Here, meet the finalists in the Go-to-MarketĚýłŚ˛šłŮąđ˛ľ´Ç°ů˛â.

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

Finalist: Business Operation Self-Healing

“A world where AI is an integral part of day-to-day business operations, where we learn from every interaction and data point to improve business systems.” This is the vision of Glenn Svensson and his team. And with implementing their innovation – Business Operation Self-Healing (BOSH) – they want to take a step toward realizing this vision.

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It all started as a research project for the 51ˇçÁ÷Executive Board, exploring the broader context of artificial intelligence (AI) in businesses. In the process, the team quickly discovered they could “do way more with AI than anticipated,” Svensson remembers. As business operations become more complex, automated solutions are crucial to supporting the best customer experiences.

According to the team, their digital innovation can identify and fix issues, address performance variations, and restore outages without human intervention, which is time-consuming and prone to error. At the same time, it is helping business users, service desks, and IT professionals work more efficiently. “Gone are the days of submitting a help desk ticket and waiting for a member of the IT team to intervene when a system incident occurs,” Svensson says.

BOSH is an automation engine build on AI that is capable of understanding human-machine interactions and has contextual awareness. Based on these capabilities, BOSH can resolve customers’ operational issues all by itself. With BOSH, high-volume complex issues can be solved in minutes – even seconds – rather than hours.

Built on 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51ˇçÁ÷BTP), it combines a broad set of services. “We have some amazing platform services in 51ˇçÁ÷BTP,” Svensson says. “We took these and elevated them into something inventive and unique that brings tremendous value to our customers.”

The team built more than 80 high-value, ready-to-use resolutions addressing common customer issues. BOSH also has more than 500 conversational skills, allowing faster and better routing of issues to the right department, leading to faster resolutions and the best possible customer experience.

This customer-first approach is the fundamental motivation for the whole team: “We originated in the Customer Success organization, so our background was solidly in the customer-facing side of the company,” Svensson says.

Transformational Moment in User Experience

Svensson and his team are confident that BOSH will drive the adoption of AI in day-to-day business and offer a huge impact on customers. “We have observed that self-healing services settle issues in a fraction of the time and improve the user experience dramatically,” he says.

With their innovation, the finalist team wants to bring hyperautomation closer to customers and demonstrate that AI can play a secure and transparent role in their businesses.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Business Operations Self-Healing Service (BOSH)
• Team: Glenn Svensson, Andy Lawrence, Mark Cooling, Eoghan Murphy
• Number of Employees: More than 40 with core team, other colleagues, fellows, delivery colleagues, and interns
• Achievement: BOSH has gone live at HPE, SAP, and other large blue-chip companies around the world. It offers over 80 ready-to-use resolutions and more than 500 conversational skills.
• Impact: As market makers in the hyperautomation space, BOSH demonstrates to customers that AI can safely and transparently take a role in their organizations. The solution covers sales, HR, procurement, and IT, and crosses lines of business. BOSH is leading the acceptance of AI in day-to-day business in a human-centric approach. All this can be delivered in less than four weeks to customers.

Finalist: SuccessLine

How can 51ˇçÁ÷bring teams from the Customer Success organization together to better support customers’ moves to software-as-a-service offerings and accelerate their value realization in the cloud? Questions like these drove the Industries and Customer Advisory (ICA) team to develop SuccessLine, a tool that brings proven best practices to Customer Success organization teams worldwide.

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SuccessLine is a tool that helps teams plan, collaborate, and execute complex customer engagements. With their innovation, the finalist team delivers a solution that can drive customer engagements with a cloud-first mindset.

SuccessLine guides teams through the entire customer journey. For each step, it links to the most up-to-date go-to-market best practices, including the latest 51ˇçÁ÷innovations, such as 51ˇçÁ÷solutions for sustainability offerings, and puts them into a customer context. For each recommended activity, SucccessLine proposes references, best-in-class examples, and contacts to help teams position the right value to the customer.

“For example, the global RISE with 51ˇçÁ÷template guides the teams to the digital discovery assessment process to effectively position RISE with SAP,” explains Jeff Tanner, global director from the Industries and Customer Advisory team at SAP. At the same time, the tool enables teams around the world to join forces and collaborate visually with one another.

Creating Alignment, Transparency, Simplicity

Throughout the process, the entire customer journey can be shared with colleagues from the Customer Engagement & Experience organization as well as partner teams, helping to facilitate a smoother handover and full transparency of the customer engagement.

“There is no other solution available to our Customer Success teams that can create the alignment, transparency, and simplicity that SuccessLine delivers,” Tanner says.

SuccessLine was initially developed and tested as a prototype in the EMEA North region. Following a successful global pilot in 65% of 51ˇçÁ÷regions, SuccessLine is planned to be rolled out worldwide in 2022 and for availability to more than 5,000 field employees in the first quarter of 2022.

For Tanner, the current global reach will benefit Customer Success teams everywhere. However, he stresses that the impact of SuccessLine will be measured not only by its adoption, but also by how it helps the field transform customer discussions. He is confident that SuccessLine has the potential to reshape the way field teams collaborate, help them deliver value to 51ˇçÁ÷customers, and ultimately accelerate both SAP’s and its customers’ transitions to the cloud.

“One of the most important jobs we have is helping our customers move to the cloud. SuccessLine empowers teams to position the latest cloud solutions and enables our customers’ reinvention in the cloud,” Tanner says.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: SuccessLine by Industries and Customer Advisory
• Team: Geff Gilligan, Richard Abbiss, Ummar Rasheed, Ilda Freitas, Mieke de Rooij, Thomas Scaysbrook, Henry Himanen, Ken Crovetti, Jeff Tanner, Phil Davies
• Number of Employees: 10
• Achievement: An innovative, best practice delivery and collaboration platform to drive customer value realization
• Impact: Available soon to more than 5,000 field employees in the Customer Success organization, SuccessLine will transform customer discussions – measured by improved customer NPS, cloud adoption, and renewal rates.

Finalist: Support Assistant

Fast reactions and providing solutions are key when it comes to creating positive customer experiences. To prevent customer support cases from piling up in the queue and longer wait times, Jonathan Wiens and his team set a goal of connecting customers directly to solutions to further reduce the time needed to resolve customer support cases. An idea was born: a tool that enables customers to find their solutions easily without the need for a support engineer to walk them through it.

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The team introduced Support Assistant, a cloud-based application that uses automation and machine learning to maximize customer satisfaction and minimize time-consuming manual work. With this innovation, customer teams are better able to handle an increasing number of support cases with the same amount of resources while supporting high customer satisfaction throughout the process.

Wiens, lead developer, explains: “The Support Assistant takes our most valuable asset — the expertly combined knowledge of our engineers — and makes recommendations in a single tool for all customers to easily interrogate and resolve their issues.”

Guiding Customers from Problem to Solution Automatically

To narrow down their problem area when reporting an issue, customers are guided through a conversational user interface where the Support Assistant automates the most common and repeatable questions. Wiens explains that with each response the customer provides, Support Assistant uses machine learning to recommend expert content such as 51ˇçÁ÷Knowledge Base Articles, 51ˇçÁ÷Notes, 51ˇçÁ÷Community posts, or wikis. By presenting customers with possible solutions before they even need to connect with a human, the case submission process is simplified and the Support Assistant guides them from problem description to solution automatically.

“The Support Assistant enables our customers to access knowledge repositories with ease, so they are empowered to act on solutions quickly and on their own,” Wiens summarizes.

If the support of an engineer is needed, the previous conversation thread is aggregated into a comprehensive case description that can be shared with the human engineer. As a result, follow-up questions by the support provider can be minimized, leading to a reduced customer effort. This way, both customers and engineers can rely on the Support Assistant to increase the speed with which support organizations can react to them.

The results speak for themselves: the Support Assistant is used daily, with more than 100,000 visitors on 51ˇçÁ÷Support Portal per day. Wiens shares that the Support Assistant was used 65,000 times in 2021, leading to tens of thousands fewer support cases requiring help from a human support engineer.

Wiens and his team are confident in the benefits of Support Assistant: “It is more vital than ever before to ensure we are No. 1 in customer satisfaction, especially when our customers consider cloud solutions. Support Assistant is helping us get there.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Support Assistant: Delighting Customers by Solving Issues Faster
• Team: James Chaplin, Lisa Lewis, Vincent Judge, Mike Griffiths, Sean MacNiven, Peter Rigo, Jonathan Wiens, Marcel Pinheiro, Christine Osborn, Lucas Viana
• Number of employees: 10
• Achievement: A team of product support engineers came together to design, build, and release an innovative customer-facing solution that guides customers to resolve their own product issues through interactively asking product- and problem-specific questions and matching them to the perfect solution.
• Impact: With more than 100,000 visitors to 51ˇçÁ÷Support Portal every day, the Support Assistant reaches customers on a daily basis, as it is now available for 90% of all customer cases raised (excluding 51ˇçÁ÷Ariba, 51ˇçÁ÷Fieldglass, and 51ˇçÁ÷Concur). In 2021, 51ˇçÁ÷customers have used Support Assistant 65,000 times to find their solution, which means fewer cases in the support queue that require help from a support engineer. Happier customers renew their maintenance and continue paying their subscription, helping drive revenue for SAP.

In the role, Franc will prioritize building upon the foundation laid over the past year in California and further unite the research and development teams across the U.S.

“I think it is about really engaging deeply with employees and understanding what drives them both inside and outside of their careers,” she says.

Franc’s career at 51ˇçÁ÷began almost two decades ago on the Corporate Strategy team. After leaving to gain further experience in the tech industry in Silicon Valley, she returned to 51ˇçÁ÷in 2014, assuming leadership roles across development, design, and sales.

“She brings a strong strategic perspective on the market, an operator’s mindset, and a fierce dedication to this company, its employees, and our customers,” 51ˇçÁ÷Executive BOard Members Thomas Saueressig and Juergen Mueller shared in an e-mail to the 51ˇçÁ÷development community.

Most recently, Franc held the role of chief operating officer (COO) for 51ˇçÁ÷Labs in California, where she focused on motivating and connect people across different functional areas.

“This role really prepared Anamarie for her new position as managing director for 51ˇçÁ÷Labs U.S.,” says Clas Neumann, head of 51ˇçÁ÷Labs Network. “All those years of experience and the different roles she held helped her become an empathic and authentic leader paired with customer centricity in everything she does.”

Tapping into the Power of the Region

Innovation at 51ˇçÁ÷happens everywhere, reflecting the success of the of 20 development centers across 17 countries. However, the San Francisco Bay Area remains the densest hub of enterprise software innovation in the world and acts as a magnet for the most sought-after engineering talent. Through her experience working with enterprise technology and software as a service (SaaS) companies, Franc understands the strong influence Silicon Valley’s ecosystem of innovation has on the technology decisions made by global companies, particularly those based in the U.S.

“Some of our most innovative customers are based here, adopting the latest technologies and pushing the envelope the furthest from a market perspective,” she says. “If you can win in the U.S. market, you’re primed to win in any market around the world, both as a line of business and as a company.”

Cloud Mindset as Basis for Customer-Centricity

The U.S., particularly the West Coast, is home to many of the world’s leading cloud application companies along with SAP’s major acquisitions in the cloud that maintain a presence within the region — Sybase, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, Callidus Cloud, Gigya, and Qualtrics. Development teams in the Bay Area are spearheading cloud-based application development and cloud-native best practices for the 51ˇçÁ÷development community. Franc says this is expected to remain the case for the foreseeable future.

Developing for customers with a cloud mindset is a clear priority for the new managing director; she is committed to ensuring the dots are connected from the end user to deep in the development organization. “To me it’s simple, but certainly not easy,” Franc says. “We need to understand our customers’ goals and what will make them successful and extend that understanding directly into every role and every function within the organization.”

The Value of Education and Mentorship

Franc is passionate about recruiting and developing young talents and has been instrumental in growing the program, an 18-month early talent rotation started on the West Coast. Under her leadership, the program tripled in size and now receives up to 12,000 applications. 51ˇçÁ÷Next Talent has developed into a high-performing, diverse, and inclusive program, with 50% women and 10% of participants from non-traditional backgrounds. At the conclusion of the program, 90% are hired as full-time employees.

Achieving a truly inclusive workplace is especially important to Franc. As the daughter of a first-generation Mexican American father, she saw firsthand the obstacles he faced and was motivated by the thirst for education that he instilled in her. Franc sees her diverse background, both personally and professionally, as a strength that allows her to evaluate situations from multiple perspectives and build bridges among employees.

Bringing Out the Best in Employees

As COO for 51ˇçÁ÷Labs in California, Franc orchestrated the launch of a new future of work pilot program that puts SAP’s new Pledge to Flex work model into practice. The seven-week program currently underway at the Palo Alto campus draws from the collective wisdom of employees to gather feedback on hybrid working arrangements.

“Bringing out the best in our 4,500 employees in ways that helps them achieve great results leads to successful teams and happy customers,” she says. Franc emphasizes the critical role played by company leaders in supporting a new balance between home and office.

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: Monitor of Monitors

Some challenges turn out to be a steppingstone to something great. For one of the eight finalist teams, identifying and resolving problems in cloud services was just such a challenge.

Out of their own need, the Global Cloud Services (GCS) team came up with an idea on how to reduce the time and effort to monitor and correlate outages and service issues within cloud services.

“When you have an outage, every minute matters, every minute costs money,” Anthony Sanchez, vice president of Global Cloud Services, recalls. “By identifying problems faster and sooner we resolve that problem, saving our customer money as well as SAP.”

Over the course of four months, the team worked around the clock and developed the Monitor of Monitors — or MoM as they affectionately call it. This acronym is quite fitting as it illustrates what the innovation is about: like a mother looking out for the health and wellbeing of her children, GCS’s Monitor of Monitors oversees the health of the 51ˇçÁ÷suite of cloud services.

What started out as a team of five people, quickly grew to dozens of people who supported and contributed to the vision.

“We all love working on this project and think that love is contagious,” Sanchez explains.

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Cloud Health at Your Fingertips

How does it work? Monitor of Monitors enables an exchange of information that is centralized and transparent. Through the tool, engineering, operations, support, and leadership teams all have the health of SAP’s cloud at their fingertips. This enables them to react more quickly to events that pose a risk to customers. By doing so, Monitor of Monitors helps 51ˇçÁ÷to operate the cloud more reliably and efficiently.

When asked, why he thinks his team should win the award, Sanchez’s response is quick and on point: “Monitor of Monitors is a tool that everyone can use; it isn’t a niche, and it has value for everyone in SAP.”

Anyone can get access to and start using it within minutes. In fact, numerous teams within the company already use the tool. As he says proudly: “Monitor of Monitors fosters the spirit of ‘One SAP.’ It encourages us all to work together as members of the 51ˇçÁ÷family.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: The Monitor of Monitors (MoM)
• Team: Anthony Sanchez, Gabor Kaszonyi, Daniel Koller, Alexander Julian Danek, Gregory Melasecca-Jr, JĂłzsef KertĂŠsz, Yu Chen, Vittalraya Shenoy Adige, Marcus Mrozowski, Birk Bohne
• Number of employees: The team started as five and grew to 16 volunteers, with participation from dozens of people across SAP.
• Achievement: Massively reduced Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) from over 60 minutes to five minutes. Consolidated the number of dashboards from hundreds, to one, decreased Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) of multi-LoB outages to their lowest in more than two years.
• Impact: Everyone in 51ˇçÁ÷can use Monitor of Monitors, within minutes, to improve their cloud efficiency, bring value to their teams, and most importantly provide value, reliability, and assurance to SAP’s customers.

Finalist: Deploy with Confidence

Accelerating the transformation to the cloud is an important pillar in the 51ˇçÁ÷strategy. The innovators behind this team have set themselves a mission: with their solutions, they want to speed up and revolutionize this movement. “Confidence in the delivery process is more relevant than ever, considering that modern cloud-native applications are inherently distributed, introducing immense challenges,” explains Sarah Mueller, cloud engineering ambassador from the team. The Deploy with Confidence approach automates delivery, testing, and operational activities. This helps to increase developer productivity and reduce error rates to support the highest quality. Every cloud release to customers is done in a fully automated fashion. 51ˇçÁ÷ are engineered by constantly incorporating customer feedback. Results are delivered to the customer daily.

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More Value for the Customer

The idea for Deploy with Confidence originated in a new cloud application project in which the team was involved. While delivering their software to the customer, Mueller and her team realized that they had the potential to improve the process and make it more valuable for the customer – Deploy with Confidence was born.

With their innovation, the Deploy with Confidence team “enables the transformation of on-premise organizations to the cloud,” Mueller explains.

People smiled at their idea at first, but they kept hearing that it would not work out. The team knew that they could make it possible. That experience led to a key learning for Mueller and her colleagues, which is to never stop, even if others tell you that you will never be able to solve a problem. With 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud ALM, the team has recorded their largest success so far, transforming an organization with more than 200 developers to the cloud. It is currently the largest application being engineered on 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Platform, delivering to customers daily.

For Mueller and her team one thing is certain: “Deploy with Confidence is a key element for SAP’s goal to accelerating the transition to the cloud.”

The tool is already available and used within 51ˇçÁ÷and several frontrunner applications are now spreading across SAP. When asked why Mueller thinks her team should win the award, she responds with confidence: “We set ourselves a goal that seemed unachievable and, in the end, we revolutionized the way 51ˇçÁ÷delivers cloud software.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Deploy with Confidence
• Team: Sarah Mueller, Semjon Kopp, Jonas Breuer, Joerg Bastian, Damian Maring, Thomas Stein, Andreas Loebel, Philipp Thiele, Timon Schuele, Hans Schulz
• Number of employees: Team of 10 plus many contributors
• Achievement: Deploy with Confidence revolutionized the way 51ˇçÁ÷delivers cloud software proven by applications like 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud ALM and 51ˇçÁ÷Subscription Billing
• Impact: Deploy with Confidence accelerates SAP’s cloud transformation and enables cloud applications to deliver innovations daily.

As 51ˇçÁ÷Chief Compliance Officer Vivianne Gordon-Pullar points out, the actions and decisions we all take to do business the right way have a significant impact.

In an interview, Gordon-Pullar shares her views on the increased compliance risks related to the COVID-19 pandemic. She explains how employees’ commitment to ethics and compliance defines a company’s success and introduces the company’s campaign of “Trust Matters.”

Q: Can you tell us more about the campaign “Trust Matters”?

A: One of the challenges when we talk about compliance is to make it real for people and to explain the context and the impact. Put simply, the concept underlying compliance is that of trust. We trust people every day – the systems that support our daily lives are all built on the foundation of trust. That applies to our customers too. If we are not operating in a way that encapsulates trust, we are not only jeopardizing SAP, but also our customers, our partners, and our entire ecosystem.

This is how we have to consider compliance: it forms the foundation of trust, demonstrating respect and illustrating that we are careful about how we go about our business.

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What has changed during the pandemic and what are new business challenges for staying compliant?

As well as impacting individuals in different ways, the pandemic may also have created a situation of pressure within many organizations. Business may have become more challenging. Companies may feel greater pressure to deliver numbers that were set at the start of 2020, but that have become overly ambitious due to the current economic situation. Everyone, across all companies and all industries, must remember what really is important. The guiding principle is ethical business, which drives sustainable, long-term value and protects companies from the risks and consequences of non-compliant behavior. As a responsible corporate citizen in today’s world, we want to make a positive impact.

How are the pillars of culture and values helping 51ˇçÁ÷navigate through the pandemic?

It’s important that we can speak about our company and our work with pride. We want to tell people what we have done to help the world in this unforeseen crisis. Consider SAP’s mission: we want to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. If we don’t act in line with our values and our culture, then how do we expect to achieve that? We need to make the right ethical choices and follow the rules of compliance. Compliance is not simply a “bolt-on” action, it must be a “built-in” element of all business.

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How does the Ethics and Compliance team at 51ˇçÁ÷operate?

The Ethics and Compliance team is comprised of senior and experienced individuals based all over the world. They not only create the policies and processes that define and explain the standards of compliance that are expected of all employees, but they also serve as trusted advisors to the business and are always available to our employees. In addition, we rely on a coordinated network of employees who act as Compliance Ambassadors around the world as champions for compliance. Together, we aim to achieve the highest standards of ethics and compliance across all areas of our business in all jurisdictions in which we operate.