneys at the in-house departments realize that they have to rely on digitalization, and the advantages it offers, to combine their legal expertise with the necessary entrepreneurial flair.

New Way of Doing Things

To achieve this, however, the central organization requires full access and control over all legal texts, such as contracts and the corresponding metadata, templates, clauses, form letters, and guidelines – as well as the business information about expenditures and resource consumption. In short: The increased requirements often face a defragmented information landscape from the perspective of the legal department.

This gave sufficient motivation to SAP’s internal Global Contract Management Services (GCMS) team to not only find a solution for themselves, but also to seek additional value for SAP customers whose specialist departments face the same problems.

“With our limited resources, we could have tried to further optimize our existing product, the Contract Management Solution (CMS). Instead, we set our sights on a paradigm shift, by expanding our focus from contracts to legal content in general and seeking to enable both the management and creation of legal content. It was important for us to develop this solution in SAP’s core solution, SAP S/4HANA, because it was the only foundation that enabled a comprehensive, sustainable solution for our customers,” says Kai Jacob.

In the spirit of a startup, the intrapreneurs from Global Legal at SAP worked together closely with solution management and standard development. Instead of enhancing their existing CMS, they started completely from scratch. In this way, the GCMS Team managed to launch a standard SAP product in less than a year: SAP S/4HANA for Legal Content.

Numerous Improvements Achieved

The team developed a product that covers the entire life cycle of a contract, including drafting, review, and checks of contracts and the corresponding contract data. It should go without saying that a feature for electronic contract signing is included. But the solution can also do more: It selects suitable content from a library of templates and clauses to prepopulate contracts and other legal documents.

Jochen Scholten, head of the legal department at SAP, says: “We manage more than 750,000 contracts based on some 6,500 templates. At peak times, we generated some 10,000 contracts every day, nearly half of them completely automatically. Thanks to the changes that the GCMS team initiated, we have been able to simplify and improve the contract process significantly: we can achieve ‘healthier’ deals with less negotiation effort. As such, we have given the colleagues involved in the contract process greater flexibility to concentrate on strategic tasks.”

In Kai Jacob’s words: “In this project, we questioned the defined limits and ultimately discarded them. We have succeeded in developing a one-of-a-kind product for SAP that, as the sole solution on the market, is fully integrated in the company’s processes and SAP’s digital core, SAP S/4HANA.”

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission title: Intrapreneurship: Going Beyond Boundaries
Board area: Global Finance & Administration (GFA)
Team: 14 employees from GFA
Achievement: Together with the P&I SAP S/4HANA Procure Team, the employees developed a standard product that also benefits SAP customers — in less than a year from kickoff to release-to-customer.
Impact: The contract management system (CMS) can help reduce SAP’s contracting time by 90%, saving the company millions of euros in operating costs each year. In addition to this added value, the standard SAP product SAP S/4HANA for legal content can also help customers to manage not only contracts, but also all kinds of legal content. It also offers additional functionality for contracting analytics and automatic legal content assembly.

A mobile application initiated by SAP’s sales organization helps raise funds for disaster relief services in Africa and around the world.

In June 2017 wildfires tore through the coastal South African town of Knysna, killing at least four people and forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. In response, the Gift of the Givers Foundation rallied to raise funds to provide important disaster relief services — all with the help of a week-old mobile app built by SAP.

The Gift of the Givers Foundation is the largest disaster relief organization of African origin on the continent, and, like many other NGOs, one of its biggest challenges is reaching donors. With help from a team from Global Customer Operations, Gift of the Givers went digital to make it easier for people to donate via a secure mobile application.

Cloud-Based App with Usability at Its Core

The project was rooted in SAP’s cloud strategy and vision to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. The team worked to streamline Gift of the Giver’s fundraising by ensuring the app was designed with purpose, in the cloud, with simplicity and usability at its core.

First, the mobile app is digitally inclusive so that more people, regardless of income level or access, can contribute to the humanitarian work of Gift of the Givers. Second, the app drives transparency among donors by including the latest updates of the organization’s relief work. Finally, the mobile app will be able to disperse emergency information going forward.

Just one week after go-live the app was used to support the Knysna fire disaster. It has since raised funds for several other projects driven by Gift of the Givers, which is well-known for its rapid deployment assistance during disasters around the world, as well as providing search and rescue teams, medical personal and supplies, medication and vaccines, and much more.

Many SAP Teams Contributed

Teams from two continents worked together to overcome technical challenges, including balancing aesthetics and performance to ensure usability under poor network conditions and undergoing a last-minute redesign due to local banking regulations. Yet through it all, an agile design-driven strategy enabled the application to go live in just months thanks to seamless teamwork with SAP product development teams, SAP Value Prototyping, an external advertising agency, and an external app development startup.

With the first deployment of SAP Cloud Platform in Africa, the team demonstrated the purpose-driven potential of SAP solutions.

“I believe that technology for the sake of technology doesn’t really add any value,” said team member Anish Saxena, who supported team leads Nazia Pillay and Dilip Radhakrishnan. “When it is used to support people on the ground, when it helps people improve their lives, that is the real value of technology. That is the most inspiring part of the project.”

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission title: Cloud Platform App for Better Disaster Relief
Board area: Global Customer Operations
Team: Greater Good Team (Nazia Pillay, Dilip Radhakrishnan, Anish Saxena, Pavel Lazhbanau, and Aliaksandr Vashyna)
Achievement: A mobile application for the Gift of the Givers Foundation to facilitate donations to the largest disaster relief organization of African origin on the African continent. The application is the first live deployment of SAP Cloud Platform in Africa, and was built to be digitally inclusive, enable transparent donations, and disburse emergency information.
Impact: Just one week after going live, the mobile app was used to support relief measures for the Knysna fire disaster in South Africa. Since its go-live in June it has raised thousands of dollars for various causes and has 700 active downloads

An SAP Marketing team proves virtual reality is the perfect platform to demonstrate the company’s new solution portfolio supporting digital business.

Although SAP has strong market share and brand awareness, the company is often viewed in terms of traditional ERP rather than for its continuous innovation. A new idea was needed to highlight the combined strengths of SAP’s portfolio, including a strong focus on the digital core, SAP S/4HANA, and the SAP Leonardo digital innovation system.

Katja Mehl, head of Customer Experience at SAP, summed up the formidable task: “Our goal was to position SAP as an innovative leader in digital transformation and help customers better understand the value of our portfolio.”

The team knew from experience that the world of traditional marketing showcases and presentations is over.

“Customers want an immersive experience where they can explore things for themselves in a short amount of time and in a fun way,” said Heather Morrison, head of Innovation and Experience Marketing for EMEA and MEE at SAP. “We needed a big idea to change the perception of SAP and motivate customers to engage with the business potential of SAP’s new portfolio of solutions.”

Introducing the Virtual Reality Innovation Experience

The team decided to use cutting-edge technology to tell an end-to-end story from a pure customer standpoint, choosing virtual reality (VR) technology to immerse the customer into a scenario while demonstrating the power and benefit of a live business. “Using virtual reality for the first time in SAP marketing was a milestone and marks a starting point for an entirely new way of storytelling, customer interaction, and lead generation,” mentioned Mehl.

By using the example of global sportswear company adidas, the 3D VR showcase demonstrates how customers can benefit from SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo to reinvent, build, and run their business to win in the digital economy. The live scenario, called the VR Innovation Experience, was developed in a cross-functional team and in cooperation with adidas. In the VR, SAP CoPilot, a personal, artificial intelligence assistant, guides viewers through the experience — from sales and marketing to production, logistics, and finance.

Customers discover the production and launch of a smart, fully customizable, IoT-based, and sensor-embedded adidas sneaker with location-based tracking, haptic feedback, and sweat analysis. Each 3D-printed sneaker can be produced with a unique design and personalized materials. This way the viewer can understand the benefits of innovative technologies such as machine learning, blockchain, IoT, Big Data and analytics, and relevant services from an end-user perspective, like personal training plans, performance tracking, real-time coaching, and voice feedback, as well as dietary and health advice.

adidas was very pleased with the resulting scenario: Michael Vögele, CIO of the adidas Group, called it a “strong experience” and “a very complex and challenging project explained in a brilliant and new way.”

Challenges

The VR Innovation Experience Team brought colleagues from various disciplines together to work on one common goal. “Having many areas of the business and multiple team members work on a single storyline is complex,” explains Sebastian Pförtner, senior marketing manager, but he noted that everyone saw the power of combining our innovative solutions with customer collaboration. Pförtner stated several other risks: “Making the right decision on which solutions to integrate was a risk, especially with regards to emerging technologies. Using a new medium was a risk, too, as we did not know whether our customers would feel comfortable about sitting, watching, and interacting seven minutes or more while wearing VR glasses.”

One VR Scenario, Many Use Cases

The scenario was first presented at CEBIT 2017, and then went on to become an essential feature of more than 40 events globally. It can also be experienced at nearly all SAP Executive Briefing Center locations and customer experience centers worldwide. So far, well over 10,000 people have seen it and customer feedback has been extraordinary. “Many asked for the scenario to be set up and shown at their events and locations, which we now do regularly. Furthermore, we use it as showcase for sales meetings and to enable colleagues from other entities,” notes Pförtner.

Future Plans for the SAP VR Innovation Experience

The team sees the adidas showcase as a first step toward more immersive VR showcases enabling customers to play a more active role in determining and exploring a particular scenario. Two new scenarios with a focus on consumer goods personalization and digital supply chain are planned for release in March 2018.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission title: SAP VR Innovation Experience
Board area: Office of the CEO
Team: SAP VR Innovation Experience (Katja Mehl, Heather Morrison, Sebastian Pfoertner, Nemrude Verzano, Stefan Feickert, Klaus Burger)
Achievement: In partnership with adidas, the team created a virtual reality showcase that guides viewers through a smart company, from sales and marketing to production, logistics, and finance, showing how SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo can help customers reinvent their businesses.
Impact: The virtual showcase positions SAP as an innovative leader in digital transformation and helps customers better understand the value of SAP’s portfolio.

An SAP team behind conversational AI for procurement has set the course for a key component of the intelligent enterprise.

The intelligent enterprise represents what SAP Executive Board Member Bernd Leukert has called the second wave of digitalization. After the initial stage of concentrating on the best ways to capture, store, transmit, and process data, the focus is now shifting to proactive applications that can understand this data and respond to it with minimal or even no human interaction.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning lie at the heart of this development. Applications that can both independently learn from and handle requests from users are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Advances in technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and voice recognition are radically changing the way we live and work. Conversational capabilities allow people to communicate with machines, systems, things, and data through natural language, offering users an intelligent and interactive user experience.

From chatbots on the Internet to Apple’s intelligent personal assistant Siri or Google’s “OK, Google,” it has become the norm for many of us to communicate with technology almost as we would with other people.

And as with so many other trends before it, advanced human-machine interaction is expanding beyond the consumer tech world to provide business users with new ways of working. With a digital service agent efficiently handling, for example, simple IT- or procurement-related queries, the employee gains valuable time to focus on tasks that require more strategic thinking or creativity and provide greater value to their customers.

Transforming Procurement with Advanced Human-Machine Interaction

This was exactly what the Conversational AI for Procurement team was hoping to do when they took part in a chatbot hackathon organized in 2016 by Bayer, a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of health care and agriculture. Bayer was looking to simplify its procurement process guidance for employees and gave all the teams participating in the hackathon four weeks to develop a solution.

The power of the conversational technologies had the potential to significantly transform procurement at Bayer.

Till Pieper, general manager in the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning unit and team lead for the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award nomination, explains: “Bayer told us that it still takes them hours per employee to do a certain procurement process – to find the right information, to find the right policies behind a certain product category. But if you can ask free-form questions and you have very smart systems that can answer these questions in a very reliable way, it reduces the time from hours to minutes to get the job done. This is the real value of conversational AI.”

SAP Runs SAP

The team set about turning potential into reality with a chatbot that not only successfully dealt with complex procurement-related requests, but also actively guided the user by providing next-step to-do lists and links to required documentation. And it was not just its capabilities that led the jury to select the SAP team as the winner of the hackathon, beating fierce competition from many notable tech giants.

As Pieper explains: “We were asked by Bayer three times in the presentation ‘Which third-party framework did you use?’ We told them again and again we hadn’t used any third-party framework. We built it from scratch, which was great for them, and that’s why they picked us in the end.”

Cornerstone of SAP’s New Conversational Platform

The hackathon set the ball rolling for conversational capabilities at SAP. The lessons learned and the experience gained in this and other subsequent projects, such as the conversational booking system at HanaHaus in Palo Alto, essentially paved the way for the further development of this technology at SAP.

With the introduction of the new conversational platform, which offers state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing capabilities to help customers create intuitive conversational applications, SAP has set the course for a new generation of intelligent applications that offer role-based assistance specific to the user’s business context, recognize and learn from situations, and provide insights and suggestions for next steps.

For Pieper, the ultimate goal is clear: “The end vision for us is that systems learn how users work, without users having to learn how systems work.”

The A(I)-Team

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is not just about innovative new ideas; it’s also about how they are brought to life and the spirit behind them. The Products & Innovation Board Area selection committee, which consisted of a mixture of senior executives and subject matter experts, chose the Conversational AI for Procurement team from the dozens of nominations submitted exactly for this reason.

The nomination was not only extremely important in terms of its technology, but also because of the strong spirit of cross-board area innovation and entrepreneurial spirit that it exemplified.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission title: Conversational AI for Procurement
Board area: Products & Innovation
Team: Peter Weigt, Till Pieper, Karsten Schmidt, Anil Babu Ankisettipalli, Joaquin Garcia Fink, Piyush Chandra, Sajid Saiyed, Karthik Uppuluri, Frank Blechschmidt, Rene Springer, Sanjana Reddy, Megh Mehta, Akashdeep Singh Jaswal, Michael Erickson, and Nina Stawski
Achievement: Winning a four-week chatbot hackathon organized by German life sciences company Bayer. The team built the winning solution, which used conversational capabilities to simplify procurement processes, from scratch.
Impact: The lessons learned and experience gained through the Conversational AI for Procurement project have directly influenced the technology’s use across the SAP portfolio and played a crucial role in establishing SAP’s new machine learning platform with conversational capabilities.

Delivering customer value at its best, the SAP Transformation Navigator team has won the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award, SAP’s prestigious annual award for entrepreneurial achievement by employees.

It’s hard to think of a tool that has enjoyed quite such an enthusiastic reception from SAP customers as SAP Transformation Navigator, which helps customers chart their transition to an SAP S/4HANA-centric environment.

As well as extolling its value and intuitive design, CIOs are excited about SAP Transformation Navigator’s ability to accelerate the decision-making process. “This will save me ten weeks of discussions at my company,” says one. What’s more: SAP Transformation Navigator takes planning reliability to a new level. “This tool gives us a much broader planning horizon,” says Erwin Tien, a manager at Dow Chemical.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP,
awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Even the notoriously critical SAP user groups have been quick to recognize the tool’s benefits. In an email to Bill McDermott and Rob Enslin, Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) CEO Geoff Scott wrote, “I can report that our testers are very enthusiastic about the tool. We are highly confident that it will help customers gain a better understanding of road maps.”

SAP Transformation Navigator helps customers chart their transition to an SAP S/4HANA-centric environment

Analysts also acknowledge the value of SAP Transformation Navigator, with IDC commenting, “SAP is the only company providing a tool of this kind that offers its customers so much transparency.”

The SAP Executive Board’s reason for its choice of this year’s award-winner sums up the tool’s value in a nutshell: “Through SAP Transformation Navigator, SAP is giving its customers clear guidance on achieving an S/4HANA-centric landscape. In a short amount of time, the team transformed customer criticism into a tool valued by SAP users and viewed by analysts as a competitive advantage for the company.”

The Road to SAP S/4HANA

In essence, SAP Transformation Navigator provides a detailed guide for the journey to the digital world. Based on the customer’s current implementation, this free, self-service tool delivers proposals for assembling the best possible solution portfolio for a future SAP S/4HANA-centric environment, while factoring in all the products, industries, and lines of business at hand. The result is a tailored product selection – based on the current SAP road maps – that serves as the starting point for further steps and discussions about the customer’s digital future.

The motivation to develop the tool came from customers, who wanted more guidance from SAP.

“The feedback from our customers was clear: They liked the idea of digital transformation and a digital framework, but they wanted us to tell them exactly what they should do, as well as why and how,” recalls project lead Cornelius Clauser from Digital Business Services, who led the interdisciplinary project team.

Central to the project’s success was the feedback gathered from key SAP users, which was channeled into development work as the project progressed. The project team also held numerous design thinking workshops with companies, which in turn triggered more in-depth discussions.

To date, more than 18,000 users have worked with SAP Transformation Navigator. Speaking at the SAP Global Service & Support Kick-Off Meeting in Frankfurt, Michael Kleinemeier, member of the Exectuive Board and head of the SAP Digital Business Services organization, pointed to the growing importance of the tool for project work. He reported that, to date, more than 9,000 tailored customer road maps have been created.

With demand for SAP S/4HANA implementations remaining strong, SAP Transformation Navigator looks set to keep on writing its already impressive success story.

In the words of project team member Tilman Goettke, “This tool is revolutionizing the way we talk to customers about their digital transformations.”

“SAP Runs SAP”: How one team rose to the challenge of moving from a highly customized on-premise ERP system to highly standardized cloud solution. Meet the HR finalist for this years’ Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award.

It’s August 2018 and the first large-scale enterprise is migrating its HR processes to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central running on SAP HANA. It’s the moment of truth in a mammoth project that will affect some 95,000 employees in 74 countries. Who is this customer? None other than SAP.

The goal of the project is to drive SAP’s own digital transformation and pave the way for the HR organization to play its full part in the Intelligent Enterprise. As part of this effort, the team was able to redefine and standardize more than 70 HR processes.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central does more than simply expand on the features already available to SAP employees. It makes processes simpler for employees and managers alike, and it’s a powerful showcase for potential external customers.

Roadblocks Large and Small

It has not been an easy ride for the project team. But setbacks are part of the process, parcel of innovation, and part of projects of this scale — “especially if your project is the largest of its kind to date and you have no-one else’s experience to draw on,” says Claudia Heneka, HR project manager for HR Goes Cloud in HR Core.

Andreas Kahlen, IT project manager for HR Goes Cloud in HR Core, agrees: “This is a highly complex implementation because of the many different countries involved, their local and legal entities, the sheer size of the workforce, and the scale of processes and data volumes that inevitably result from that. What we’re doing here is replacing internal processes that SAP has developed and honed over two decades. This poses challenges at many levels.”

For example, one of the unforeseeable challenges that took a while to sort out occurred with data migration and data validation. Some roadblocks slowed progress more than expected and meant that the project schedule had to be both fluid and flexible.

Optimization: Customer First

The team puts a positive slant on challenges like this. “If we can identify and smooth out the bumps at SAP first, then our external customers won’t experience them down the line,” says Ralph Schneider, program manager for HR Goes Cloud.

By running the software in a real working environment, the team was able to solve issues and refine processes from the start, thereby relieving customers of tedious maintenance work later on. “That’s why Formula One cars are tested on real race tracks before they compete in a Grand Prix. In effect, we are all test drivers for SAP,” adds Schneider.

Teamwork at its Best

The team working on this major project is a highly virtual one, with members spread across more than 19 locations worldwide. Many of them will meet face to face for the first time when the winner of the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is announced. “We needed a broad range of skills for this project. And it was only by working with diverse SAP talent all over the world that we were able to get the result we wanted,” says Schneider.

So how — despite the challenges — did the team succeed in implementing the project on time? Heneka’s response speaks to pure perseverance: “Giving up wasn’t an option. We were all part of one team. We never lost sight of our goal, and we remained disciplined and focused. If something didn’t work, we looked for a solution and just kept on going.”

What’s Next?

Since the go-live, more potential improvements have been identified. Armed with feedback from their colleagues, the project team is now focusing on continuous optimization, thus ensuring that that there will be scope for more simplification and innovation in the future.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: HR CORE Project – SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Implementation
Board Area: Human Resources
Team: HR Core project team; 20 project team members representing the entire HR goes Cloud HR Core project team
Achievement: The team managed to move from a highly customized on-premise ERP system to highly standardized cloud solution offering the same set of functionalities and minimized country specific legal deviations. SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central introduces global standardization to HR processes, reducing over 1,300 data fields (more than 20 percent) and standardizing more than 70 process flows. About 95,000 employees (13 scenarios) and managers (25 scenarios) can now use self-service features.
Impact: For HR, the team has built the foundation for faster cycles of cloud innovation by being live on SuccessFactors Cloud modules, and is now an important showcase for other large enterprise customers. This helps support customers in their migration to the HCM cloud.

Take a stroll through the scenic project “Gardener” and the “develop once, run anywhere” philosophy at the heart of SAP Cloud Platform.

Catching up with members of the project “Gardener” team for an informal coffee is to meet them in their element. Coffee and tech-talk flow in abundance and the energy with which the team talks about the topic is as infectious as it is confusing for non-techies.

But don’t be fooled by the informal banter; project “Gardener” is serious business, and it has fundamentally changed the cloud technology that underpins SAP’s vision for the Intelligent Enterprise.

The smarts behind project “Gardener” can be found in the nebulous world of open source technologies and in particular Kubernetes, an open-source platform run by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

In early 2017, a team of four SAP Cloud Platform experts got together with the mission to tackle issues that SAP was having in the machine rooms of the cloud platform. They headed off to KubeCon and CloudNativeCon — think ComicCon for techies — for inspiration, after which, in the words of the team: “We smelled gold!” in Kubernetes.

The team was convinced that Kubernetes would solve the original issue, but the ‘eureka’ moment was realizing that there was so much more to the technology. By fully implementing Kubernetes — essentially making this open-source technology SAP’s de-facto cloud integration layer — SAP would not waste time reinventing what Kubernetes already provides.

It would eliminate the need for years of catch-up development time, eliminate third-party provisioning tools, and ultimately reduce integration complexity and costs.

After selling the idea to management (a story of its own), the quickly-growing team launched “Gardener” as an open-source SAP project on GitHub, a web-based hosting service for open source software. Developing “in the open” is not something SAP often does, but the team was convinced.

It was a good call: To date the project has amassed more than 700 GitHub stars, has been prominently listed on the CNCFs homepage as “one of the most influencing […] frameworks,” and inspired fan-art. All of this in connection with SAP software.

The Kubernetes-as-a-Service/project “Gardener” approach that the team came up with enables SAP to leapfrog the industry trend toward hyperscale cloud providers, and empower private clouds for Mode 2 software development, referring to software platforms that support customers’ transitions into new and disruptive business applications. And that’s huge! Competitors are spending billions to acquire what SAP has with project “Gardener.”

Now customers can do business with SAP no matter what they’ve bought in the past and what their current IT landscape looks like. Using project “Gardener” and open source, customers can adapt and send applications/compute to where the data resides, or data gravity.

At the end of the day, this is a story about a team so well-versed in their expertise that they saw beyond the original task. The team understood the pain points of SAP Customers, changed the technical integration layer at the heart of SAP software, and had the tenacity to sell the idea both internally and then to the broader open-source community. All while having a bit of fun.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: Project “Gardener” – Kubernetes Botanist of SAP Cloud Platform
SAP Board Area: Products & Innovation
Team: SAP Cloud Platform Kubernetes Core Team
Number of employees: 20 (Andreas Burger, Vasu Chandrasekhara, Christian Cwienk, Hardik Dodiya, Rafael Franzke, Andreas Fritzler, Andreas Herz, Amshuman Rao Karaya, Dominic Kistner, Uwe Krueger, Holger Koser, George Kuruvilla, Vedran Lerenc, Markus Liepold, Dirk Marwinski, Swapnil Mhamane, Prashanth, Juergen Schneider, Sebastian Stauch, Martin Vladev)
Achievement: The team has developed a way of managing cloud-native Kubernetes clusters at scale to realize SAP’s vision for the Intelligent Enterprise — develop once, run anywhere — for all new SAP business services and applications, that is independent of the IaaS-provider.
Impact: Project “Gardener” resets the cloud landscape by providing the hybrid multi-cloud capabilities of Kubernetes-as-a-Service — to SAP and to partners and customers. For SAP, this opens the opportunity to provide cloud-native applications to customers without forcing them to commit to a specific hyper cloud vendor.

Learn More:

Last year, the SAP Digital Business Services organization won the 2017 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award with SAP Transformation Navigator. This year, their hopes of winning the coveted award again rest on “Digital Support Experience (DSX) built-in support.”

The inspiration for creating built-in support came from the ticketing process. SAP’s Josef Schmidt and his team had long been unhappy about the complicated process customers had to go through to report a support incident. Not only did they have to supply a raft of technical information, but they also had to navigate the application component hierarchy (ACH) and select the correct component.

“This unnecessary complexity was the motivation for our team to fundamentally improve the support experience by enabling built-in support,” says Schmidt. For example, customer data is collected and saved automatically as contextual information so that customers no longer have to enter additional details — an important first step on the way to a positive customer experience.

DSX Built-In Support Knows the Best Route

At the heart of built-in support is an intelligent chatbot called DSXbot, which has been integrated into the user interface of SAP CoPilot. When SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers open the SAP CoPilot user interface — which they can do directly from an active application — the support chatbot guides them to the materials and sources they need to answer their questions.

To do this, the DSXbot relies on the conversational artificial intelligence (AI) services of SAP Leonardo, using natural language processing (NLP) technology to select the right route, in much the same way as a vehicle’s navigation system. Other forms of multi-modal interaction, including gesture control, are planned for the future.

This new built-in support means that users can locate and contact experienced key users at their own company. In the future, they will also be able to interact with support specialists at SAP in real time if needed – in chat sessions, known as Expert Chats, enabled by the platform’s underlying microservices architecture. In a nutshell, built-in support aims to offer customers the most efficient ways to link up with specialists to solve their issues. Of course, they can still opt to enter a ticket in a form-based UI if they wish.

DSX built-in support went live with release 1805 of SAP S/4HANA Cloud in May of this year. The integration of the SAP Integrated Business Planning solution took place in release 1811, and work is also under way to connect SAP SuccessFactors software. The ultimate aim is to equip all the products in the intelligent enterprise suite from SAP with built-in support.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: Moving Intelligent customer support into our products: DSX – Built in Support
Board Area: Digital Business Services
Team: Digital Support Experience Platform (DSX Team)
Number of Employees: 19 — Josef Schmidt, Kathrin Appel, Nikolay Dimitrov, Alexander Gahr, Michael Rautschka, Li Xu, Lars Riecke, Chen Fuxin, Chen Zhong, Kuiyou Hu, Yang Liu, Angel Qian, Banks Sun, Selena Yang, James You, Dylan You, King Chen, Venkatesh Damodar Pai, Taimur Ali Khan.
Achievement: Built-in support provides customers with direct in-solution access to support through an intelligent digital assistant and represents a fundamental shift in how SAP Support interacts with customers in the cloud business. It radically simplifies the process of requesting help and resolving the issue through machine learning, sophisticated intent-matching features, and context-sensitive knowledge that provides personalized support.
Impact: Built-in support improves SAP’s relationships with customers, positively influencing the experience of the user by quickly providing relevant assistance to the search of a resolution of an incident.

An intrapreneur startup has been nominated for the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award.

The team is living the dream of startups everywhere: Its product is a hit, with more than 16,000 users currently in more than 1,700 different organizations, and that number is growing daily. An already successful 2018 is drawing to a close on a double high. In addition to making it onto the SAP price list, the team’s product has also been nominated as a finalist for the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award. To whom are we referring? The Ruum team from the Office of the CEO Board area.

The Ruum by SAP solution is an easy-to-use task management tool for teams. Its super-lightweight project management workspace integrates with a company’s business processes and a built-in digital assistant takes care of informing and following up with team members. On ruumapp.com, teams can register for the tool in seconds and start working with it right away — a basic version is available free of charge.

Teamwork Through and Through

Simplifying teamwork in the enterprise was the mission from day one. That goal brought together Florian Frey and Stefan Ritter in 2016 in the SAP.iO Venture Studio, where they built a solution that links business processes and back-office systems to communication and teamwork tools.

Frey and Ritter completed their first prototype in just four months and began to vigorously recruit users. With an initial target of garnering 10 new active users per week, they actually attracted a total of more than 16,000 internal and external users in just two years.

Frey gives an example of how Ruum is being used at SAP right now: “We have set up integration with SAP Sales Cloud so that sales teams can create a project workspace for each of their deals with a single click. Even aligning with external customers and partners is simple. Our bot handles project management and syncs everything back into CRM automatically. What we regularly hear from users – in sales particularly – is that they are able to reduce their email volume and alignment meetings by half.”

With user numbers growing rapidly, the Ruum team expanded gradually, operating as an independent startup within SAP with the motto “diversity drives innovation.” Although the eight women and seven men on the team work in Berlin, they hail from across the world. But when there are difficult decisions to make, they operate as united team.

Personal Contact with Users

When asked to name their strong points, the team cites their entrepreneurial mindset and obsession with the customer.

“We want to make it as easy as possible for our users to interact with us so that we always know precisely what they need,” explains Frey. Right from the start, close contact with users was paramount and immense importance was attached to phone conversations and open feedback meetings. The stream of feedback shows no signs of running dry: Team members report enthusiastically on the ‘user love,’ as they call it, that reaches them several times a day.

For the Ruum team, there is no substitute for being in constant contact with users. Any feedback entered in a chat window in Ruum is pushed to each team member’s cell phone to trigger a live chat. “We’re ready to do whatever it takes to make our customers successful,” says Ritter.

Exciting Future Ahead for Ruum

Ruum manages the balancing act between complex business processes and lightweight project collaboration, explains Ritter, summing up the application’s business potential. The market for such tools is competitive, he concedes, but Ruum is superior in many respects. “No-one else offers a solution that is so integrated and yet so easy to use,” he says. The application is also ideally positioned within SAP, adds Frey.

True to the pitch that Ruum is the “home of all your work,” its originators are clear about their aspirations for this cloud solution. “We want to be the collaboration cloud for all SAP products,” says Ritter.

Fun fact! If you’re wondering about the tool’s unusual name, the team found it on indifferentlanguages.com: “Ruum” is Estonian for “space.”

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: Ruum by SAP
Board Area: Office of the CEO
Team: Florian Frey, Josefine Harzmann, Stefan Ritter, Matthias Stegmüller, Felipe Bortolon Taiarol.
The extended project team includes Vidyashree Basavaraju, Rafael Frank, Valentin Gerlach, Alban Nocaj, Michael Rebitzki-Vennhoff, Diana Rösner, Paulina Rosin, Johannes Rupieper, Dorothee Schulze, Andrii Serputko, Iulia Shkatova, Stephanie Taiwo.
Achievement: Building and growing a ‘freemium’ SaaS product from scratch to more than 16,000 users from 1,700 companies; delivering 11 integrations with SAP solutions.
Impact: Connecting teamwork with business processes and bringing SAP to the front office.

Red, yellow, green: Closing a deal can be as simple as driving a car. Under the hood, a modern car is very complex, yet it is easy to use. Nowadays many cars can even warn us when something is wrong. No warning lights on the dashboard means that all is good, but when the light turns red, we know we must get to the nearest garage and find out what needs to be fixed.

The nominees for the 2018 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award from the Global Finance & Administration Board Area did not have cars in mind when designing the Deal Health Index, but they did follow this same logic. When a deal is entered in the quoting system, the default status is marked as green. But as the deal cycle moves forward and potential risks become visible, this can change. The deal – or more precisely, the health of the deal – can turn yellow, or even red.

The Deal Health Index looks at different components of a deal and functions as a safety warning in the deal approval process. It assesses and alerts account executives of various financial, legal, and operational risks. With these tools, sales employees can make quick decisions and experts can assess potential problems more effectively and undertake fixes. They can consult with business partners and make rapid decisions about approving a deal across different levels of the organization.

Robin Manherz led the Commercial Finance Team when the Deal Health Index was ideated and remembers the factors that inspired the team: “There were a couple of triggers for us to work on this topic. We got feedback from stakeholders and executives across the organization that the deal support process was very cumbersome, involving many people. This feedback coincided with the decision to implement a new quoting system as part of the Simplify Selling program.”

As part of the Simplify Selling program, a workstream was created with members of the commercial team and the sales operations team in order to improve deal efficiency. Reassessing turned into rethinking, and from there the team developed the idea into something bigger. With the same boldness that moved SAP into the cloud, the team began to integrate new business principles and an entrepreneurial spirit into their project.

In recent years, the Deal Health Index has evolved into the rapid, agile deal assessment process it is today, empowering stakeholders across SAP. Sales teams now have easy access to their deals’ health information. They can make informed and efficient decisions based on the health of a deal and clearly assess any associated risks. The Deal Health Index even gives recommendations on what to do when a deal is not “green.”

Customers can also be kept up-to-date quickly about the status of their deal. Meanwhile, finance teams have seen significant decrease in manual efforts and have a more modern, effective, and transparent insight into deal cycles.

The Deal Health Index is already live across 82 different market units and has been used by 2,500 employees in sales, resulting in nearly 4,000 customer quotes so far. Joel Bernstein, chief financial officer of Global Customer Operations and head of Global Field Finance at SAP, said, “What the Deal Health Index team pulled off is truly amazing. They were instrumental in making this change happen across SAP, so we do better business for ourselves and for our customers.

When asked about the one thing she would like SAP employees to take away from this project, Robin Manherz explains, “As stewards of the company, we feel it’s important everyone has SAP’s best interest at heart while balancing the requirements of our customers. As transformation agents, we took it upon ourselves to simplify aligning this balance, thus improving the productivity of our people and the quality of our transactions”

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: Deal Health Index
Board Area: Global Finance & Administration
Number of Employees: 10
Achievement: Deal Health Index is a risk-assessment process that measures deal health and offers those involved in deal transactions detailed information about the commercial and financial health of each deal. The approach fundamentally changes how rapidly and effectively business and back-office teams respond to and meet customer needs, helping increase transparency of sales and predictability of deal approvals among internal and external customers.
Impact: Deal Health Index is a radical new approach to evaluating sales engagement, shifting how we engage in compliant transactions, optimizing the time and resources invested in operations, and refining our financial performance. By reducing risks and automating business processes, Deal Health Index increases SAP’s focus on solution adoption and customer retention.

With more than $2.6 trillion of global commerce annually transacted on the SAP Business Network, it is no exaggeration to say that SAP is the technological center of global B2B commerce. It is also uniquely positioned to understand not just how a network operates but why it operates the way it does.

The SAP Business Network team developed a better way to help customers by integrating SAP data across systems and across companies to build the most complete view of global B2B commerce ever constructed.

As the digital era gives way to the intelligence era, customers are turning their focus from process automation to decision automation. “Every company has data, but not every company has the context to drive intelligent decisions,” says Darren Koch, chief product officer at SAP Ariba and SAP Business Network team lead.

SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Concur networks bring the solutions — and the data and capabilities — together to help customers as a precursor to the Intelligent Enterprise conversation.

It changes the game for SAP customers by expanding the scope of available data to outside the four walls of an organization – including data from financial markets, transportation systems, and weather systems.

By enabling a unified data management system that integrates data across internal and external sources, SAP provides the foundation upon which the intelligent suite can be built. Bringing the data together helps ensure that the systems talk to each other, and an artificial intelligence engine defines the next steps in the process, develops a decision, or delivers a solution.

To maximize the value of such a robust data set, SAP exposes this data as a platform service in SAP Cloud Platform. This means that SAP applications, the SAP developer ecosystem, and SAP customers can leverage it to provide innovative products and solutions that meet the ever-changing needs of SAP’s global customer base.

But in the era of GDPR, sharing data also has its challenges too. The team had to navigate data privacy laws and varying legal entities to drive the project forward. The open platform — comprised of SAP HANA and Orient DB, an open source project from Callidus, as well as AWS and other technologies — serves as the backbone and allows for the scalable technology.

According to Henry Tsai, vice president of SAP Business Network, “Our partners get it immediately. In the spend management or the process automation space, this is gold for them. They can easily layer their product on top.”

Koch attributes the success of the project to the team. “It’s a unicorn project. There is an amazing value proposition, amazing support from leadership, and tremendous people working on this,” he says. “We went from a whiteboard 18 months ago to something that can change the company and make us a market leader for the next 25 years. There is something special going on.”

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: SAP Business Network: Enabling the Intelligent Enterprise and Beyond
Board Area: Cloud Business Group
Team: Darren Koch (lead), Quincy Milton, Henry Tsai, Jay Mandal, Jose Contreras, John Dixon, Adam Horacek, Tomas Visnovec, Matus Horvath
Number of employees: Nine
Achievement: What makes the SAP Business Network so extraordinary, aside from the ability to integrate data from disparate systems, is the context it creates for the events that feed into the platform helping to make intelligent decisions.

Put the customer at the center of everything: The New Customer eXperience team took this to heart and flipped the script on how SAP works with customers.

Last year at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP CEO Bill McDermott shared how the company would deliver on its promise to help organizations across the world be best-run businesses by putting the customer first.

As a team of dreamers, the New Customer eXperience team made the promise a reality. The dream they shared became the Immersive Experience approach, formerly known as SAPCity. This new engagement model was created in less than 90 days, and brings together SAP solutions, consumer experience, and virtual reality in a tangible way to redefine how to put the customer first.

Immersive Experience Reimagines How SAP Engages with Customers

As a first step, the team conducted deep-dive sessions to learn how to lead with an “outside-in” view.

“We worked with theme parks, TV companies, and theater companies to understand what makes a memorable consumer experience,” said Helle Dochedahl, who heads up Presales and the Center of Excellence EMEA South at SAP.

Making an experience begin before a person enters the room seems simple enough, but the team also had to consider keeping that excitement going the entire time customers were in the room.

“You can literally beam customers into the future of their workplace,” Angelique de Vries said. “It could be a future workplace, inside their production hall, or shop. You can take them by the hand and show them how they can get there.”

Immersive Experience is more than a conference room; it’s a 360-degree view of how business can be run, from past to present to future. The best part? One does not have to be in the room to be engaged. “If you want to connect somebody from the other side of the ocean, you can do this too,” said Tom Scaysbrook, senior presales specialist for SAP EMEA North.

Immersive Experience is equipped with the latest technology, such as voice recognition, which results in a high “touch and feel” approach. What’s more, Immersive Experience is scalable, flexible, and can adapt to the needs of the customer — all by reusing content and materials from previous customer meetings.

“That means a sales person in the retail space can build upon what other customers are doing in the same vertical,” explained Mark Raben, CTO of SAP MEE. “They’re able to build ‘a day in a life,’ for example, and really bring it to life using our software solutions.”

Embracing a “Can Do” Attitude

To research, develop, and implement a project like the Immersive Experience approach in quick order required the team embrace change in the broadest sense of the word.

“We felt like a startup within SAP,” said Susanne Vollhardt, head of Solution Management for Machine Learning at SAP. “We brought a team together from different board areas and embraced that ‘can do’ attitude.”

When asked about the value Immersive Experience brings to customers, Nicole Burhenne, vice president of Strategic Programs for SAP Digital Core, said: “Customers see a different SAP. We are able to explain complex topics in a simple and personalized way and guide our customers on their intelligent enterprise journey. And our customers appreciate the clarity.”

The Immersive Experience is delivering collaboration and experimentation to different venues across the globe, from Building 21 at SAP headquarters in Walldorf to the Intelligent Enterprise truck that traveled across Europe, as well as to the SAP SuccessConnect events in Berlin and Las Vegas. This year, the Immersive Experience will be available SAP offices in New York City, Newtown Square, and Palo Alto.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: Immersive Experience, Revolutionizing Our Customer Experience Experience
Board Area: Global Customer Operations
Team: The dynamic team was comprised of colleagues from across SAP, including Angelique de Vries, Susanne Vollhardt, Dr. Mark von Kopp, Swetlana Zimmermann, Janja Antic, Thomas Scaysbrook, Cristina Ricaurte, Marcus Raben, Claire Lauper , Katy Lion, Isabel Kremers, Jill Irvine, Martin Elsner, Helle Dochedahl, Nicole Burhenne.
Achievement: Taking a design thinking approach and learning from other industries, the team created the Immersive Experience in just 90 days.
Impact: From February to June 2018, more than 150 customer sessions were hosted, demonstrating a clear impact to SAP’s business. The team can host more personalized customer-focused sessions and enable visitors to visualize our content better, as well as increase efficiency and meet customer demand.

Imagine a machine that needs repair. In the classical enterprise resource planning (ERP world), a service technician would read data from this machine, log on to the SAP system, and enter the request “spare part needed.”

However, as many SAP customers digitize, now many of these machines can report errors, like the need for a new spare part, themselves. But if the request is processed in a system without any human interaction, how can SAP charge for it in a reasonable and fair way?

“User-based charging is not a realistic approach anymore in the digital world,” explains Uwe Grigoleit, project lead for SAP S/4HANA.

Over the past year, a cross-functional team at SAP has developed a new pricing model for the use of SAP S/4HANA by devices and third-party applications rather than human beings.

The Digital Access Model

The newly created Digital Access Model gives customers the commercial clarity and predictability needed to innovate around digital technologies with SAP ERP and simplifies an extremely important component of their decision-making processes.

Based on a defined set of transactions — called ‘documents’ — in the ERP system, SAP no longer charges for the number of parties—humans, devices, etc.—accessing the system. Charges are instead outcome-based, a first-of-its-kind model.

“Of course, you could provide every machine or IoT device in the company with its own user,” Grigoleit says. “But this is not feasible with hundreds or thousands of machines and devices. We are now charging our customers for the business usage of the system; they only pay when the system is working for them, processing transactions. This is the fundamental idea of the Digital Access Model.”

A Cross-Team effort

The team that developed the new model included employees from across the company—from Pricing to Solution Management, Development, Sales, Contracts and Legal, and License Audit.

“The best thing about working on this project? Our great cross-functional team!” says Sonya Swann, project lead for Corporate Pricing. We were able to put all our internal differences aside and truly focus on the best outcome for our customers.”

In order to develop the new model, the team had to address the risks of revenues loss, market readiness, and potential effects on SAP’s credibility. Nevertheless, they were convinced these hurdles could be overcome: “We are not just reacting to our customers’ demands anymore but addressing them head on with an innovative and industry-leading approach,” Swann said.

Is It Paying Off?

User groups, analysts, and influencers have recognized the efforts. While previous user models were perceived as non-transparent, unpredictable, and inconsistent, the new pricing model makes it easier to use and pay for SAP software licenses. In developing the model, the team reached out to a variety of experts across SAP and collaborated with external stakeholders, including key user groups and industry analysts.

Since its introduction in April, the new model has generated over €90 million of revenue and 800 transactions with a very strong pipeline. The model also makes daily life easier for SAP colleagues in Sales because the new model replaces individual negotiations by clearly defining what is charged for.

“This is not the end of a very long project, it is the beginning,” predicts team member Joseph LaRosa, vice president of Strategic Pricing and Commercialization.

“In the era of digital transformation, and after having listened carefully to our customers, we believe that an adjustment to our offerings was necessary. With the new pricing and licensing model, we can now provide even more transparency, predictability, and consistency. I trust that these aspects will encourage our customers to continue to invest in digital business models.”

– Christian Klein, chief operating officer and
member of the Executive Board of SAP SE,
Intelligent Enterprise Group

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: Commercial Innovation for the Digital Age
Board area: Global Business Operations / Intelligent Enterprise Group
Team: 18 employees – Sonya Swann, Vishnu Arcot, Joseph LaRosa, Brian Earp, Sunil Gupta, Uwe Grigoleit, Dirk Kaestner, Xiaohua Wang, Ulrike Raidl, Mani Pirouz, Maribel Young, Matthias Medert, Mark Govannicci, James Prest Jr, Eckhard Farrenkopf, Norbert Nowak, Yasmin Awad
Impact: The impact of the Digital Access Model is reflected in endorsement from user groups and customers, positive reviews from analysts and influencers, and nearly €90 million revenue since its introduction. The extremely collaborative approach has helped SAP win customer trust.

The 2018 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award has been won by Immersive Experience from the Global Customer Operations board area.

2018 Hasso Plattner Founders' Award Winners — *Immersive Experience team wins the 2018 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award.*

SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced the winning team and greeted them onstage during a global employee meeting in January.

SAP Executive Board Member Adaire Fox-Martin, Global Customer Operations, was also present to congratulate the team: “I am so proud of the Immersive Experience team. I know that they threw their heart and soul into this initiative. It is already making a difference to SAP customers as we demonstrate, in an immersive and experiential way, the opportunities our products provide to achieve the business outcomes and the business value they desire.”

Comprising employees from across the company, the cross-functional, 15-person strong team developed a new way to engage with customers using a Design Thinking approach and learning from other industries such as theme parks, broadcasting, and theater companies.

Immersive Experience is far more than just a conference room. Using advanced touch and display technologies and customized content, it provides a 360-degree view of how an intelligent business could be run and aims to immerse customers in their own story. By putting its visitors in the middle of this experience, they reimagine the customer engagement and touch their visitor’s hearts in an innovative and memorable fashion.

The Immersive Experience concept is scalable, flexible, and can adapt to the needs of any customer. It helps them to visualize the impact of SAP solutions on their businesses more easily and run their operations using technology tools like SAP Digital Boardroom.

More than 150 personalized customer sessions were hosted in the Immersive Experience room in Walldorf from February to June 2018.

“Immersive Experience is for everybody,” said Angelique de Vries, project lead for Immersive Experience and head of Global Presales and Solution Experience at SAP. “Winning the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is so amazing. It inspires us to constantly drive for innovation. Working with such a talented team makes it so much fun and this creates the success.”

To celebrate, the team was not only awarded with the trophy, but also received a €10,000 donation check for a social project of their choice. They decided on TechGirlz, a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce the gender gap in technology occupations. The team chose the project to enable this nonprofit to follow their innovation path and foster innovation – just as they did.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

SAP TV Senior Correspondent Megan Meany has all the SAP and tech news headlines for the week of April 27, 2015.

This week’s news, insights and updates include the second annual Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award; the debut of the new SAP Sports One solution; countdown to SAPPHIRE NOW; and more.

Watch all episodes of The Spin.

With the new Zero Downtime Option, SAP is delivering a groundbreaking concept for the future of software maintenance.

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A new team lead

Customer and partner interest

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This story originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.

Six months after winning SAP’s prestigious innovation award, AribaPay continues to spark the digital B2B payment transformation.

The Little Payment Engine that Could

Picking Up Steam

Changing the Game

Changing Lives

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

A new test-automation-as-a-service platform helps certify cloud products with less effort, greater confidence, and higher speed.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

When you think of legal departments, do you think of rigid processes and bone-dry text? Think again. The intrapreneurs from Global Finance & Administration (GFA) at SAP are generating true value for customers.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

A mobile application initiated by SAP’s sales organization helps raise funds for disaster relief services in Africa and around the world.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

An SAP Marketing team proves virtual reality is the perfect platform to demonstrate the company’s new solution portfolio supporting digital business.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

An SAP team behind conversational AI for procurement has set the course for a key component of the intelligent enterprise.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Delivering customer value at its best, the SAP Transformation Navigator team has won the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award, SAP’s prestigious annual award for entrepreneurial achievement by employees.

Roadblocks Large and Small

Optimization: Customer First

Teamwork at its Best

What’s Next?

DSX Built-In Support Knows the Best Route

Teamwork Through and Through

Personal Contact with Users

Exciting Future Ahead for Ruum

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Immersive Experience Reimagines How SAP Engages with Customers

Embracing a “Can Do” Attitude

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

The Digital Access Model

A Cross-Team effort

Is It Paying Off?

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Watch all episodes of The Spin.

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