The first category, “Scaling Innovation,” honors project teams that excel in innovation, align with SAP’s strategic priorities, and demonstrate significant and sustainable impact on the company. The winners will be announced during the award ceremony on March 26, 2026.

51·çÁ÷Joule for Developers, ABAP AI capabilities

As organizations worldwide accelerate their transition to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA, one reality remains unchanged: ABAP continues to power the core of SAP’s technology and the mission‑critical business processes that run on it. At the same time, developers working with this backbone technology have long lacked the modern AI‑driven tooling available in other programming ecosystems—an issue that becomes even more pressing during large‑scale transformation projects.

This gap is precisely what 51·çÁ÷Joule for Developers, ABAP AI capabilities addresses. As part of the broader Joule generative AI portfolio, it brings AI capabilities tailored for ABAP development directly into the hands of development teams. Its mission: to modernize the developer experience of writing, understanding, and maintaining ABAP code and to dramatically accelerate innovation at enterprise scale.

51·çÁ÷Joule for Developers, ABAP AI capabilities is natively integrated into the ABAP development tools. It supports developers in a hybrid approach that utilizes a large language model fine-tuned by 51·çÁ÷data scientists on millions of lines of ABAP code, along with commercial models augmented with context derived from decades of 51·çÁ÷expertise. This equips developers with specialized capabilities covering everyday tasks like predictive code completion, unit test generation, real-time explanation, and chat-based assistance—significantly boosting productivity and developer satisfaction.

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Complementing this, ABAP AI for custom code migration redefines how organizations approach the complex task of revamping legacy custom code from 51·çÁ÷ERP Central Component to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA. What once required weeks of manual analysis can now be accomplished in hours, with AI explaining legacy logic, highlighting needed adaptations, and generating migration proposals. Integrated into the Custom Code Migration app on 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51·çÁ÷BTP), it empowers project managers and consultants to better scope work packages and plan code migration project timelines with far greater accuracy.

51·çÁ÷Joule for Developers, ABAP AI capabilities already serve thousands of developers across more than 280 customers, 470 partners, and 6,500 internal ABAP developers, with adoption growing rapidly inside 51·çÁ÷and across the ecosystem. Evolving from a 2023 proof‑of‑concept to enterprise availability in 2025, the project stands as a testament to what cross‑organizational collaboration between ABAP, AI, and 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA teams can achieve—bringing innovation to one of SAP’s most essential developer communities.

Team lead Jasmin Gruschke, AI architect and project expert, describes the extraordinary team spirit: “United by a shared vision and customer dedication, we poured our collective energy and dedication into bringing an extraordinary idea to life, demonstrating that, together, we can turn visionary concepts into remarkable realities.”

51·çÁ÷Document AI

Modern enterprises face a growing obstacle in an increasingly data‑intense world, reflected in the rapid proliferation of unstructured business documents. From invoices and purchase orders to contracts and shipping papers, companies are drowning in information that demands time‑consuming manual processing. 51·çÁ÷Document AI tackles this challenge head‑on by transforming the way enterprises extract, process, and act on document‑based data.

Today, more than 30,000 customers rely on the solution to process billions of documents, embedded seamlessly across SAP’s core applications. 51·çÁ÷Document AI delivers enterprise‑grade automation without costly integrations or extensive model training, enabling businesses to accelerate workflows, reduce errors, and improve decision‑making at scale. Real‑world customer data shows the tangible impact: automated document processing powered by 51·çÁ÷Document AI generates an estimated €2.6 billion in annual business value.

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51·çÁ÷Document AI is now natively integrated into 32 business processes across 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA, 51·çÁ÷Business Network, 51·çÁ÷Concur solutions, 51·çÁ÷Fieldglass solutions, 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions, the 51·çÁ÷Customer Experience portfolio, and 51·çÁ÷BTP, with dozens more use cases in development. This deep embedding of “everyday AI” into products that are already in use by customers is a key driver of adoption across SAP’s global installed base.

The technology behind the solution sets new industry benchmarks. 51·çÁ÷was among the early innovators in schema-based zero-shot document processing, an approach that enables AI systems to understand complex documents without task-specific retraining, and which is now widely adopted across the AI ecosystem. Even before the rise of large language models, 51·çÁ÷researchers advanced the field with award-winning and trend-setting papers such as CharGrid, BERTgrid, and Charmer, AI methods designed to help computers understand documents.

The team continues to innovate with AI that learns instantly from user feedback, “sees” and interprets documents visually, and understands content well enough to take intelligent actions on it. Their next generation of generative AI models now support over 110 languages. Building on these innovations, platform usage on 51·çÁ÷BTP for custom document automation has increased 285-fold since 2020, underscoring how developers worldwide are leveraging this technology to streamline business processes. Next, 51·çÁ÷Document AI will launch reusable tools that empower AI agents to handle complex document workflows across industries. As unstructured data and diverse document types become central to business processes, demand for smarter, faster, and more adaptable document understanding solutions has never been higher.

Tobias Weller, chief product owner and team lead, states: “We built 51·çÁ÷Document AI to deliver measurable business value at global scale, securely, responsibly, and embedded in everyday processes, demonstrating SAP’s ability to operationalize AI at massive scale.”

51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Learning: GenAI Content Generation

With AI reshaping work at unprecedented speed, organizations face a dual challenge: mastering new skills and managing overwhelming amounts of information. 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Learning: GenAI Content Generation is a game-changing capability designed to streamline, accelerate, and scale how learning content is produced across the enterprise.

The new capability leverages advanced large language models (LLMs) to convert simple prompts or uploaded files into complete, compliant learning experiences in minutes. What previously required days, weeks, or even months, can now be accomplished almost instantly. The system generates course outlines, quizzes, interactive elements, summaries, and assessments—all tailored to the user’s input and organizational context.

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A key innovation lies in its multi‑LLM orchestration, enabling dynamic selection and combination of specialized models. This ensures high accuracy, domain relevance, and enterprise‑grade content governance. Real-time multilingual translation allows learning teams to launch global courses simultaneously, while AI-based skill extraction automatically aligns content with workforce development strategies.

Early validation shows organizations can produce learning content five times faster, dramatically reducing costs and enabling teams to respond more quickly to shifting skill demands. Subject-matter experts throughout the organization can now create content and share knowledge more effectively—without requiring instructional design expertise. By transforming knowledge into structured, scalable learning experiences, the capability helps organizations strengthen agility, boost employee engagement, and ensure continuous upskilling across the enterprise.

Team lead Neha Dhawan, principal product manager, 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Learning, describes the impact of the project: “We’re not just building technology, we’re building possibilities—for admins to move faster, for managers to better support their teams, and for learners to experience content that feels personal and meaningful. If we can make learning more accessible and inspiring, then we’ve created something that truly matters.”

The 51·çÁ÷Taulia portfolio offers solutions for working capital management and supply chain financing, as well as a network for buyers, suppliers, and financial institutions.

Mehlkopf is global chief revenue officer for Treasury and Working Capital Management at SAP, and is responsible for marketing and rolling out the solutions for these domains to customers.

Q: Three years ago, we announced that the Taulia products would be integrated into the 51·çÁ÷portfolio. What’s the status?

A: After acquiring Taulia, we pushed ahead with three main priorities to align with 51·çÁ÷Business Suite. The first was the integration of the portfolio into 51·çÁ÷Business Network so that, where suppliers and buyers both run 51·çÁ÷Taulia solutions, they can utilize the network to benefit from early payment options and supply chain finance.

We also worked on integrating the solutions into and released the 51·çÁ÷Taulia solutions for receivables financing and payables financing on 51·çÁ÷Cloud ERP in February 2025. These are particularly relevant for small and midsize enterprises that want to grow and that need quicker payments to do so. The current focus is on the U.S., Canada, UK, DACH, and Singapore markets, with the goal of making this functionality available in additional countries soon.

Our third priority was to embed 51·çÁ÷Taulia Virtual Cards into 51·çÁ÷Ariba solutions. The cards enable buyers to pay their suppliers sooner — even before they issue an invoice — using a “pay on purchase order” transaction. This ensures that the supplier in question has sufficient cash flow to fulfill the order.

Back in 2022, Taulia was described as a growth opportunity for 51·çÁ÷and for customers. Could you tell us how 51·çÁ÷Taulia is performing?

51·çÁ÷Taulia already has several customers that finance billions through the platform, thereby improving both their own liquidity and that of their suppliers. My team’s objective is to increase that number and to continue scaling up, and we’re making good progress. Over the last three years, the volume of transactions processed with 51·çÁ÷Taulia has risen steadily from US$500 billion to US$800 billion.

Customers are benefiting from this progress: one large enterprise in the oil and gas industry saved almost €700,000 within a single month of going live. Extrapolated to a full year, that’s annual savings of almost €8 million. So, the business case for customers is definitely there.

You presented the first AI use case in 51·çÁ÷Taulia at 51·çÁ÷Sapphire in 2025. Can you tell us about its value for customers?

The AI use case relates to our “insight to action” approach and helps companies plan and improve their cash flow. 51·çÁ÷Taulia has already been using artificial intelligence for some time to forecast supplier behavior around early payments. By combining this insight with data from an app on 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform that provides transparency on free cash flow, the AI use case will give customers tips on how to improve their liquidity. It also runs through various scenarios showing them ways to influence it. Information like this is especially important for CFOs — never more so than in times of uncertainty.

Are there any other recent announcements you would like to share?

Yes, another important update is that 51·çÁ÷Taulia is now part of SAP’s cloud ERP packages for the public cloud, 51·çÁ÷Finance Base and 51·çÁ÷Finance Premium, as well as the private cloud, 51·çÁ÷Cloud ERP Private. This means that we can quickly show customers the positive business case for their transformation of using 51·çÁ÷Taulia to improve their cash flow and achieve savings.

In times of global crisis, trade tariffs, and supply chain disruption, why are the 51·çÁ÷Taulia solutions so vital for cash flow?

Cash is still king, especially in a crisis. An article published recently in German business newspaper Handelsblatt reported that net debt among the 40 companies on Germany’s DAX stock market index has increased eight percent to €227 billion since the pandemic. Clearly, financing is a major issue, particularly given that interest rates have risen so sharply. Many companies borrowed when interest rates were low and are now having to refinance their loans at higher interest rates, which puts enormous pressure on their finance teams. 51·çÁ÷Taulia solutions can help by providing the funding that businesses need.

Given the impact that trade tariffs have on the supply chain, it is vital that companies carry out liquidity planning and scenario analysis. They need to think about where they will manufacture their products in the future, what effect that choice will have on revenues, and how they can use 51·çÁ÷Taulia to improve their cash flow.

Which reference customers are already benefiting from this?

51·çÁ÷Taulia customers include Henkel, Airbus, Nissan, AstraZeneca, Kimberly-Clark, and Bridgestone.

One customer has enabled early payments to suppliers totaling over €5 billion since the start of the program, which has led to an improvement in cash flow of more than €1 billion during this period.

Your pledge is “to create the future of finance together.” What does that involve?

We want to team up with our partners and customers to influence the transformation of corporate finance. That includes working with banks and implementation partners and integrating 51·çÁ÷Taulia into a swathe of 51·çÁ÷solutions. Together, we offer customers a comprehensive portfolio of treasury and working capital solutions, ranging from payments and cash management to financial risk management.

One key aspect of our road map is our treasury and payment portfolio, which covers topics such as the future of payments. We are also working to integrate new technologies, including blockchain and digital currencies, so that we can offer our customers innovative payment and financing solutions.

“PowerCo will develop and produce battery cells for the VW Group in best quality, in large numbers,” Andreas Eckle, CIO of PowerCo SE, told the audience during a live session at Hannover Messe trade fair. “The gigafactories are set up to a standard factory design.” This ensures the same processes, the same equipment, and the same workflows at all its locations, he explained.

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Three Gigafactories from Scratch

“Construction is in full swing at the first standard factory in Salzgitter, Germany, only about 70 kilometers from Hannover. It serves as a blueprint for all PowerCo’s gigafactories,” Eckle said. Cell production in Germany will start in 2025; Valencia, Spain, and St. Thomas, Canada, will follow soon. In future, the Salzgitter plant is to reach an annual capacity of up to 40 GWh—enough for about 500,000 electric vehicles. The three gigafactories in Europe and North America will have a total volume of up to 200 GWh.

Eckle pointed out that producing battery cells is a completely new business for Volkswagen. “It is not manufacturing cars anymore; it is chemistry. We go all the way from mining to the complete cell and recycling,” he said. At the same time, cell production is a very relevant topic for sustainability, so PowerCo has to make sure that the complete supply chain is committed to Volkswagen’s sustainability standards. The company’s scope will include new business models based around reusing discarded car batteries and recycling the valuable raw materials they contain.

The battery cell manufacturer started from scratch: 24 months ago, not only the factory had to be built but the staff for the startup company had to be recruited, too. Now there are about 1,500 employees in different areas, from research and development to operations, and they are the basis for building the company. The same applied to the IT landscape: it first had to be set up.

Standards Accelerate Implementation

Eckle said: “We have a very high demand that we need to satisfy for electric vehicles, and from our understanding this will only work if we have the right standards in place.” Stephan Fester, Global Battery Best Practice lead at SAP, who was on stage with Eckle, agreed: “Without standards you will never have the performance you need to set up a factory at this scale in no time.” Fester described how 51·çÁ÷and PowerCo connected in 2022 and defined a project scope for the first phase in only two days.

In 2023, the project team set up an system and realized three go-lives. They began with the processes that a startup typically needs at once: “The first initiative was to manage and spend money and recruit, employ, and manage people,” Fester said. He told the audience that it was around March or April when the project partners heard of the big opening ceremony that was planned for the go-live of PowerCo.

With that hard deadline in mind, they started with the accelerated deployment service for recruiting, onboarding, and workforce management with 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions. “Normally this takes 12 weeks,” Fester recalled. “The 51·çÁ÷team said it normally takes at least eight weeks, but PowerCo challenged us with a time frame of only five weeks!’” This was a good example, he explained, of how a standard can accelerate implementation. They also set up material accounting, financial closing, and vendor invoice management.

“Another very important factor for success was that we as 51·çÁ÷wrote the concept according to our understanding of the requirements. PowerCo carried out a review and confirmed it,” Fester explained. “We didn’t ask PowerCo what it wanted, because it couldn’t specify that at the time. We understood the business and designed and implemented it based on our experience.”

Synchronize Business and IT Planning

In June 2023, the project team delivered the first version of logistics management. Fester explained the concept: “We synchronized the setup plan of the factory with the IT plan. If we know the first truck will arrive at the factory at a certain day, that means the capabilities to manage the truck and the material handling need to be available prior to that.”

Enhanced logistics were implemented in November, like in-warehouse processes, batch management, and returnable packaging management. At the beginning of 2024, integrated business planning went live, and more logistics processes were implemented. The next phase is already planned and set-up with product lifecycle management and other systems.

Fully Operational in Six Months

“We set up a cloud ERP system in less than six months, fully operational,” Fester said. PowerCo CIO Eckle added that this timeline only worked out because critical defects were resolved quickly and effectively in task force mode. The success of the 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA implementation project is also shown by the 51·çÁ÷Quality Award PowerCo received in 2024. “We are proud of what we have achieved,” Eckle concluded, “but we still have a long way to go. The Salzgitter factory opening is the first major milestone, with two other openings following.”

PowerCo is now well positioned for future business development. The current cloud ERP system serves as the central foundation for cell production. It will also support future business models like recycling of battery cells and the energy storage system business.

Based in Germany, Raumedic designs, develops, and produces polymer- and silicone-based solutions for customer-specific medical and pharmaceutical applications, as well as products for intensive care. It offers a variety of products ranging from a single medicine tube to more complex systems such as kits for liver transplants or infusions. This diversity brings about very complex production and assembly processes. The company has over 70 years of experience in the industry; its more than 1,300 employees work in five locations in Europe and the U.S.

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Making the Shop Floor More Efficient

A manufacturing execution system (MES) is a comprehensive, dynamic software system that monitors, tracks, documents, and controls the process of manufacturing goods from raw materials to finished products. Providing a functional layer between enterprise resource planning (ERP) and process control systems, an MES gives decision-makers the data they need to optimize production and make manufacturing plants more efficient. This is especially relevant in the highly regulated market Raumedic operates in.

The company’s MES strategy stagnated due to the old MES reaching the end of its life cycle. “We could not plan any further rollouts in our plants in the U.S. and Estonia. We had no support to get new change requests for innovation in our system, no usability improvements, and finally no AI scenarios could be implemented,” Vogler said.

Avoiding Wrong Decisions

When evaluating and choosing the right software partner for its new MES, Raumedic needed to avoid the wrong decisions of the past, Vogler explained. “We wanted a strong provider with a future-proof solution and an excellent partner network in the background,” he said. The company’s vision was to set up a basis with its new MES solution and develop it toward a digital production platform. For its five production plants, it was also important to work with a global template approach.

Raumedic’s project team opted to rigorously test the cloud-based 51·çÁ÷Digital Manufacturing solution and, in March 2023, started the proof-of-concept phase. The team began with a small, discrete industry and assembly scope for the pilot plant in Germany and planned to use this blueprint as an accelerator for the worldwide rollouts and implementations.

The employees in the pilot plant were very motivated because the new solution could not only relieve them of time-consuming routine tasks, but also help ensure compliance both now and in the future. With their previous system, employees still had to document on paper every quality management and GxP compliance process – GxP refers to the many “good practice” guidelines and regulations that apply to organizations that manufacture products consumed or used by humans or animals. The new 51·çÁ÷system could handle all this digitally, saving time and increasing compliance. In Raumedic’s regulated market environment, regulatory compliance is a strategic advantage that enhances market access, builds trust, mitigates risks, and attracts investment.

Concept for Long-Term Success

After rigorous testing, the team concluded that the solution was ready for the company’s complex production processes. “We collected over 300 requirements and evaluated them for possible usage in 2024,” Vogler said. “I am very proud that we implemented 75 requirements into a demo landscape.” He said that the team carried out the end-to-end manufacturing execution process with an integration of one use case from the shop floor. They got the confirmation for the production planning with all relevant production values back to the system. “The result was very convincing, and so at the end of last year our top management confirmed 51·çÁ÷Digital Manufacturing as our new MES solution.”

As a next step, a global template will be set up and implemented in a process-oriented manner via 51·çÁ÷ERP Central Component (51·çÁ÷ECC). The go-live is planned for Q1 2025. In parallel, 51·çÁ÷ECC will be transformed to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA by 2026, using the Cloud Integration capability within 51·çÁ÷Integration Suite, and rolled out to the other plants.

“51·çÁ÷Digital Manufacturing is our central, future-proof, state-of-the-art MES solution. It forms the basis for securing Raumedic’s strategic goals in the production environment and adds value to all our business processes,” Vogler concluded.

The new CDO had two specific goals: first, to standardize processes across all subsidiaries and create a template for any newly acquired business to follow, and second, to upgrade Kaiser’s outdated legacy system to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA.

He embraced the challenge, recognizing that comprehending the business processes was an essential first step for long-term success. He also was aware that this challenging task could only be accomplished with a strong partner, engaged contributors, and a powerful IT tool. This is where digital consultancy and 51·çÁ÷partner and the business process transformation portfolio came into play.

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Long-Term Success with End-to-End Processes

Significant change management was required as colleagues needed to transition from instinctive decision-making to a data-driven approach. “This was not merely an IT project, but also a business one,” Vehreschild said. “It was imperative to engage the various stakeholders right from the outset and eliminate any obstacles to change.” He said it was important to look at the end-to-end processes and not just focus on one department or process, because “every process impacts other departments and their processes as well.” The backing of management was also crucial for the long-term success of the project, he emphasized.

To bring all stakeholders and their needs under one roof and gain a common understanding of the transformation project, Vehreschild hosted a series of workshops. “Some of the long-serving employees from different subsidiaries had never met before, and now they discussed their process challenges. Intercultural interaction was very important,” he said.

The transformation team, supported by Valantic experts and their wealth of knowledge and experience, opted for a decentralized approach. They started with the company’s Swiss subsidiary, subsequently expanding to other locations. They had three main topics on their agenda: 51·çÁ÷best practices, performance of the processes, and immediate impact through quick fixes.

Transparency Across All Systems and Processes

Frank Franzlik, head of Process and Project Engineering, Valantic ERP Consulting, described how the business process transformation project started: “Out of the full 51·çÁ÷Signavio portfolio, we first used 51·çÁ÷Signavio Process Manager. The solution helps to document, model, and simulate business processes. The scope for this involved the four core processes of Kaiser: order to cash, purchase to pay, demand to supply, and record to report. Second, we implemented 51·çÁ÷Signavio Process Insights, which identifies, analyzes, prioritizes, and monitors a customer’s most critical business processes and alerts them when an issue arises.”

Vehreschild expressed great satisfaction with the results of these preliminary measures: “For the first time, we achieved transparency across all our systems and processes, each associated with specific numerical values.” It only took the project team about one week to implement the whole system.

In the workshops, the team introduced the concept of best practices and process management with 51·çÁ÷Signavio solutions to their colleagues in all locations and showed them the performance of their current processes with concrete examples like throughput time or cash discount. “They were able to link the process and performance then, understanding which lever to adjust to enhance efficiency,” Vehreschild said.

Immediate Impact Leads to Acceptance

The business partners saw immediate impact. “We were able to offer quick solutions to problems in the processes that had developed over a long period of time,” Vehreschild said. “Overall, everyone involved was very satisfied with the new approach.”

“Now, the advantage is that anytime there’s a process discussion within our production or sales department, everyone says â€�Let’s solve it with 51·çÁ÷Signavio!’” he said, noting that his colleagues now understand the portfolio’s functionality, know its potential, and realize they can use it as a flashlight to identify strengths and weaknesses.

Talking about lessons learned, the CDO said: “Never underestimate the power of a community! It encompasses uniting varied departments and cultures, promoting dialogue, and providing opportunities for interaction.” He also said that working with a strong partner like Valantic was crucial for the success of the project.

Franzlik of Valantic gave an outlook on the further joint path of the partners: “Thanks to the insights gathered from 12 distinct workshops, we are now positioned to establish a road map for successful 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA implementation,” he said. “We aim for a decisive road map, our so-called â€�GPS,’ to assist Kaiser on its digitization journey.”

The glass bottles on the high-speed filling line made quiet clinking sounds as they sped around the bend of the track. The visitors to the 51·çÁ÷booth at the internationally renowned industrial trade fair were waiting for the moment when an optical sensor, using AI support, spotted the bottle that was only three-quarters full and kicked it out of the line and into a defects bay. “This system has a capacity of 6,400 bottles per hour,” said a grinning Ben Hughes from SAP’s Solution & Innovation Experience team. “In comparison, the original system from our partner can fill 50,000 bottles, but that would be much too loud here at the trade fair booth.”

The showcase demonstrated how the cloud-based 51·çÁ÷Digital Manufacturing solution could serve as the process order management system for 51·çÁ÷customers, whether they typically work with a lot size of one or with continuous manufacturing at higher speeds. The purchase order could have come from an 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA system, for instance, and ended here with execution in production. “We can see the hardware integration with our own eyes,” said Hughes.

AI was also involved: a camera captured the fill level of each bottle. If it was outside the defined tolerance, the bottle was rejected and this information was sent to the 51·çÁ÷system. A manufacturer could use this data to calculate the production costs for the system and the profitability of every work center, all with AI support. The data from all systems would give experts and management insights into how well the production process was working. This, in turn, would help improve planning.

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Complete Portfolio from the Industry’s Point of View

Hannover Messe 2024 took place from April 22-26. Muhammad Alam paid a visit for the first time in his role as leader of the 51·çÁ÷Product Engineering Board area. At the 51·çÁ÷booth, which featured the motto “Bring out new manufacturing excellence,” he emphasized the importance of AI as an integral part of 51·çÁ÷solutions: “AI has the opportunity to fundamentally create significant value for our customers, particularly in the industrial space, with an ability to create resiliency from a supply chain perspective that just wouldn’t be possible without the application of AI.”

51·çÁ÷demonstrated nearly its entire portfolio in an industrial context in Hannover. “51·çÁ÷uses what we call â€�end-to-end scenarios’ to do this,” said Georg Kube, head of Industry Data Ecosystems. To reflect this, the booth was set up in line with this logic. The “design to operate” graphical element, which maps all steps of the manufacturing process, showed the corresponding step in the value chain at each station of the booth. “We integrate our solutions with the specific process that manufacturers have,” Kube said. “They design a product, then it’s manufactured, then it’s bought by a customer, and in the end it is being used and maintained. We offer integrated solutions for every step in this process.”

Working Together for Success

Darcy MacClaren, global CRO for Digital Supply Chain, acknowledged the challenges faced by SAP, its customers, and its partners: “We are facing environmental and geopolitical disruptions and we want to be sustainable.” She said collaboration is the key to achieving these daunting goals, a message that was echoed in many presentations and podium discussions at the booth.

For example, experts from , , and 51·çÁ÷discussed how the automotive industry network is creating a standard that enables collaboration, data interchange, and transparency to support decarbonization along the value chain. Catena-X serves as a blueprint for other industrial networks under the umbrella, such as Factory-X for factory equipment suppliers and operators.

The showcases at the trade fair booth wouldn’t be possible without partners, which also play a decisive role in SAP’s competitiveness and future viability. “The partner ecosystem is a key success factor for SAP,” said Andreas Markus Thon, head of Digital Supply Chain MEE. “They are enriching our suite with their applications and solutions and are critical for high quality and successful adoption and use of our solutions.”

A Fleet of Robots Delivers Materials

SAP’s “Modular Manufacturing” showcase let visitors witness examples of successful partner collaboration for themselves. It demonstrated a fleet of autonomous transport robots that delivered a variety of parts for a valve from storage to assembly stations. Thanks to the fleet control software with embedded AI from 51·çÁ÷partner , the robots from different manufacturers worked together seamlessly, making autonomous, situational decisions as to which station should assemble or disassemble the parts. The scenario demonstrated that 51·çÁ÷systems can also implement modular production, which is typically used in manufacturing scenarios involving many variants and low to medium product volumes. 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA, 51·çÁ÷Extended Warehouse Management, and 51·çÁ÷Digital Manufacturing were deployed here.

The “Industrial Metaverse” showcase was another big draw. It let visitors to the 51·çÁ÷booth put themselves in the shoes of a systems operator, using VR (virtual reality) glasses to inspect a system virtually, even if the manufacturing was taking place on the opposite side of the globe. The “Injection Molding Machine” scenario vividly demonstrated how planning and manufacturing dovetail in integrated, agile, made-to-order production, as the machine produced colorful recycled plastic cups for guests at the end of the process.

Other topics at the trade fair included potential uses of digital twin solutions, such as virtual models and real-time simulations, as well as collaboration between people and machines. A summary description of all the presented scenarios is available .

The World’s Largest Industrial Trade Fair

The guiding theme of Hannover Messe 2024 was “Energizing a sustainable industry.” Nearly 4,000 exhibitors from 60 countries presented solutions for a high-performance, sustainable industry. As part of an industrial ecosystem, they showed how carbon neutrality can be achieved through electrification, digitalization, and automation.

Companies from Germany, China, Turkey, the U.S., Italy, and France booked the largest exhibition spaces. Around 1,600 speakers appeared on the venue’s 11 conference stages. This year’s partner country was Norway.

Under its motto “Bring out new manufacturing excellence,” 51·çÁ÷demonstrated how it is using AI to advance manufacturing processes, among other solutions, at its more than 1,000-square-meter booth in Hall 15. Visitors to SAP’s booth had the opportunity to see 27 product demonstrations and nine interactive showcases. More than 25 51·çÁ÷partners showed the collaboration and variety of potential uses of their solutions, and 35 presentations by experts and customers were featured at the booth.

Photo ©nottebrock.

To address this challenge, Vestas, a major wind turbine manufacturer, launched a quality initiative powered by 51·çÁ÷solutions and 51·çÁ÷Business Network.

Pillars of the Energy Transition

Faced with the climate crisis, many countries around the globe are investing heavily in zero-emission renewables. China’s 14^th Five-Year Plan is driving the market for renewable energy, as are the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States and the Green Deal in the European Union. In these parts of the world, wind energy is regarded as the pillar of the energy transition and is the largest source of renewable energy.

But the wind energy sector is highly competitive, experiences rapid innovation, and is prone to massive supply chain issues. Manufacturers must source raw materials, manage global logistics operations, and mitigate the risks of supplier dependency while still keeping pace with demand. They also need to be confident that all the components in their turbines meet rigorous quality standards and deliver performance and reliability. Quality control issues can result in faults, repairs, and – at worst – major failures.

As a market leader in wind turbines, Vestas Wind Systems, headquartered in Aarhus, Denmark, launched a large-scale quality initiative. Its 29,000 employees in 88 countries develop wind energy projects worldwide and manufacture, install, and service the turbines for them. The 85,000 turbines Vestas has installed to date generated 173 gigawatts of electricity and over 151 gigawatts under service as of September 2023. Several newly commissioned major projects will see that output increase significantly in the coming years.

“Collaboration with suppliers and partners is of crucial importance to Vestas when it comes to creating a sustainable future for the world by leading the global demand for onshore and offshore wind energy,” Adeola Abegunde, director of Technology Area Lead Digital Procurement and Supply Chain at Vestas, says.

Sourcing Quality with 51·çÁ÷Business Network

Today’s wind turbines are made up of more than 10,000 individual parts. Since the companies that produce these parts are based all over the world, the supply chain is highly complex. To help manage this complexity, Vestas relies on , the B2B platform used by millions of companies across 190 countries that can connect buyers with contract manufacturers and suppliers.

51·çÁ÷Business Network enables Vestas to run all its procurement and supply chain collaboration processes online – even beyond company boundaries. Employees use its supply chain functions to collaborate on orders and subcontracting orders. When a supplier confirms an order and sends a shipping notification, staff at Vestas and its contract manufacturers see this information right away. Vestas employees therefore know whether raw materials or the components for an order will arrive at the contract manufacturer on time.

Projects of this scale need to run smoothly and according to plan. This is where the quality collaboration features in 51·çÁ÷Business Network come in. Before a supplier confirms or sends an order, it has to complete predefined quality tests and document them on the network. Vestas employees are then aware in advance of any quality issues further up the supply chain and can take corrective action. Through the network, employees can pass on changes to specifications if, for instance, one particular part had to be replaced sooner than expected and needs to be improved. If quality defects lead to incidents, the network can make these failures transparent to all partners and provide an audit trail. That helps everyone in the supply chain understand what went wrong and solve the problem.

“51·çÁ÷Business Network allows Vestas to offer its trading partners a platform that makes all sorts of collaboration scenarios transparent from end to end. This means that Vestas is better able to mitigate the impact of disruptions in its global supply chain, making it more robust, future-proof, and sustainable,” Florian Seebauer, senior director of the 51·çÁ÷Business Network unit at SAP, says.

Reducing Supply Chain Friction

Suppliers also benefit from the network’s forecasting capabilities. Vestas can provide them with information from the planning tool so that they can prepare for changes and capacity increases. This helps suppliers plan more accurately and can minimize friction losses in the supply chain.

51·çÁ÷Business Network also supports Vestas’ sustainability goals since it allows users to select and rate suppliers by sustainability criteria. When compared to electricity generated from fossil fuels, Vestas’ solutions have saved 1.9 billion tons of carbon emissions – equivalent to 88 million cars driven for a year. Vestas has established sustainability performance as a core priority across its entire value chain and introduced pioneering initiatives such as its “Circularity Road Map” for the circular economy. It is no surprise then that Vestas is ranked as one of the world’s most sustainable companies, featured regularly at the top of lists such as .

Vestas and 51·çÁ÷have a long-standing relationship. Vestas has been running 51·çÁ÷as its ERP system since 2007. In 2017, it adopted 51·çÁ÷Ariba solutions for e-procurement and 51·çÁ÷Business Network. Through 51·çÁ÷Business Network, it now has access to a vast pool of potential trading partners. And, because the network is connected to Vestas’ ERP and the complex ordering and collaboration processes running in the background, users don’t have to switch away from the systems they are familiar with. With SAP’s help, Vestas is breezing into a bright future.

Top image: Borssele 3 & 4, The Netherlands, Courtesy of Vestas Wind Systems A/S

I spoke with her about the success of the project and where there is still room for improvement.

Q: What are your greatest successes so far on your mission to make 51·çÁ÷events more sustainable?

Bittmann: First of all, it’s a real success to have advanced this topic to the top of the agenda. When event managers from Google and Amazon approach us at the , one of the largest trade shows for business events, and ask us how we launched and implemented our strategy for sustainable events, it shows that we’re pioneers in this extremely important area.

I’m also proud that we’ve started measuring our social and ecological footprint with actual figures, because that’s an important step towards real improvement. It lets us compare, readjust, and define even more ambitious targets. Our analysis of the last 51·çÁ÷Sapphire conference, which was organized as a decentralized event in the U.S., Spain, Brazil, and online, showed that we reduced CO₂ emissions by nearly 24,000 tons compared to when we had just one central event in Orlando, Florida, due primarily to the shorter distances traveled. In mathematical terms, that corresponds to around 2,200 around-the-world flights!

I’m also happy about a lot of little things, for instance, that we did without single-use plastics completely at 51·çÁ÷TechEd in 2019 in Barcelona, Spain, preventing three tons of waste – enough to fill a 10 by 10 meter room one meter high – at just this one event!

To be successful, we all have to pull together. Our Global Events team, together with the teams in the regions, has proven that we have a huge amount of leverage together and are motivated to get even better.

What are the biggest challenges you face?

The global strategy and our specific action recommendations can’t always be implemented uniformly because they depend on each country’s economic and cultural context. In Brazil, for example, good hospitality means putting the best meats on the table – which made it a real headache for the local event team members to create a menu that was 40% vegetarian. They found a good compromise, however, by making sure to choose meat varieties that had a smaller ecological footprint than others.

In some parts of Asia, in contrast, it would be considered rude if we didn’t give small gifts to speakers as a sign of gratitude. In this case, we and the event team considered potential alternatives to the usual giveaways, for instance tree-planting certificates as an unusual gift.

These examples underscore how we often have to think outside the box together and identify new solutions, but can also unleash creativity in the process and sometimes even change people’s mindsets.

What are your targets for the coming year?

We want to improve our waste prevention even further and increase our recycling quota. We want to avoid non-reusable plastics completely and use sustainable materials for our branding items as much as possible. As far as emissions are concerned, we want to reduce travel activities even more, and we’ve been purchasing carbon offsets for unavoidable trips for some time now. When it comes to catering, we want to offer more vegetarian dishes and locally source at least half of the food served.

In addition, we are striving to recruit more female speakers to the stage, gain more social enterprises as suppliers, and strengthen social partnerships. Even if it means extra work for the local teams, I’m very impressed that so many of my colleagues spare no effort to achieve measurable improvements – and I hope their numbers will continue to grow! 

Do you have any advice for people who want to do their part in making company events more sustainable?

We should have the courage to do things differently – and better! One example: the most recent shareholders’ meeting was the first one to do away with 51·çÁ÷plastic bags, notepads, and pens, and the outcry was much less than expected. We simply decided to scrutinize this established practice because when both the integrated report and the ballot papers are exclusively virtual, shareholders don’t need these things anymore.

There are many examples of things “that we’ve always done that way” – call them into question! When we banned disposable beverage bottles at 51·çÁ÷TechEd, no one shed a tear. The visitors were thrilled by our concept of giving out high-quality bottles and offering endless refills at the water stations. At the same time, this also supported a water project, which was very well received. 

Many of these workers come from Vietnam and paid three to four times the minimum annual wage typical in their home country as a recruitment fee for their jobs. Some even had to fork out the equivalent of €950 on top as a deposit, returnable only if they worked their full three-year contract. The majority of the workers and their families took on significant debt to do so, say those affected.

New Human Rights Laws Proving Effective

Tagesschau’s investigations were triggered last year following reports published in current affairs publications Le Monde Diplomatique and The Diplomat. Following up on the allegations, the European automotive suppliers launched their own probes and, after uncovering human rights abuses, reached agreements with their business partners in Taiwan that affected workers would be repaid and that new recruits would no longer have to pay fees to secure a job.

The fact that these human rights violations were identified and at least partially eliminated appears to be a first success of the , which came into effect on January 1, 2023. It sets out the due diligence duties of companies operating in Germany and obliges them to respect human rights and environmental standards within their global value chains. The act thus aims to make the legally binding. Similar laws are in force elsewhere in the world too, including modern slavery legislation in the UK and Australia and the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act.

Respect for Human Rights and the Environment along the Supply Chain

The LkSG sets out the international human rights and environmental standards that companies must comply with to fulfill their due diligence obligations. These include, among others, prohibiting child labor, slavery, forced labor, and torture; allowing the formation of employee representation bodies; ensuring freedom from discrimination; and protecting against the unlawful seizure of land, the disregard of occupational health and safety obligations, the withholding of an adequate wage, and harmful soil alteration or water contamination. Violations can result in heavy fines and in the offending company’s exclusion from public tenders. Indeed, the draft EU Supply Chain Act that is currently being negotiated is in some respects even stricter than the German act.

The LkSG stipulates that all companies above a certain size must designate responsibilities, for example by appointing a human rights officer. This officer is tasked with monitoring the implementation and execution of risk management, which includes reviewing the company’s risk analysis as well as its remedial and preventive measures.

Stephanie Raabe from SAP’s Corporate Sustainability team has been working on and driving this topic for many years. She was named SAP’s Human Rights Officer on January 1, 2023. “Companies that are serious about sustainability must take human rights seriously too,” she says. The (UN SDGs) are designed to improve people’s lives while promoting human rights; for example through SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). Human rights are part of SAP’s sustainability ambition of “zero emissions, zero waste, zero discrimination,” Raabe says.

Putting the Act into Action

When the German government announced its intention to introduce a supply chain due diligence law some two years ago, Raabe and her colleagues set up a project team with members drawn from Sustainability, Global Procurement, Global Risk and Assurance Services, and People and Operations. Tasked with analyzing the legal requirements and organizing their implementation, the team succeeded in getting 51·çÁ÷compliant in time for the law’s rollout on January 1, 2023. This included defining fixed responsibilities, establishing a complaints procedure, and analyzing the risk of violation in SAP’s own operations and its supply chain.

The team also seeks collaboration with other enterprises affected by the new laws, for example via industry associations. “We can only exert real influence if we pull together with other companies. Take the procurement of hardware, for instance. We need to ensure that human rights are not violated in the mining of raw materials in developing and emerging countries,” Raabe says.

In short, the LkSG obliges companies to establish structures, processes, strategies, and behaviors that respect human rights. But it also compels them to take remedial action if specific violations do occur. This would be the case, for example, if a company committed or was complicit in a human rights violation.

Decent Wages

Raabe gives us an example: “An analysis we did in 2022 revealed that six employees in Brazil who joined 51·çÁ÷through an acquisition were unable to maintain a reasonable standard of living, despite earning the local minimum wage. When we found out, HR reacted and raised their wages in the next salary round. Unfortunately, in some countries, the statutory minimum wage is too low to constitute a decent living wage. This case further shows that we also need to take human rights considerations into account for acquisitions.”

Nevertheless, the analysis concluded that 51·çÁ÷pays an appropriate or good salary in most countries and thus has a very positive impact on the lives of its employees. “Thanks to the analysis,” she notes, “we were able to identify and quickly resolve the deviation in Brazil.”

As Raabe points out, the LkSG requires 51·çÁ÷to always take effective preventive and remedial measures based on its risk analysis. In doing so, the company is allowed to prioritize based on the degree of risk. “For SAP’s supply chain, this means scrutinizing at-risk suppliers in more detail, for example, and engaging them in dialogue. But we also have to take a critical look at our own purchasing practices. We need to ask, â€�Is it even possible for a company to pay a decent living wage for the price it’s quoting to us?’” she explains.

A Step Further

For SAP’s Human Rights Officer, however, it is not simply a question of implementing the legal requirements. “As a sustainability thought and action leader, 51·çÁ÷must do more than just comply with the law,” Raabe explains. “We need to consider human rights in everything we do. Among other things, this means examining the impact we and our solutions have on our customers – for instance, in the area of artificial intelligence. The has been exploring this issue for several years now.”

The aim of the Corporate Sustainability team is to analyze and understand SAP’s impact on human rights in its entirety. To this end, it also aligns with colleagues on the product side to share insights on how 51·çÁ÷solutions can help respect human rights and the environment – and meet legal requirements even more simply and effectively.

“Solutions that spring to mind are 51·çÁ÷Ariba Supplier Risk or 51·çÁ÷Business Network, which can help increase transparency along the supply chain. We want to leverage these capabilities ourselves, so we collaborate with 51·çÁ÷partners that provide us with useful data for analysis in 51·çÁ÷Ariba Supplier Risk,” Raabe says.

“But there’s more to human rights due diligence than analyzing supplier risk,” she adds. “That’s why I also work with colleagues from the product side to position and drive other areas in our solution portfolio, such as incident management, occupational health and safety, reporting, and stakeholder analysis in the context of human rights due diligence.”

Relevant for All Employees

Raabe sees one of her most important tasks as making all employees worldwide aware not just of the rights they themselves enjoy, but also of the rights they touch through their work, for example when they work with suppliers. Her team has therefore developed the “Respecting People and Their Rights” info session, which is available in many languages and aims to sensitize participants on how they themselves are treated and how they should treat others – always with respect for the dignity of others. It also shows where they can turn if they feel their rights are being violated. “We worked with the Office of Ethics & Compliance, People Compliance, and SAP Global Security to open up the Speak Out at 51·çÁ÷tool for complaints about human rights and environmental due diligence violations,” she says.

“We’re a private organization, so we’re flexible and can deploy to wherever we’re needed fast. Every minute is precious in the search for earthquake victims,” says Hodapp, who has served as a volunteer firefighter in his hometown for more than 20 years and joined @fire 12 years ago to use his skills to help save lives abroad, too.

After just a few hours’ preparation, the first @fire team – 17 emergency responders and two search dogs – flew from Germany via Istanbul to Adana in southern Türkiye. As one of the first international response teams to arrive, they began by helping install the UN reception and departure counter at the airport for rescuers flying in from around the world. After that, they set off on a six-hour drive across the mountains to the city of Kahramanmaraş (or Maraş) in southern Anatolia. The Turkish authorities provided them with vans and drivers for the journey.

The Hazardous Search for Survivors

On arrival in MaraĹź, part of the team began setting up a base camp for the rescuers, while others immediately joined the search for survivors beneath the rubble. They spoke with local residents and with other rescue teams to assess where there might be hope of finding people alive. Because the earthquake hit during the night, most of the victims were trapped in the ruins of apartment buildings.

Once the team had established where to begin looking, the dog handlers moved in with their specially trained rescue dogs, which can search large areas of debris relatively quickly. “The dogs have learned to bark only when they pick up the scent of people who are still alive,” explains Hodapp. When the dog gives a bark alert, the rescuers bring in audio equipment to listen for shouts and tapping sounds. They also use tiny telescope cameras that they can push through holes and cracks to find victims.

When the rescuers locate a survivor, their stress levels rise as they feel the burden of responsibility to do everything they can to get the person out alive. They use a variety of tools, including concrete breakers and drills, to break through areas of damaged buildings that have become inaccessible – often putting their own lives at risk. “We have structural engineers on our team who can tell us whether collapsed buildings are at risk of collapsing further,” says Hodapp. And throughout the rescue mission, specially trained team members provide as much medical care for trapped victims as they can in these difficult conditions.

Hodapp tells us of one very lengthy operation to reach two people who had been on the first floor of an apartment building when the earthquake struck. The rescuers used an excavator and other equipment to access the building through the basement and then worked their way up bit by bit to the trapped victims.

Grueling Rescue Efforts

The team pulled five people from the rubble over the seven days it was in action. One particular rescue was especially emotional for Hodapp, who has a two-year-old daughter himself. “We were trying to free a mother and her six-year-old daughter. And finally, after 20 hours, we got them out,” he explains. “No words can describe the relief and joy we felt in that moment. But there’s little time for these emotions because we have to move on to the next rescue. And that’s why this work is so grueling.” In the first evening they were there, the team members rescued four people. Two days later, they managed to free a 15-year-old girl.

Hodapp and the team spent one week in Maraş: “The chances of finding someone alive seven days after an earthquake is very small – especially in such bitterly cold temperatures, which are partly below freezing, especially at night,” he says. Hodapp is reassured by the fact that several international teams have stayed behind to complete the final search and rescue operations. Having liaised with the United Nations Disaster and Coordination (UNDAC) organization, @fire stood down on Saturday evening.

The team headed back to Germany on Sunday morning. Hodapp says: “Dramatic situations like these remind us of how fortunate we are. I’m humbled and grateful to be able to return to my family and to a house that is safe. The people affected by the earthquake face months or perhaps even years of adversity.”

Life Lessons from Relief Work

At SAP, Hodapp manages the local IT organization for SAP’s regional offices in Germany and the IT Event Services unit for EMEA. “I’m lucky to have a team that is willing to cover for me at short notice and a manager who lets me take time off so I can join disaster relief missions,” he says.

He explains how his training as a rescuer and the deployments he has been on have changed his outlook on life and his approach to his job: “Relief work has taught me to keep calm under pressure – and to first decide how best to deal with a situation and then to act decisively. These are skills that help me at SAP, too.”

Hodapp also relates how teaming up with rescuers from across the world has helped him improve his ability to communicate and work with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. It has taught him that success takes teamwork, cooperation, and flexibility. Understanding this helps him perform better as a leader at SAP.

As one of @fire’s directors, Hodapp devotes much of his spare time and energy to the organization. Doing so also gives him so much back in return. To anyone who is wondering whether to become a volunteer for an organization, he says: “It is such a great feeling to do something for the community and make a difference. Just try it – I’m sure you’ll find it as rewarding as I do.”

Top photo courtesy of @fire

Here, meet the 2022 Go to Market finalists.

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

Demo Experiences with Persona-Driven Storytelling

Every customer journey leads to opportunities for 51·çÁ÷to showcase solutions, shape its market presence, and demonstrate value to its customers. “However,” says Milan Cerny, who works in Value Experience at SAP, “one of the biggest issues addressed is that customers often do not understand our offerings well enough.”

This finding was the trigger for Cerny and his team of nine to work on the demo tool Interactive Value Journeys. It closes the gap between high-level marketing materials and in-depth product demos by providing a platform for value-driven storytelling for customers, focusing on their business needs and how 51·çÁ÷can help.

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The team, which consists of designers, developers, and solution managers in various locations across Germany, started working on a prototype in May of 2021. They quickly rolled it out to a select group of early adopters to achieve efficient feedback and development cycles. Based on initial input, the team developed the foundation of their demo tool, including the mandatory inclusion of personas and value drivers in each journey. Incremental improvements have led to a larger release, which reflected the feedback gathered from usability testing, interviews, and the embedded feedback functionality.

The creation and authoring of Interactive Value Journeys require very little effort, as the tool standardizes visual and structural aspects and thus takes away complexity from authors. This does not limit flexibility in how content is laid out and put together; rather, it allows authors to focus on the content and storytelling.

The Interactive Value Journeys tool already has an active authoring community and has been used in various customer scenarios, on the partner portal, and in other instances. Cerny is confident about its future: “More than 4,700 unique users and over 68,000 hits in 2022 prove that Interactive Value Journeys should become an additional, essential piece of the tool kit 51·çÁ÷is using to position itself in the market.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Interactive Value Journeys
• Team: Elena Baur, Lina Gonzalez Garcia, Ruben Stoesser, Carlo Kloss, Marco Heumann, Christian Weber, Helena Schloeter, Tim Krohne, Milan Cerny
• Number of employees:Ěý±·ľ±˛Ô±đ
• Achievement: The development and launch of a standardized, consistent, and highly customizable solution to deliver value-centric and persona-driven demo experiences
• Impact: Interactive Value Journeys provide simplified yet relevant content that focuses on customers’ needs and challenges, serving as a valuable addition to no-touch and low-touch customer engagements.

Optimized and Data Privacy-Compliant Conversations with Customers

Sales and marketing executives are often flying in the dark when determining a customer’s interest and if they are allowed to talk to them considering data privacy restrictions. That is why Christopher Salvatore and seven colleagues from the Data Privacy, Compliance, and Technology team came up with their idea.

“We wanted to qualify the customer as center of the decision and, by analyzing what specific topic they want from us with an all-encompassing view, if we are allowed to even talk to them under privacy law,” Salvatore says.

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The team developed Contact Interest Intelligence, a tool that uses contact interaction data from various sales and marketing systems and, via a new Contact Interest Intelligence engine, determines if 51·çÁ÷has legitimate interest to communicate with a contact and in which topics they are interested.

The team consists of data privacy professionals from sales and marketing, data curators, operational leads, source systems, and 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51·çÁ÷BTP) cloud architects, and has been working on the tool for four years. It was built with the requirements of two business units: global sales and marketing.

“For sales, it started with a privacy-focused idea around automating the understanding and legal basis of legitimate interest. For marketing, it was a need to recognize the contacts’ â€�topic’ interest from an operational and privacy perspective,” Salvatore explains. “It was not until we combined efforts that we saw this program take off.”

Contact Interest Intelligence first enables specific customer interest conversations by eliminating redundant and conflicting messages, so the customer or prospect receives focused, relevant responses from both 51·çÁ÷sales and marketing. The result is a better, streamlined 51·çÁ÷experience for customers. Additionally, the prospect opts out less because they are receiving information relevant to their needs.

Next, Contact Interest Intelligence offers legitimate interest calculations. The tool considers more than 80 different global data privacy laws, export controls, and the like, taking the complexity away from sales and marketing. Based on previous interactions with sales and marketing, the tool also suggests next steps for the contact on their topic of interest.

The team is using cloud solutions from SAP, such as 51·çÁ÷BTP, 51·çÁ÷Event Mesh, and 51·çÁ÷HANA Cloud, to show that 51·çÁ÷can innovate from within. Recently, they submitted Contact Interest Intelligence for a global patent, and plan to commercialize the tool sometime in late 2023.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Contact Interest Intelligence
• Team: Mike Hollitscher, Scott Lawley, Christopher Salvatore, Asha Iyengar, Subrah Kappagantula, James Pagel, Pavan Yanmanagandla, Benjamin Smokovich
• Number of employees: A team of eight, with many subject matter experts and supporters over the past four years
• Achievement: Enables optimized and data privacy-compliant conversations with customers
• Impact: Contact Interest Intelligence is U.S. patent pending and commercialization is planned for 2023. It could make 51·çÁ÷a leader in privacy and sales optimization tools.

Finalist: Digital, Customer-Centric Platform for Sales Acceleration

Back in 2019, Sandrine Pons, project leader in the Solution Sales & Innovation team, Midmarket EMEA North, set a task for her team: “We need to put our customers in the driving seat on their journey to discover the right solutions for their business requirements.”

The team of eight accepted the challenge. They wanted to simplify and humanize the way 51·çÁ÷connects with its prospects and customers and make it more sustainable.

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During their search for the right solutions to business challenges, the team found that customers required more than just demos. “Customers want to deep dive into topics by line of business and industries, understand the ecosystem of SAP, find references from peers, and explore other opportunities and future innovations,” says Pons. “In short, the customers need to interact with 51·çÁ÷in a meaningful and holistic way.”

When COVID-19 hit, the team had to rethink the traditional method of physical engagement — everything needed to become digital, but still maintain that human element. To adapt to the “new normal,” they started working on the digital, all-in-one Midmarket Business Always-On Platform for EMEA North.

Pons’ team reached out to more than 400 contributors from around the world and harnessed the talents of storytellers, designers, technical experts, sales, and business people to bring the best customer experience into existence. The task was to create an immersive, entertaining, and interactive way to tell the 51·çÁ÷story. The platform is designed to simulate a conference center with different floors, lifts, and rooms. Users can play demos, watch videos, visit summits and exhibitions, ask questions, book meetings, and receive relevant follow-up thanks to built-in analytics. The team has used SAP-owned technology as well as their own development.

Midmarket Business Always-On Platform for EMEA North was launched in 2020 and is running continually with measured impact each year. According to the finalist team, with each euro invested, the tool generated €30 in pipeline in 2022 and €85 million altogether. The platform was also adopted by the North America Midmarket team and other line of business customer territories.

“As we upscale and develop our design and content, the platform is becoming an increasingly valuable resource for sales, partners, and customers alike, but also for consultants, analysts, future talents, and anyone outside of the technology industry,” Pons says. The team also implemented personalized follow-up options based on built-in data applications to amplify the impact of the platform.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Midmarket Business Always-On Platform
• Team: Sandrine Pons, Enda Kilroy, Sanne Corneliussen, Amaury Martin, Neil Howarth, Olivier Demeusy, Sophie Brun, Linh Le Dinh Thuy
• Number of employees: Eight
• Achievement: A breakthrough, digital, and customer-first platform that has generated over €80 million in pipeline, achieved 60% net-new named customers, and signed more than 150 deals since 2020. It has scaled to run different events for all customer territories and regions around the globe, with two-times year-over-year growth.
• Impact: Midmarket Business Always-On Platform transforms SAP’s digital engagement with partners, customers, and prospects using our own technologies. Instigates a digital breakthrough with scalable opportunities that will directly generate pipeline and impact sales revenue. The platform has a 92% customer satisfaction rate.

While they are not contagious, people suffering from long COVID might experience one or more symptoms such as fatigue; shortness of breath; memory and concentration problems, sometimes referred to as “brain fog”; sleep problems; muscle aches or pain; psychological symptoms, such as depression or anxiety; and changes in smell or taste. These symptoms may impact quality of life and limit the ability to complete everyday activities — making a normal working routine hugely challenging.

Looking after yourself and seeking help early on are extremely important, especially when it comes to long-term illnesses. That is why the Global Health, Safety & Well-Being team at 51·çÁ÷is working to make employees aware of the possible long-term effects of a COVID-19 infection and providing practical advice.

Company Medical Officer Dr. Torsten Paul shares more here about living and working with long COVID.

Q: We often hear or read about long COVID and post-COVID conditions in the media, but what do these terms mean exactly?

A: Before we go into that, I’d just like to point out that other viruses can cause long-term health issues as well, so this isn’t new.

“Post-COVID conditions” is used as an umbrella term to capture health problems that occur four or more weeks after an acute COVID-19 infection and cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis. New, recurring, or persisting symptoms from four weeks up to 12 weeks after the initial infection are called long COVID. If you experience symptoms for more than 12 weeks and they cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis, then we would refer to that as post-COVID syndrome.

What can I do to protect myself from post-COVID condition? Do vaccinations prevent it?

The best way to prevent post-COVID conditions is to protect yourself and others from becoming infected. Being fully vaccinated against the virus and following the measures to prevent infection help with this.

But if you do catch the virus, being fully vaccinated significantly reduces the risk of severe COVID-19 illness and the likelihood of post-COVID conditions. Although research on the prevention of post-COVID conditions is still ongoing, current findings strongly suggest that people who are vaccinated but experience a breakthrough infection are less likely to report post-COVID conditions, compared to people who are unvaccinated. Unfortunately, people who are fully vaccinated can still suffer from post-COVID-19 conditions, as our colleague Nicky’s story shows (see below).

At SAP, we are also doing our part to prevent the long-term effects of a COVID-19 infection: so far we have administered more than 30,000 vaccines to employees worldwide and continue to do so.

Does long COVID affect only people who suffered from a more severe COVID-19 illness?

The long-term health problems that can occur are mostly unrelated to the severity of the original COVID-19 illness. Sadly, this means that people who had a mild or asymptomatic infection still have a certain risk of developing long-term health issues. The good thing is that their risk is lower compared to people who had to be treated in an intensive care unit during their COVID-19 infection. Current research also suggests that women are more likely than men to develop long COVID, but we do not yet know why.

It can be difficult to distinguish many of these symptoms from symptoms that occur for other reasons.

Do physicians, hospitals, and authorities now recognize long COVID as an illness?

If a patient experiences symptoms following a SARS-CoV-2 infection, a thorough clinical evaluation is important. If the symptoms cannot be otherwise explained, physicians should always suspect a post-COVID condition. Fortunately, the general awareness of these conditions is growing, and we continue to learn more about them. Many countries now have official guidelines on diagnosing and treating post-COVID conditions.

What can employees do if they think they might be suffering from a post-COVID condition?

In most countries, the first point of contact for employees is their general practitioner or family doctor. Company physicians can also play an important role in the case of so far undiagnosed post-COVID conditions by referring patients to further external diagnosis and treatments.

What types of treatment are available?

Unfortunately, we are not yet able to treat the underlying causes of post-COVID conditions. Current treatments focus on improving symptoms and quality of life. Many official international guidelines recommend interdisciplinary, outpatient care provided by specialist physicians and in some cases by general practitioners. Because the symptoms often affect multiple organ systems, it is not unusual for treatments to involve multiple specialists in, for instance, general medicine, pulmonology, neurology, psychosomatic medicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and, for children, pediatrics. Many countries have already set up post-COVID clinics or outpatient centers, some of which are located at university hospitals, to take care of patients with more severe illnesses.

How does the 51·çÁ÷Health team help colleagues?

We offer medical consulting and referral as part of our general occupational and preventive . Our services do not replace, but rather complement, the specialist diagnosis and treatments that are available outside SAP. We also have separate post-COVID consultation sessions, during which patients can discuss their symptoms with our medical experts and receive recommendations to find the right external diagnostic and treatment pathway, as well as the support available in the workplace.

For colleagues who have been ill for some time, we offer support in the return-to-work process to help ensure that their working environment meets their medical needs.

“There is no end to the hardship and suffering of the people on the ground, where the confrontations with violence, loss, and destruction increase daily. The displacement of the civilian population has reached unprecedented proportions and the need for humanitarian aid is becoming more urgent and greater,” the GRC writes on its . The relief organization estimates that 13 million people are stranded in areas directly affected by the fighting. They lack food, drinking water, and medical care.

Attacks on healthcare facilities, personnel, and infrastructure have only exacerbated the situation, undermining relief efforts and depriving people of urgently needed care. According to the , 300 attacks on healthcare resources were reported between February 24 and June 15. It is also estimated that more than 10,000 civilians have been injured since the war began.

Ukrainian health authorities and many local and international relief organizations are doing everything they can to ensure that those affected continue to receive medical assistance. The biggest challenge is having medicine and medical supplies available where it’s needed.

Connecting Suppliers and Buyers

Mathias Fritzsche, who, together with Martin Fassunge, heads the Software Donations working group in SAP’s Ukraine Task Force, says: “51·çÁ÷wants to support Ukraine with software solutions. War means chaos and destruction, and with it the shattering of supply chains. Our SAP Ariba Procurement solutions can help rebuild those supply chains.”

As part of this initiative, 51·çÁ÷is making its SAP Ariba Discovery solution (now 51·çÁ÷Business Network Discovery) available to companies and organizations free of charge until the end of 2022. The solution can help buyers connect with millions of companies in 190 countries across the globe via 51·çÁ÷Business Network. “It works in the same way as a dating platform: suppliers and buyers can log on to SAP’s huge business network to find suitable matches,” Fritzsche explains. “What’s more, we’ve added a new toggle button called “Support Ukraine,” which aid agencies can use to search specifically for urgently required goods.”

In the first 15 hours after it went live, more than 300 suppliers offered their help via the solution. This number has since increased to more than 4,600. To date, these suppliers have delivered over €130 million worth of humanitarian goods, including 300,000 first aid kits, torniquets to stop heavy bleeding, and more.

Ordering System for the Ukrainian Ministry of Health

The start of the war spelled the end of “business as usual” for the State Enterprise Medical Procurement of Ukraine (MPU), the only national agency that ensures centralized procurement of quality medicines and medical devices for the state funds, too. With many of its national suppliers no longer available, the MPU was forced to find a new approach, as tenders can no longer take place the way they used to or are not fast enough in cases where urgent help is required.

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The not-for-profit aid organization contacted 51·çÁ÷in March, seeking IT support for federal procurement authorities, and brought the partners together. Founded by Ukrainian volunteers in Switzerland, Enkidu supports the procurement and supply of medicine to war-torn Ukraine as well as facilitates the donations process for global institutional donors through its platform. In addition to using the SAP Ariba Discovery solution to post its sourcing needs, the MPU also needed a catalog solution to search for and compare specific medical supplies.

Fritzsche made some inquiries: “On a Friday evening, we asked colleagues for help, and they did not let us down. Around five consultants sprang into action right away. In less than three weeks, we were able to implement and install a catalog solution for the MPU based on the guided buying capability. It’s similar to the cloud-based 51·çÁ÷Ariba solution that 51·çÁ÷employees use when they order a new notebook or cellphone, for example.”

For the MPU, 51·çÁ÷experts uploaded the corresponding catalogs from suppliers of medical products, set up authorizations for users, and tailored the solution to the ministry’s needs. The built-in invoicing process, for example, is an important feature, enabling benevolent suppliers to deduct donations from their taxes.

“I am particularly pleased about our collaboration with Enkidu because it makes it easier for us to help the Ukrainian people swiftly and efficiently. The network approach also provides greater opportunities to speed the rebuilding of Ukraine,” Fassunge adds.

The first order transacted via the ordering platform was for 400 vacuum-assisted closure machines and 10,000 disposable negative pressure therapy kits, valued at over US$1 million. Negative pressure therapy provides better healing of wounds, requires fewer dressing changes, and minimizes the risk of infection. The order was funded by the Ukrainian Embassy in London. In the first two weeks of using the solution, the MPU triggered several orders totaling more than €2.5 million, no doubt saving countless lives.

Although internet traffic has significantly increased year over year, the proportion of electricity that data centers consume has remained relatively constant over the past 10 years, as the reports. This is because many businesses have moved from small, less efficient data centers to ones that use more efficient servers and infrastructures.

The Cloud Is the Key

To simplify the transition to the cloud for customers, in early 2021 51·çÁ÷launched RISE with 51·çÁ÷consisting of cloud solutions and services that support customers on their digital transformation journey. The response has been positive, helping the company reach its ambitious cloud growth target: by 2025, 51·çÁ÷expects to generate more than €22 billion in cloud revenue. 51·çÁ÷is working with the four largest hyperscale providers currently dominating the cloud market: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud.

51·çÁ÷Cloud customers can choose whether to use one of SAP’s data centers; a co-located data center; or, depending on the solution, one or several hyperscale data centers. To further build out its cloud software infrastructure, in early 2021 51·çÁ÷launched the Next-Generation Cloud Delivery initiative, targeted for completion in late 2022.

“Through this initiative, we are consolidating the infrastructure and the various platforms that we have today,” explains Jürgen Sattler of the Next-Generation Cloud Delivery team. “We are migrating customer software to a state-of-the-art environment, which our new customers use from day one. By modernizing our infrastructure, it will be easier for us to scale in the future, and we will be able to provide customers with better service-level agreements.” Existing cloud customers are being migrated to the new environment during normal maintenance windows, which are usually on the weekend. “Once the program is complete, we will be running in a harmonized environment on our own cloud and on the four strategic hyperscalers,” says Sattler.

Green Data Centers

As customers migrate to the cloud, data centers play an increasingly important role in making solutions available to them, and, as such, in customers’ sustainability strategies. Running solutions in 51·çÁ÷data centers and using hundreds of cloud solution transactions every day requires processors, memory, storage devices, and cooling systems. This requires electricity, which produces carbon emissions, and water – and generates electrical and electronic waste. Customers must often report this energy use and other metrics in their sustainability reports.

The data centers at 51·çÁ÷headquarters in Germany and North America have been certified according to ISO 14001. This certification ensures that 51·çÁ÷manages its data center operations and responsibilities in a systematic and environmentally conscious way, monitors its environmental performance, and continuously improves its impact on the environment.

Since 2014, 51·çÁ÷uses renewable electricity to power all its facilities, including its own and external co-located data centers. And, to ensure its use of hyperscale data centers is also carbon neutral regardless of the sustainability strategy put in place by the provider, 51·çÁ÷generates renewable electricity in selected 51·çÁ÷locations worldwide and makes investments into high-quality, EKOenergy-certified energy attribute certificates. All of these steps make a significant contribution to SAP’s commitment to become carbon neutral in its own operations by the end of 2023 and achieve net-zero along the entire value chain by 2030. In its efforts to become carbon neutral while still growing the business, 51·çÁ÷is focusing on a three pillar approach: “avoid-reduce-compensate.” Customers can also draw on SAP’s green cloud solutions and services to significantly reduce their own carbon emissions to help support their sustainability strategies.

White Paper on Making Data Centers Green

“Customers often ask us what we are doing to minimize the environmental impact of our cloud solutions,” says Gergely Gulis, a data center architect at SAP. “Green data centers help our customers make their entire value chains more sustainable.” A outlines the industry standards and best practices that the 51·çÁ÷Global Cloud Services Data Center Management team follows to design, operate, and decommission 51·çÁ÷data centers across the globe, ensuring their lifecycle is sustainable. It also provides the basis for the next logical steps in making cloud activities greener.

The white paper covers topics such as:

• Energy-efficient data center infrastructure and IT devices
• Optimization of cooling and, where possible, reduced cooling
• Use of a cold/hot aisle containment concept to save energy
• Use of thermal cameras to optimize air flow and insulation
• Reduction of electrical waste and increased recycling
• Reduction of water consumption
• Use of performance indicators for energy efficiency, water consumption, electrical waste, and more

Digital Companies Are More Sustainable

With 51·çÁ÷customers accounting for 87% of total global commerce, 51·çÁ÷is in a unique position to provide valuable market insights into technology’s impact on profit and planet. Following our of the correlation between digital maturity and business performance with BCG, S&P Global, and AlphaSense, we applied the same externally validated methodology from IDC to sustainability.

The results show that companies with higher digital maturity have better sustainability performance as reflected in ESG scores, which measure a company’s exposure to long-term environmental, social, and governance risks. These risks – involving issues such as energy efficiency, worker safety, and board independence – have financial implications.

After analyzing sustainability performance for 8,685 publicly traded companies representing US$47 trillion in annual revenue through S&P Trucost Limited and ESG Global Scores, the outcomes are clear – companies with higher digitally maturity have:

• 75% higher ESG scores compared to their peers in their industry
• Better individual E Scores, S Scores, and G Scores
• 24% lower CO₂e emissions

Sustainable Data Center Deeply Anchored in New Global Environmental Policy

To execute on SAP’s accelerated commitment to net-zero by 2030, which includes a special emphasis on sustainable data centers, 51·çÁ÷updated its Global Environmental Policy. The policy became effective on May 1, 2022 and guides SAP’s environmental action by outlining specific global environmental objectives, focus areas, and guiding principles – further strengthening its pledge to reduce the ecological footprint of its operations, its value chain, and its solutions.

The dots, as Sahling refers to them, are the individuals and organizations working tirelessly every day to transport desperately needed medical supplies into Ukraine and fly back vulnerable Ukrainian civilians, often wounded and traumatized, to safe countries in Central Europe.

Ukraine Air Rescue () connects private pilots and other volunteers with physicians, medical centers, pharmacies, and aid organizations to arrange supply flights to Ukraine’s borders with Poland, Slovakia, and Romania. Over 250 pilots from Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and elsewhere have signed up to help. The volunteers have completed more than 20 humanitarian flights so far.

“Our aircraft get medical supplies and urgent medicines to the places they’re needed fast,” says Sahling. “Requests come to us directly from hospitals and aid organizations in Ukraine and we deliver specifically to them. We also receive confirmation that the goods have arrived safely.”

On their return journeys, the aircrafts transport vulnerable people to safety, including mothers and children, the wounded, and disabled. Volunteers make sure that suitable accommodations are available for the refugees when they arrive at their destination.

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Transporting the Wounded and Vulnerable

An avid pilot, Sahling has flown several missions to airports in Poland since Ukraine Air Rescue was founded and has witnessed the impact of the war on civilians. On May 11, he co-piloted one of three UAR-sponsored planes to RzeszĂłw-Jasionka Airport in southeastern Poland to deliver medical supplies and pick up a family of four who had recently escaped the besieged city of Mariupol. Sergey, 64, had been buried in rubble when a Russian vacuum bomb destroyed the apartment building he lived in. He lost his wife and nine-year old grandson in the explosion. When rescue workers dug him out, one arm and a leg were crushed. He was rushed to hospitals in Mariupol and then Donetsk, but to save his life, doctors had to remove his right leg. His left arm was broken several times.

On his arrival in Germany, he was met by Semion Iomdin, a volunteer with the humanitarian organization Mrija Bergstrasse in Heppenheim, Germany. The flight reunited nine family members from three generations who are receiving medical attention in Germany. Iomdin thinks Ukraine Air Rescue fills an important need for refugee transport to safe countries. “Transport by land to a country like Germany takes up to 20 hours and requires quite a lot of logistics effort,” he says. “The flight only takes a few hours, so we contact UAR when we need to transport families that have suffered major injuries or trauma and time-to-treatment is a major factor.”

Ukraine Air Rescue also works with the German-Ukrainian aid association (Blue-Yellow Cross), , and other organizations to supply hospitals in and around Ukraine. For example, a Ukrainian patient lying in a hospital in Iași, Romania, was diagnosed with sepsis but had a high resistance to antibiotics. UAR supported Pharmacists Without Borders by organizing the flight of a concentrated antibiotic from Ireland to Romania, enabling it to be administered to the patient within hours.

51·çÁ÷Employees Help Ukraine

Ukraine Air Rescue has united 51·çÁ÷colleagues, partners, customers, and others in a common purpose. All bring their own special talents and strengths to the cause and are reinforcing the network into a resilient fabric. “I know how important it is to have a wave of people supporting in the background,” Sahling says.

For example, Peter Horsch, who is responsible for the partners in the 51·çÁ÷Retail team, heard about UAR from a friend and signed up as a pilot through the website. Sahling got in touch with him, and it turned out that they both work at SAP. Horsch has flown to Poland three times now. He can transport up to seven people in his Cessna 414. He says: “51·çÁ÷is a very altruistic corporation that not only supports financially in times of crisis, for example through the , but also encourages employees to donate their time to charitable organizations.” Through UAR, Horsch experiences many aspects that are also deeply rooted in SAP’s corporate culture, like solidarity, mutual support, commitment, and the willingness to build bridges: “Everyone makes a small contribution and gets involved where their strengths lie.”

Other examples include Sahling’s manager, Andreas Hauke, chief information security officer for 51·çÁ÷Customer Experience, who volunteers his expertise to keep the organization’s website secure. Uliana Caceres, senior developer for 51·çÁ÷Customer Experience, helped establish a cooperation between UAR and (Munich helps Ukraine) to send 600 liters of insulin to Lviv. She also helps bridge the language barrier in support of UAR’s transport logistics. Michal Tabakowski and Pawel Wiacek, 51·çÁ÷employees in Poland, volunteer with local NGO (Laboratory of Peace) to organize the logistics for Ukrainian refugees traveling on UAR’s return flights. And Anouk Vastert from 51·çÁ÷in the Netherlands helped by sourcing tourniquets from the U.S. to help save lives in Ukraine.

The Power of Connections

The humanitarian crisis has unleashed the power of personal and professional connections in the tech industry, as people collaborate across companies with single purpose. ServiceNow is supporting the aid organizations Blau Gelbes Kreuz e.V. and UAR with a ServiceNow platform-based application that maps all process steps of the relief operations, developed within only a few weeks. Sascha Wildgrube is a senior technical consultant at ServiceNow. Together with a core team and many supporters, he is developing an application that manages the processes from the requests of the Ukrainian hospitals; to the procurement and dispatch of medical supplies, including transport documents; to the return transport of the passengers in need of help and accommodation in Germany.

“We started immediately and implemented the most important processes,” Wildgrube says. “Our goal was to give NGOs a better alternative to email, chats, and spreadsheets for planning and coordination, thus enabling them to carry out their work in a structured, fast and compliant manner.”

He estimates about 200 person-days have already been invested in the application so far, with time donated by ServiceNow and Teiva Systems employees and by paid time allocated by ServiceNow. “It’s just good what we’re doing,” says Wildgrube. “Normally, our solutions help companies work efficiently and save costs. This time, we’re using it to help people who have been wounded in war to survive.”

For SAP, AI plays a key role in empowering its customers to become intelligent enterprises. The main motivation of implementing artificial intelligence is to support people – freeing them from mundane, repetitive tasks and thus giving them more time to employ human skills, such as creativity and empathy.

But whether in business or the personal realm, there are ethical issues that need to be addressed. 51·çÁ÷first defined guidelines for using artificial intelligence in 2018 to ensure that ethical issues and conflicts are considered in the development of new services and use cases from the very beginning. And the , which applies to all employees, came into force in January 2022.

In addition, a committee of experts and an external advisory council also review questionable cases on a regular basis. Facial recognition was already an item for discussion here. For example, an AI service within an industry solution was intended to identify people and warn them if they entered a danger zone in production – which is a good thing, in principle. However, the same technology could be used by an unjust regime to identify and monitor its citizens, for example, and this usage contradicts the principles of ethics policies at SAP. This technology was never implemented.

Key Technology for the Intelligent Enterprise

Analysts estimate that the global market for artificial intelligence in software grew by 20%-22% from 2021 to 2022. Forrester predicts that revenue in this software market will grow by 39% from 2021 to 2025. Clearly, artificial intelligence is a true megatrend. 51·çÁ÷recognized this potential several years ago and intends to become a leading provider of enterprise AI for key technologies.

The company invested in its artificial intelligence business unit, which is led by Dr. Feiyu Xu, a researcher and experienced AI expert. Potential multipliers here include the company’s strong market position, access to the business data needed to train the AI, and profound knowledge of business processes in all industries. 51·çÁ÷is focusing on embedded AI: services that are part of an industry solution and work in the background to support users. 51·çÁ÷also offers individual artificial intelligence microservices – 51·çÁ÷AI Business Services – as well as AI infrastructure and tools – 51·çÁ÷AI Core and 51·çÁ÷AI Launchpad – with which SAP’s business units, partners, and customers can implement their own artificial intelligence projects.

“Customers expect the solutions they buy from us to be intelligent by design,” says Jana Wuerth, product management expert in the AI unit. “In the best case, end users don’t even notice that the solution contains AI components, but only that it works well and makes their work easier.” So far, several hundred use cases have been developed in many different business areas. Customers include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dulux, Mitsui, and Döhler, as well as many midmarket companies. Customers know that these services work best when experts use real customer data to train and test them. That’s why more and more customers are making the data from their systems available for development – under strict data privacy criteria. “We are happy that so many customers are sharing their data with us, because it helps us make their applications even more efficient,” says Dr. Xu, SVP and global head of Artificial Intelligence at SAP.

AI Created on an Assembly Line

The key to making this happen is the close collaboration between lines of business and AI technology teams. The 51·çÁ÷collaboration model “AI Factory” equips applications with AI like on an assembly line. With this approach, 51·çÁ÷can provide focused solutions, delivering ready-to-run artificial intelligence and other services as a one-stop shop that customers can use simply, efficiently, and uniformly.

The team is currently working with its line of business colleagues on several use cases for order automation. For example, customers who have not yet automated their orders, but instead receive them as PDF files, used to have to enter the data in their system manually. An AI service can now extract the necessary information from the PDF and create a PO automatically. A planned future addition is a service that supplements missing information autonomously by reading it from the order history. This could involve the order type, plant, or route, for example. If information was missing, employees used to have to inquire with their contact person; this step has been largely eliminated. Depending on the quality of the input data, the accuracy of some of these services is nearly 90%. As a result, manual processing or review is only needed for a small number of orders.

Another AI service from 51·çÁ÷makes personalized recommendations possible, as consumers are familiar with from online shopping. They are also used for SAP’s internal course offerings in its HR development software 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions, with employees receiving relevant training offers based on their business role and the courses they have already completed.

Intelligence in 51·çÁ÷Process Automation combines features of the 51·çÁ÷Workflow Management service and 51·çÁ÷Intelligent Robotic Process Automation with a powerful, intuitive, no-code development environment. This allows users who have little experience in software development to design, change, and improve their own workflows and business applications. In addition, embedded AI supports the business processes, making them smarter and more efficient.

One solution for the circular economy is 51·çÁ÷Returnable Packaging Management. When it comes to returnable packaging, such as shipping pallets, heterogenous data systems have made it difficult for the different players in the supply chain to collaborate. The AI solution, which builds on 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform, now helps integrate the different back-end systems.

Myriad Possibilities

The healthcare line of business is currently exploring an AI service for hospital billing. As background, the German legislature made the subsequent correction of bills more difficult at the start of 2022, which makes it essential for healthcare providers to issue correct bills in the first place. If an employee in the billing department enters “appendectomy,” for example, the system automatically proposes line items that are typically involved in this type of treatment, such as specific medications and services. This can not only simplify and speed up the billing process, but also can prevent the creation of incomplete or erroneous bills.

Many more use cases for artificial intelligence are imaginable in the future. Integrated AI in an industry solution could predict interruptions in the supply chain, for example, because it has been trained with real data and can identify patterns that resulted in bottlenecks in the past. Companies could also use AI in the future to avoid procuring products produced with child labor because the procurement solution has been trained to identify such risks in the supply chain at an early juncture and search for alternatives.

Here, meet the finalists in the Operational Excellence category.

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

Finalist: Competitive Advantage for Sales

An integrated knowledge of customers, markets, and competition can be the decisive factor for a sales team in closing a deal. The challenge is that although sales-relevant data is available, it is often spread across different tools and platforms. Sales employees may lack the time and expertise needed to analyze and interpret the data. This represents a missed opportunity for sales and a gap that needed to be closed.

The three-member Data-Driven Selling team — Pilar Navarro, Rajesh Parthasarathy, and Benjamin Baumann — accepted this challenge. The team is passionate about fundamentally improving sales decisions by using data-driven insights aligned with the sales journey and personalized to every phase of the sales cycle.

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Starting in 2019, the team members delivered various ad-hoc and standard reports for demand generation and sales teams with the aim of identifying new sales opportunities. In the following year, the report was enhanced with additional data points, such as pipeline, profiling, adoption, market forecast, and competition, and was mapped to the different phases of the sales cycle, from planning to execution.

In 2021, the team formally translated all the different needs from the field into the Data-Driven Selling dashboard for account, territory, and executive views.

The Right Data at the Right Time

“Our dashboard integrates sales data from more than 10 different sources into one holistic view that enables teams to analyze and interpret the data,” says Navarro. “Sales teams can make faster, better-informed decisions as to where they should concentrate their efforts.”

As a result, the solution can help both sales planning and execution teams generate and accelerate new deals, giving them a significant competitive advantage. Better informed employees are a threefold win: for the sales teams, for customers, and for SAP.

“Data-Driven Selling has already generated tremendous interest and has been well accepted in our EMEA South region and in the various market units,” Navarro shares. “The concept is so powerful that it could be used outside of SAP, too, and even offered as a solution.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Data-Driven Selling
• Team: Pilar Navarro, Rajesh Parthasarathy, Benjamin Baumann
• Number of employees: Three, with many internal contributors and supporters
• Achievement: Provide the sales team with the right data at the right time to make the right decisions on where to focus their efforts. Some of the key proven impacts realized are incremental pipeline, progress in existing opportunities and pipeline conversion to revenue.
• Impact: 51·çÁ÷sales teams can use the Data-Driven Selling dashboard to improve demand management, opportunity acceleration, and deal closure.

Finalist: The Future of Engineering

Integration is at the center of SAP’s business strategy. More than 15,000 customers use 51·çÁ÷Integration Suite to execute business-critical processes in 30 data centers, supporting 10 billion transactions monthly – and the numbers keep rising.

While customers expect solutions to run trouble-free, 51·çÁ÷teams are continuously challenged by the steadily growing number of customers and systems. More than 50,000 monthly software deployments on these systems across different environments, such as those of the leading infrastructure providers, add many additional sources of error to the equation. Many of the incidents are caused by factors that developers cannot anticipate. In the worst case, this leads to interruptions for customers and ties up developer time to resolve the issues.

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That is why the Data-Driven Engineering team, led by Bhagyesh Hede, believed that developer teams needed an intelligent, data-driven methodology to achieve uninterrupted, functional, and focused software deployment at a high level of quality. Their goal was to proactively predict and prevent outages for customers. It quickly became clear that they were not only building a bridge between development and operations, but also had to establish permanent, close cooperation between these two areas – which also benefits customers. With this inspiration, the 10-person team worked on their project tirelessly until they were able to present the initial results of their work.

Dashboards Support Developers

Data-Driven Engineering methodology outlines capturing key metrics in multiple dashboards tailored to individual scrum teams. These dashboards provide information about the most important KPIs for the functions, as well as insights into how the software is working in the actual productive environment. The metrics give teams an overview of the most significant configuration changes and their impacts, and pre-defined thresholds trigger alerts when passed. The dashboards also provide insights for the planning of peak loads and help the development and operation teams develop robust, scalable software for diverse environments.

“Data-Driven Engineering enables us to meet our customers’ expectations by shortening recovery times, reducing the number of incidents, and deploying new features faster,” explains Hede. “Since the development teams have better insights into both development and productive environments, we can identify error patterns at an early stage that could have a major impact if not corrected. We’ve been able to avoid many customer incidents as a result. The solution will help us achieve our cloud availability service level agreements of close to 100%.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Data-Driven Engineering
• Team: Bhagyesh Hede, Ashwinkumar Vijayakumar, Himanshu Mahajan, Tarun Ramakrishna Elankath, Karthikeyan R, Mrutyunjay Padmasali Sidda, Nitin Verma, Sapreen Ahuja, Prajwal Gonsalves, Sandhya Nambrath
• Number of employees: 10
• Achievement: Conceptualized and contextualized the Data-Driven Engineering methodology in the organization using state-of-the-art monitoring and Big Data technology within the Cloud Integration unit. The methodology centers on customer satisfaction and helps make 51·çÁ÷engineers’ work more efficient.
• Impact: Data-Driven Engineering supports fulfilling the business expectations of customers, such as improved time to recovery, lower incidents, and delivering new features at speed. As the development teams have greater insights into production, early visibility of the failure patterns is available, which could cascade to greater impact.

Finalist: Healthy Accounts = Satisfied Customers

Sales employees know it is better – and easier – to keep customers than to attract new ones. But the grand prize is when current customers regularly renew their contracts and buy additional solutions. Customer Health Score specifies a customer’s renewal risk and helps account teams create better customer relationships.

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Under Angela Reichert, the 10-person team began work in late 2019 to predict the renewal risk in cloud accounts and use these findings to alert account teams at an early stage. The goal is to improve the health score and thus minimize the renewal risk. The team is comprised primarily of colleagues from North America and Germany who otherwise work on different teams. “We want to achieve 10% more customers with healthy and neutral cloud health scores,” says Reichert.

Machine Learning for Real-Time Insights

The team relied on machine learning to create a powerful solution and is convinced that the data, combined with real-time insights into accounts, is extremely powerful when predicting renewal risk. Sixty-five percent of 51·çÁ÷cloud customers are digital customers that are not assigned a customer team. In some cases, the automated check of the customer status is the only information available.

The Customer Health Score model is already forecasting the renewal risk for 94% of nearly 68,000 cloud customers. The score is used both regionally and globally and already supports almost all cloud solutions from SAP. The prediction quality is over 80% and the team is confident they can increase it with the help of additional data, such as external financial metrics.

When asked about the project’s impact on the company, Reichert explains, “In addition to the improved health index and higher visibility of critical accounts, our approach delivers one thing above all else: a positive customer experience and thus a better customer relationship.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Intelligent Visibility into Cloud Customer Health with Predictive Score
• Team: Cloud Health Score core project team, including Global Post Sales Process Office, Customer Engagement & Experience, and Intelligent Data and Analytics, Franchise for Customer Success
• Number of employees: 10
• Achievement: Machine prediction of customer health, identifying risk to renewal, using over 90 data points, validated at 80% accuracy
• Impact: Ninety-four percent cloud annual contract value with intelligent predictive score (€7.1 billion revenue), global coverage, across 11 cloud lines of business, 65,000 cloud accounts and growing

51·çÁ÷is one of seven global companies that already have 1.5°C-aligned reduction targets, and the first in Germany.

The company has responded to a call to action issued by a broad coalition of business, civil society, and United Nations (UN) leaders to make the critical and necessary contribution to keeping global temperature increase within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

“While much of SAP’s ability to create a sustainable future lies in how we enable customers to create positive economic, social, and environmental impact through our product portfolio, SAP’s ambition has always been to lead by example and be a credible role model,” said 51·çÁ÷Chief Sustainability Officer Daniel Schmid. “To contribute to the UN Sustainable Development , we aim to become carbon neutral in SAP’s own operations by 2025. But our responsibility goes beyond that. In line with our vision and purpose to help the world run better and improve people’s lives, we are committed to join the global movement of leading companies and align our businesses with the most ambitious aim of the Paris Agreement to prevent global warming exceeding 1.5°C. Our strong cloud strategy will be a key driver based on efficiency gains in our data centers and a significant increase of our cloud customers.”

Setting Ambitious Emissions Reduction Targets

In June, global leaders — including Her Excellency María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, president of the UN General Assembly; Lise Kingo, CEO and executive director of the UN Global Compact; Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; John Denton, Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce; and SDG Advocate Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever — collectively issued an .

The letter challenges chief executive officers to set ambitious targets for their companies in line with last October’s , which made the case for limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Companies are asked to set verifiable science-based targets through the , which independently assesses corporate emissions reduction targets against scientific best practice.

Building a prosperous, net-zero carbon economy by 2050 requires a transformation of unprecedented pace and scale, with decisive business leadership and investment in climate solutions supported by ambitious government policies. By setting ambitious policies and targets in line with a 1.5°C trajectory, governments give business the clarity and confidence to invest decisively in the zero-carbon economies of the future.

“We need concrete, realistic plans by 2020 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent over the next decade, and to net zero by 2050,” said Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba, UN Special Envoy for the 2019 Climate Action Summit, and one of the key advocates for the campaign. “Climate change requires an unprecedented effort from all sectors of society, and business leadership demonstrated by setting science-based targets at 1.5°C will send strong market signals as we look to identify the scalable and replicable solutions needed to secure a world where no one is left behind.”

“We have less than 11 years to fundamentally change our economies or we will face catastrophic consequences,” said Lise Kingo, CEO and executive director of the UN Global Compact, an SBTi partner. “For the first time, we are seeing business and climate leaders coalesce around a common call to action, sending a powerful signal that science-based target setting presents a significant opportunity for businesses to step up when it comes to tackling climate change and limiting global warming to 1.5°C.”

Paul Simpson, CEO of CDP, an SBTi partner, said, “The science is clear: In order to limit the catastrophic impacts of climate change, we must ensure warming does not exceed 1.5°C. The ambition is high, but it’s achievable, and science-based targets give companies a roadmap for getting there. Corporations worldwide have an unprecedented opportunity to be at the very forefront of the transition to a net-zero economy — and there is no time to lose.”

To join the movement and take action,
visit: .