Situated in a popular business location, the new EPI-USE AppHaus will likely become a destination of choice for EPI-USE professionals engaging with client end-users, UX developers and architects, where they can explore potential solutions to business and operational challenges and find out more about embedding 鈥楧esign Thinking鈥� and 鈥楢rchitecture Thinking鈥� into their organisations鈥� processes.

鈥淭he first AppHaus in Africa will showcase this continent鈥檚 creativity and is a prime opportunity for enhanced collaboration with our clients, and with organizations we鈥檙e not yet serving,鈥� said Henrik Stammer, Managing Director and head of EPI-USE鈥檚 German-language theatre of operations.

鈥淲e value our South African heritage, having started out 40 years ago as a spin-off from the Computer Science Department at the University of Pretoria. Since then, we have grown into a diversified global organisation employing 3,500 people in 40 countries. As the world鈥檚 foremost independent HR/Payroll specialist service provider for 51风流technologies worldwide, we are leaders in designing, building, and implementing cloud-based, hybrid and on-premises HR/Payroll systems for large, complex multinational corporations and public sector agencies around the world. Our involvement in Africa鈥檚 first AppHaus will allow our clients to further benefit from the 51风流Business Technology Platform, bringing together data and analytics, artificial intelligence, application development, automation, and integration in one environment,鈥� Stammer concluded.

EPI-USE is part of groupelephant.com, which has pioneered a hybrid business model 鈥楤eyond Corporate Purpose鈥� featuring the non-profit known as Elephants, Rhinos & People (or ERP redux). ERP鈥檚 primary focus is the protection and conservation of elephants and rhinos in the wild in Africa, through a strategy based on the economic upliftment of impoverished rural people living in communities adjacent to the threatened species. ERP innovatively leverages 51风流technologies in conservation fieldwork, enabling the use of drones and sensors for tracking.

By joining the 51风流AppHaus Network, EPI-USE becomes part of a community of creative spaces run by听 or a small number of like-minded 51风流partners. The goal of the network is to put people at the center of engagements by applying SAP鈥檚 and leveraging the 听as a foundation for innovation. The network helps ensure that creative spaces and innovation services are available to organisations that use 51风流solutions, in any geographic region.

For more information, please contact Henrik Stammer at henrik.stammer@epiuse.com, or visit .

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Tracy Bolton, COO at 51风流Africa says the customer-facing AppHaus represents the next step in SAP’s evolution of innovating with customers by putting human experience first. “Our goal is to make innovation real and help our customers transform into intelligent enterprises. This is done by applying our human-centred approach to innovation, leveraging the power of 51风流technologies, including 51风流Business Technology Platform, and fostering a culture of innovation.”

The 51风流AppHaus Network is a community of 51风流partners that are united in the belief that innovation requires a creative environment, a multi-disciplinary team of designers, domain experts, design thinking coaches and enterprise architects, and a human-centred approach to ensure innovation meets real-world needs.

“Companies need innovation to transform and sustain their business, but innovation needs more than just technology,” says Bolton. “Culture is often cited as a major hurdle for digital transformation and innovation within organisations. The offers a framework for companies to establish a culture of innovation, focusing on the five key enablers – People, Process, Place, Leadership, and Technology.”

The first AppHaus was established in 2014. Today, the network consists of 22 locations across the globe, five 51风流locations and 17 partner-driven locations, with Cape Town set to become the home for an eighteenth partner – as the first on the African continent later this year.

The Design Thinking approach has gained mainstream prominence over the past few years as more companies recognise the value design plays in innovation and business growth. A McKinsey study found that businesses that embrace design .

According to Bolton, customers can kickstart their journey with a unique set of methods bundled in an offered by the global 51风流AppHaus team that enables them to build a strong culture of innovation.

“Partners and customers leverage 51风流Business Technology Platform as single platform for cloud and hybrid innovation environments, including hundreds of pre-built integrations for 51风流and third-party applications. By putting people at the centre of every engagement, our goal is to ensure ideas are feasible and can deliver real-world business value.”, say Birgit Fien-Schmalzbauer, Global Head 51风流AppHaus Partner Network.

51风流is currently engaging with a shortlist of potential partners for the Cape Town AppHaus.

For more information about 51风流AppHaus, please visit

Visit the 51风流News Center. Follow 51风流on Twitter at

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In his remarks, UNESCO Secretary General (SG) Teboho Tsilane informed that ACW is听an annual event that Lesotho adopted in 2016. He noted that it was facilitated by UNESCO, working jointly with collective schools to spread digital literacy across听the country and nurture the 21st Century era with skillful workforce through practical and playful learning.

鈥淚 congratulate all participating schools and learners this year, I hope that this initiative will also persist听even in the countless upcoming years. Schools that participated in the 2020 ACW competition were Masitise High School, Thabeng High School and New Millennium听High School,鈥� Tsilane stated.

The UNESCO-SMEF programme is in its first year under ACW and is intended 鈥渢o share with the Government of Lesotho (GoL), as a key stakeholder on how the听initiative is advancing Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics, Design Thinking in a creative way听through coding especially among the youth and children鈥�. UNESCO-SMEF Ambassador and Trainer for ACW Scratch Programme Bokang Selialia explained that the purpose of the program is to train on and raise awareness of ICT to students听and also to engage them in order to transform their education system, which requires excess knowledge of Mathematics.

Selialia explained that in the Africa Code听Challenge Winners Competition, students鈥� teachers get involved, playing students鈥� mentors for their projects to be successful and be submitted to听 Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing (SAP). The three winners; 鈥楳atumelo Makoa, Reamohetsoe Khomo-haka and Keabetsoe Mokhali were awarded trophies, certificates and compensations.

As indicated by Tsilane, these students participated in the three African Code Challenge projects precisely speeding calculator, Covid-19 awareness and maze games.

Therefore the 1st winner title went straight to 鈥楳atumelo Makoa from Masitise High School who participated in speeding calculator, coached by Mr. Sello Mpota, 2nd听winner was Reamohetsoe Khomo-haka who participated in Covid-19 awareness coached by Mr. Malakoane Thejane while the third winner was Keabetsoe Mokhali from Thabeng High School coached by Mrs. 鈥楳aneo Mapharisa.

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With the constraints placed on organisations by the COVID-19 pandemic, 51风流Africa has adopted a ground-breaking, innovative and safe approach to provide employees with a unique volunteering opportunity on Mandela Day 2020. 听The organisation is hosting, what can be considered, a first Mandela Day 67-minute virtual design thinking sprint. 听听51风流is partnering with the globally recognised Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking at the University of Cape Town .听 in partnership with Siyafunda Community Technology Centres to deliver the Mandela Day programme.听 The design thinking activity will support Rays of Hope, , based in Alexandra, Johannesburg, in close proximity to 51风流offices. 听As design thinking听is both an ideology and a process, concerned with solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way, 51风流employees will be called upon to utilise their knowledge, experience and skills to assist Rays of Hope to address the following challenge 鈥� How can Rays of Hope enable Alex youth to thrive in a world where Covid-19 has deepened the inequality gap?鈥�

听51风流Global Head of 听Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Alexandra Van der Ploeg said that 鈥� SAP鈥檚 aspirational goal听is to create a听significant and sustainable social impact听in three core areas:

• Building digital Skills
• Powering best-run Non-Governmental Organisations & Social Enterprises, and
• Connecting听employees听with purpose听

Mandela Day provides our most valuable resource, our employees, with a unique opportunity to support social impact in all three core areas of our CSR strategy.鈥�

In addition, 51风流will also support Rays of Hope in establishing the #Hope4Alex programme office, which enables the organisation to support vulnerable families and residents of Alexandra through three streams, namely the educational and pastoral centre, the general centre office and the social workers and counselling centre. 听听On the digital literacy front, 51风流will further support the continued digital skills building journey of Rays of Hope, its partner organisations and residents of Alexandra beyond Mandela month, in partnership with Siyafunda CTC, via a virtual learning platform.

Participating 51风流employees both in Africa and globally, will give up their time for approximately 100 minutes, to include the introduction, framing of the challenge, the design sprint and reflections on the proposed solution.

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At its location at the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB) at the V&A Waterfront precinct, the d-school has brought together diverse minds for workshops that offer training in design thinking tools and principles. These programmes for students include the four-day Design Thinking Week and the longer Foundation Programme in Design Thinking, spread across 12 weeks. The Open Course: Design Thinking in Practice is geared towards working professionals and tailor-made workshops are also offered to organisations seeking to become more agile.

Hasso Plattner, founder of the d-school as well as technology company SAP, had a vision to 鈥渦nleash hidden creative potentials and help focus on human needs鈥�. After establishing the d.school at Stanford University in the United States and another at the Hasso Plattner Institute (D-School) in Potsdam, Germany, Cape Town became the first Africa-based location where design thinking鈥檚 impact on the culture of work and education could be fostered.

鈥淒esign thinking, during its first years, was mostly seen as a user-centred way of helping organisations get a better picture of their customers and鈥攖hrough early, cheap prototyping鈥攕hortened the development cycles and made it more efficient,鈥� says Plattner. Since then, design thinking has been taken beyond boardrooms and into universities, the non-profit sector, and government departments. Plattner himself has invested funds in establishing schools to ensure design thinking is taught more broadly. 鈥淥ur schools encourage collaboration rather than individual competition. They train a network mode of thinking and working, they unleash hidden creative potential, and they help to

focus on human needs. 鈥淒esign thinking has the potential to change individuals, companies, organisations, and, with its radical democratic approach, even political structures.鈥�

Plattner believes the d-school at UCT can 鈥渂ecome a solution engine for some of the major social problems in South Africa, supporting companies and public organisations with their current challenges鈥�.

The d-school鈥檚 founding director, Richard Perez, officially opened the school鈥檚 doors in 2015. He explains that design thinking is not about learning a process, but rather about adopting a mindset. 鈥淲e are not trying to train people to become professional designers, but rather work with individuals that may not have followed a traditional design education and teach them how to approach and solve challenges within their field of expertise through the lens and mindset of a designer,鈥� says Perez. 鈥淒esign thinking exhibits a number of key attributes that include, but is not limited to, interdisciplinary collaboration; problem solving; tolerance of ambiguity and failure; user-centredness and involvement; creativity and innovation; and iteration and experimentation.鈥�

The d-school has offered design thinking workshops to students registered at various higher learning institutions across South Africa. It has also integrated design thinking into the curriculum in some UCT and GSB courses. 鈥淲e would like to see every student at the University of Cape Town exposed to design-led thinking. Its application is endless鈥攆rom solving engineering challenges to designing your own life,鈥� adds Perez. 鈥淲e live in an ever-increasing world of complexity, where challenges cannot be understood and solved by a single discipline or traditional analytical approaches anymore.

鈥淭he need to be able to innovate in the face of this complexity, and do so in multidisciplinary and multicultural teams, is not a skill that is taught in higher educational institutions. This is a critical skillset we will need for the future world of work and, at the d-school, we develop this within our students.鈥�

Perez says the d-school wants to create an African Centre of Excellence for Design-Led Thinking and be part of a leading design thinking network on the continent. The d-school has already worked in various African countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, and Morocco, and has partnered with an international non-governmental organisation in Malawi since 2016, adds Perez. This experience shows how local-led solutions can change the way donors design and implement programmes. It also offers insight into how African solutions need to include local contexts and input.

Through its work across the continent, the d-school has found that having people on the ground who are trying to find solutions in a local framework are integral to success while donor funding needs to be more human-centred and informed by the context of the environment.

In Morocco, it was meanwhile discovered that design thinking could be taught in any context, even when no furniture or creative studio setup was available. The most interesting aspect? Design thinking became a common language for people who had diverse languages and backgrounds.

While the d-school brought the process, tools, and technologies to help communities surface their own capabilities, people were also able to take ownership of solutions. Ultimately, the premise of design thinking then is in the value in the room and in the diversity of the people who come together.

This article first appeared on .

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