Lara Stoeckle, Author at 51��News Center

Developers and Researchers Drive Outside-In Innovation

Lara Stoeckle — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:15:33 +0000

Evolution in the tech world happens fast. To keep up with the industry’s pace, 51��works closely with academia to help ensure that the company never loses touch with the latest trends and innovations.

To facilitate this, , which is part of the New Ventures and Technologies unit, has established the . In this initiative, theory and practice go hand in hand. Academic research plays a crucial role in exploring new technology trends, but without a link back to the business, it can sometimes remain purely theoretical.

By partnering with academic institutions like the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, the Hasso Plattner Institute, and the University of Southern California, 51��can bring knowledge about emerging technology trends into the company.

This targeted exploration of forward-looking technologies with external experts from the academic community is referred to as “outside-in innovation.” It enables the company to identify trends at an early stage and to evaluate whether it is worth investing in a particular trend or not.

The academic partnership program includes engagements with several top-ranked universities around the globe. “We take a proactive approach,” explains Matthias Uflacker, location lead at the 51��Innovation Center Network location in Munich. “Once we have identified a promising topic area, we address academic experts directly.”

Uflacker says that flexibility is particularly important when exploring new fields of technology: “We want to take small steps and learn along the way.”

The individual projects with the universities are designed to run for a relatively short time, starting with a six-month or one-year plan, but with the option of extending them whenever results are promising.

An important criterion is always the relevance for SAP’s own mid- to long-term strategic goals and product visions. The program is therefore designed to help ensure that collaboration projects are either linked to existing projects and teams or supervised by 51��engineers.

51��Innovation Center Network has been working on establishing three main pillars within their academic partnership program: academic fellowships, research sponsorships and community outreach.

The three main pillars within the 51��Innovation Center Network academic partnership program.

The academic fellowship program started in 2020. Under it, 51��Innovation Center Network invites renowned university faculty to join 51��as visiting researchers. They then work on new ideas and promising exploration topics as members of an 51��team or multiple teams simultaneously. This enables them to bring their own research into an 51��context and validate it against real-world use cases. It also gives them a chance to influence SAP’s exploration and incubation of new technology and to earn reputation as a technology advisor.

Academic fellowships can be set up as full-time or part-time engagements – in the form of a sabbatical or freelance consulting work, for example. The program addresses different tiers of academic staff, ranging from post-doctoral researchers to junior and senior faculty.

Felix Naumann, professor for Information Systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, was one of the first scholars to dive into the 51��world as part of this program. He says he was able to garner a lot of knowledge and practical experience that he can bring back into his daily work at HPI.

Asked how the cooperation went, Naumann shares, “In academia, I try to generalize problems and find elegant solutions, while at 51��— very understandably — sometimes the thinking is much more practical, to solve the problem at hand and not think about it in a principled way. I think that both sides very much benefited from this difference.”

Naumann says that he can now use his insights to provide more valuable feedback to his PhD students.

He believes that this alliance is essential for innovation and progress.

“To solve real-world problems we need the real-world input and that remains a large difficulty, because 51��– for very good reasons – cannot share much of its data,” he explains. “This problem will not go away, so this is exactly why we need a close collaboration between academia and SAP.”

Research sponsorships through 51��Innovation Center Network support PhD-level and post-doctoral research projects in the area of computer science and related fields at relevant academic institutions. These can be either unrestricted donations or third-party budgets provided for contracted research services working on jointly defined projects.

A current example for a sponsored research project is the research on human-human dialogue understanding at the University of California, Irvine. From April 2020 to March 2021, researchers sponsored by 51��are working in collaboration with 51��employees at the .

The project seeks to develop machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to automatically analyze transcripts of human conversations in order to detect questions in the conversations and to characterize the quality of responses.

“It is common in academic research in this area to work with somewhat idealized testbed datasets,” explains Padhraic Smyth, Chancellor’s Professor at the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics. “These are very useful for building initial prototypes and testing research ideas, but they often underestimate the challenges of real-world environments, such as the variety of ways that we as humans express ideas and concepts through natural language.”

That is why the feedback of 51��researchers was so beneficial.

Community outreach is the third pillar of the academic partnership program, where 51��Innovation Center Network teams up with university students to tackle problems in technology.

This engagement happens through internships, campus events, student projects, and hackathons. The array of on-site and off-site events has so far included the support of the TEDx conference in Potsdam and other events such as the symposium on natural language processing in California.

One example of a successful community outreach cooperation is user behavior mining, which started out as a thesis project for a bachelor’s course at the Hasso Plattner Institute in 2019. The students worked together with the 51��teams based in Potsdam, Walldorf, and Newport Beach and delivered concepts and prototypes for tracking behavioral patterns when using 51��Fiori apps. The prototypes have been successfully evaluated with customers, and have now been .

Overall, the academic partnership program benefits both 51��and the research institutions: 51��can sound out which new business and technology trends should be addressed within the company while researchers can validate their studies in a real-world environment.

2020 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award Finalists: Customer Success

Lara Stoeckle — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 16:15:41 +0000

In 2020, the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is organized around three new categories, which allow for a better comparability among diverse ideas and offer projects a better chance to stand out. Each category reflects a different type of breakthrough thinking, considering the various ways in which innovation drives SAP’s success.

Here, meet the finalists in the Customer Success 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: The Intelligent Enterprise Showroom

The Intelligent Enterprise Showroom features key 51��technologies and innovations that have made 51��an intelligent enterprise – and thereby makes the notion of the Intelligent Enterprise readily accessible to internal and external audiences. The 51��Experience Technology team is nominated for the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award for their project, the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom.

The showcase can be experienced physically in 51��offices in Walldorf, and soon in Bangalore and Newtown Square. And in response to pandemic restrictions, it will also be made aviailable digitally or in a hybrid form. The team is proud to have created the digital IT showroom from scratch within weeks. It has had over 4,500 visitors.

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From the outset, each member of the team was given the freedom to experiment and challenge each other. As Anja Rosker explains, “We’re about not being selfish and are always supportive of each other.”

Showing Customers They Can Do It Too

Becoming a functioning and future-proof intelligent enterprise can be challenging for any company. “With the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom, we’re showing customers what we can do internally so they see they can do it too,” explains team head Oliver Gutzeit.

What makes the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom innovative? One solution combines the stories, learnings, and experiences from all over SAP. Rosker believes that what they achieved is “fixing the gap between knowing what’s there and knowing where to find and how to use it.”

Because the content comes from within 51��and from many different colleagues, it used to be difficult to access and consume knowledge that stemmed over decades. The team fixed this problem by connecting with 3,500 colleagues from the Intelligent Enterprise Group and merged their topics into one consistent platform.

The showroom is a global offering available for all customer-facing activities as well as units inside 51��and can be consumed in a guided or self-guided way. It presents scalable “51��runs SAP” storytelling packages to help equip colleagues in the field to win deals.

Finalist Fast Facts

Submission Title: Feel the Heartbeat of the Unbreakable Business: the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom brings the digital company within reach
Team: Oliver Gutzeit, Sebastian Lang, Anja Rosker, Stephan Kamps, Zoe Angelova-Stoyanov, Lars Langhammer, Christian von Jutrzenka Trzebiatowski, Matthias Wiench
Number of employees: Eight
Achievement: More than 7,500 51��employees and 1,600 external guests have taken guided tours of the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom and “51��runs SAP” storytelling packages
Impact: The showroom enables customers to understand what the Intelligent Enterprise is and how 51��can help them transform, using 51��itself as a reference customer

Finalist: Intelligent Case Routing

“Customer success is everything” is a sentence you will hear frequently when talking to Frantisek Zdvoran and his team, which created the Intelligent Case Routing tool for 51��Concur solutions. The tool was designed to enable support teams to respond to and fix customer issues faster.

“One of the biggest problems in support is getting the issue to the right person,” explains Zdvoran. The group tackled the challenge of simplifying the complex, time-consuming, and manual support triage and case routing process. The team describes the relevance of this goal for overall customer success as “faster and more accurate customer case assignment that leads to faster times to closure and happier customers.”

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The application uses machine learning-based text recognition. It is about making the machine understand the issue. In order to do so, it looks at all the closed cases in the past, which means looking at the roughly 200,000 cases the support team handles each year.

Prior to the implementation of Intelligent Case Routing, the repetitive task used to consume some of the most senior support engineers’ attention, which is why the team sought to keep the customers’ and their own team’s resources in mind along the way. The team also emphasizes that the application is not taking jobs or responsibilities away from colleagues, but rather is “a force multiplier and enabling technology,” as it frees up capacity for tackling customers’ larger issues.

Equal Parts Human and Code

When asked why the application is innovative, the team says that the deep understanding of the customer support world and its challenges combined with the strength of SAP’s machine learning services were key ingredients for delivering business value-driven results. Automation and machine learning become vehicles to achieve its goal, not just the goal itself. In short, they say, their solution is innovative because it is equal parts human and code.

The application has already been a success. After they had first met at a Hackathon in the 51��office in Prague two-and-a-half years ago, the team members had been working on the application mostly as a side project, investing their own time. In April 2020, the application went live across multiple support queues within 51��and has been in use since then.

Asked why his team deserves the 2020 award, Zdvoran states confidently: “We’re making our customers happier, we’re helping our colleagues, and we’re saving some money along the way.”