The 11th cycle of the Hasso Plattner Founders‘ Award saw an evolution of the award itself. With a refined structure and this year’s strong thematic focus on AI, the award now recognizes achievements in two categories: Emerging Ideas, honoring visionary concepts that explore new architectural directions and long-term opportunities for customers and the business, and Scaling Innovation, celebrating innovations already delivering proven impact at scale.

The jury received a total of 254 submissions from all over the globe, from which 41 finalists representing nine different countries were chosen. Six teams made it to the final round, highlighting the breadth of innovation across teams worldwide.

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The winning teams were formally recognized and celebrated during a red carpet award ceremony on March 26 at 51ˇçÁ÷headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Executive Board Members Christian Klein and Sebastian Steinhaeuser introduced the finalists and announced the winners in the Emerging Ideas and Scaling Innovation categories, respectively. 

Emerging Ideas winner: 51ˇçÁ÷Cognitive Twin Enterprise

The Emerging Ideas category honors bold thinking and visionary concepts that explore the future of enterprise software. This year’s winner, 51ˇçÁ÷Cognitive Twin Enterprise (51ˇçÁ÷CTE), embodies this forward-looking spirit by presenting a new way of how organizations plan, simulate, and execute in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world.  

51ˇçÁ÷CTE introduces the idea of an ever-learning, AI-powered intelligence layer built on a continuously updated model of the entire organization. It unifies data, simulation, and AI on SAP’s foundation to help deliver guided autonomy across functions, supporting the shift from keyboard-centric SaaS to governed decision-making and agent-led execution. 

Acting as a constant observer of the business landscape, 51ˇçÁ÷CTE evaluates an organization’s position against anticipated trends and potential changes. It runs what-if simulations and provides governed recommendations on 51ˇçÁ÷applications and data across finance, spend, supply chain, HR, and customer experience, with selective, low-risk auto-execution and human-in-the-loop control for high-risk steps. By doing so, it can transform ERP into an AI-native system of foresight and elevates workforce intelligence. 

The solution helps organizations move from reacting after events occur to proactively and continuously testing scenarios, anticipating risks, and evaluating options. This provides the information they need to make critical decisions, allowing them to anticipate what’s next, shape it, and execute in a single, connected environment.  

“Winning the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award validated 51ˇçÁ÷Cognitive Twin Enterprise’s vision,” Natalia Aksakova, Strategy & Portfolio at Global Finance and Administration, says on behalf of the team. “It reinforced that we are on the right path and gives us the momentum to bring the next era of ERP to life faster, with the ambition to help define how organizations operate in the years ahead.” 

Scaling Innovation winner: 51ˇçÁ÷Document AI

The winner in the Scaling Innovation category demonstrates how breakthrough innovation becomes truly transformative when it is embedded into everyday business processes and adopted at global scale. The 51ˇçÁ÷Document AI solution can fundamentally change how organizations process and understand the vast volume of documents that power daily operations.

Across industries, enterprises continue to grapple with the rapid growth of unstructured data. Invoices, purchase orders, contracts, shipping documents, and many other business records still require significant manual handling in many organizations, creating bottlenecks, delays, and avoidable errors. The 51ˇçÁ÷Document AI team addressed this challenge by bringing intelligent document processing directly into core business applications, enabling customers to automate document workflows seamlessly and securely.

What sets this achievement apart is not only the technological innovation but the scale of real-world adoption. The solution has become deeply embedded across SAP’s portfolio and is used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide to process billions of documents. By integrating advanced AI capabilities directly into existing workflows, the team has made automation accessible without the need for complex integrations or specialized expertise. This approach enables organizations to accelerate business processes, reduce manual effort, and improve the quality and speed of decision-making.

The award recognizes the team’s ability to translate research excellence and engineering innovation into measurable business impact. Their work demonstrates how embedded AI can move beyond experimentation to become a trusted and reliable component of everyday enterprise operations. By operationalizing AI responsibly and at scale, the team has helped strengthen SAP’s position as a leader in enterprise automation and intelligent applications.

Equally important is the long-term perspective behind the innovation. The continued evolution of document understanding capabilities, combined with growing adoption across SAP’s platform, illustrates how scalable AI can serve as a foundation for future innovation. The recognition celebrates not only the impact already achieved but also the momentum created for the next generation of intelligent enterprise processes.

“Winning this award is a tremendous honor for our team,” Tobias Weller, chief product owner and team lead, says. “It validates years of hard work, close collaboration, and a shared belief in the transformative potential of AI to accelerate essential business processes and capture true business value for our customers.”

Celebrating innovation across the AI spectrum

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award has long celebrated the people and ideas that drive 51ˇçÁ÷forward. By recognizing both scaled impact and visionary thinking, the award highlights how innovation thrives at every stage of the journey—from early exploration to global adoption. It underscores the belief that long-term success depends on both delivering value today and continuously reimagining what is possible.

At the ceremony in Walldorf, employees around the world came together or joined virtually to celebrate the winning teams and the many contributors who helped bring their ideas to life. Their work reflects the creativity, dedication, and passion that define SAP’s culture of innovation. As the company continues to advance its AI-driven strategy, this year’s winners demonstrate how teams across the organization are turning ambition into reality—helping customers run better, adapt faster, and prepare for the future.

The winning teams will be given the opportunity to pitch their project to the Executive Board in 2026. The projects will be recognized in the permanent Founders’ Exhibits in Walldorf and Palo Alto. In addition, the members of the winning teams will receive a personalized trophy.

Following the presentation of the “Scaling ąő˛Ô˛Ô´Çąš˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô” category finalists, we now turn to “Emerging Ideas,” which honors visionary concepts at an earlier stage—projects that explore new architectural directions, challenge established models, and open long-term strategic opportunities for 51ˇçÁ÷and its customers. The winners will be announced during the award ceremony on March 26, 2026.

51ˇçÁ÷Cognitive Twin Enterprise (CTE)

Modern enterprises are very effective at monitoring their business and analyzing vast amounts of data, yet many still see untapped potential in safely testing complex scenarios end to end and turning insights into cross‑functional, policy‑aligned options before making mission‑critical decisions. 51ˇçÁ÷Cognitive Twin Enterprise (51ˇçÁ÷CTE) addresses this gap by creating an AI‑powered digital brain built on a continuously updated model of the whole organization. It runs what‑if simulations and provides governed recommendations on 51ˇçÁ÷applications and data across finance, spend, supply chain, HR, and customer experience, with selective, low‑risk auto‑execution and human‑in‑the‑loop control for higher‑risk steps.

The business case is compelling. Organizations that combine digital twins with agentic AI at scale report double‑digit improvements in efficiency and cost, plus materially faster decision cycles. For a global industrial enterprise with approximately €40 billion in revenue, 51ˇçÁ÷CTE is modeled to systematically prevent margin leakage, excess working capital, and audit exposure, delivering an estimated €229 million or more per year in hard impact and risk-adjusted cash benefit. By maintaining a continuously updated representation of the business, companies can test scenarios before execution and dramatically reduce the risk of costly mistakes.

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51ˇçÁ÷CTE’s real differentiator is its enterprise‑wide scope. It consolidates existing 51ˇçÁ÷capabilities and builds on 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio solutions, 51ˇçÁ÷Business Data Cloud, and 51ˇçÁ÷Knowledge Graph to maintain a shared semantic model of how the whole business runs. This cross‑domain intelligence lets Joule and AI agents optimize complex trade‑offs—such as cost versus service level versus carbon footprint versus operational risk—across all functions, rather than pushing problems from one silo to another. At the same time, 51ˇçÁ÷CTE provides a safe innovation environment: enterprises can trial new pricing strategies, network configurations, and workforce models in a production‑grade twin before agents execute changes in live systems.

51ˇçÁ÷CTE represents a strategic shift in how enterprises operate. It turns SAP’s deep process knowledge, rich transactional data, and mature governance tooling into a differentiated position in a cognitive twin market that analysts expect to accelerate from US$36 billion today to US$150 billion by 2032, with 30%-40% annual growth. As an extensible platform, 51ˇçÁ÷CTE is designed to be the trusted operational brain for that future: new agents, scenarios, and data products plug into the same enterprise twin, allowing customers to expand autonomy and business impact over time without rebuilding their foundation.

“51ˇçÁ÷CTE is more than an initiative: it’s our vision for a new era of connected intelligence. We’re bringing strategy, data, and execution into one continuous system of insight, so customers don’t just react to change—they anticipate what’s next and shape it. That’s how we win and grow together,” said Natalia Aksakova, Strategy & Portfolio at Global Finance and Administration.

51ˇçÁ÷Signavio Transformation Advisor

Organizations planning business transformations face a persistent bottleneck: identifying the right challenges to focus on and creating actionable initiatives is slow, costly, and heavily dependent on expert consultants and detailed knowledge of the organization. This traditional approach delays decision-making and increases risk in fast-changing markets, with analysis often taking weeks or months to complete.

51ˇçÁ÷Signavio Transformation Advisor reimagines this workflow by using AI to extract business challenges and create actionable recommendations to solve them in minutes. The solution identifies business challenges in uploaded reports or via text input and instantly generates recommendations linked to process insights and best practices to make them addressable. By combining advanced language models with the 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio portfolio‘s process knowledge, it enables users to achieve in minutes what previously required weeks of manual effort while keeping users in full control.

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Early results demonstrate significant impact. The tool cuts analysis time by up to 80%, enabling faster decision-making and reducing reliance on scarce consulting resources. Since launch, approximately 200 customers have tested the transformation advisor, validating its value across organizations at different maturity levels. The solution has proven valuable both for customer engagements and for internal use in preparing sales pitches.

The innovation lies in bridging strategic business challenges and operational processes in a way no existing tool does. It automatically identifies organizational pain points and links them to targeted process flows, best practices, and improvement opportunities within the 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio ecosystem. This seamless integration empowers leaders to move from insight to action in just a few clicks, aligning transformation initiatives with company strategy.

The team embraced a proactive and entrepreneurial mindset: it started with a pure technical proof of concept then moved to a prototype for internal demonstrations, general accessibility and testing, and ultimately a releasable feature. The team demonstrated both transparency and customer focus by responding early to pull from go-to-market and sales teams while clearly stating tool limitations at each stage.

“The real fun in developing such a solution lies in seeing your idea and your knowledge grow at the same time and getting a clear pull from the market early on. The best customer sessions were those where the tool was improved live during the interview. That combined is a clear signal that we are on the right track,” said Alex Cramer, product manager at 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio Next.

AURA (Asset Understanding & Reliability AI)

Field engineers maintaining critical infrastructure face a frustrating reality: reporting asset faults requires completing complex forms on mobile devices, scrolling through endless dropdowns and codes. At one heavy equipment and infrastructure customer, 300 users report 400 to 1,000 asset faults monthly through 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA, but the process is slow, manual, and error prone. A single classification mistake can send the wrong maintenance crew and delay urgent fixes.

AURA (Asset Understanding & Reliability AI) revolutionizes this workflow by combining 51ˇçÁ÷HANA Cloud vector engine, 51ˇçÁ÷AI Core, and generative AI into a single intelligent solution. Instead of completing eight or more complex form fields, engineers simply upload a photo of the fault; review an AI-generated report automatically populated with asset type, location, and recommended classification; and confirm submission—all within seconds.

The technology uses embedded text, semantic search, and geospatial data to analyze both images and historical fault reports. AURA cross-references similar cases in the knowledge base, suggests the most accurate fault category, and learns from user corrections over time. 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Application Programming Model provides the secure foundation, 51ˇçÁ÷HANA geospatial content supports asset location intelligence, and AI models process text and images using 51ˇçÁ÷HANA Cloud vector engine for similarity matching.

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Results demonstrate substantial operational impact. AURA delivers 80% faster fault reporting, fewer data entry errors and misclassifications, and improved response times. For the customer, this translates to safer infrastructure, reduced operational costs, and a future-ready foundation for predictive maintenance. The response validated the approach: the customer loved the proof of concept and agreed to proceed with AURA as an official project.

Beyond defect detection, AURA lays the groundwork for scalable AI asset intelligence. Future phases include building a knowledge graph to link asset relationships, a data product integrated into 51ˇçÁ÷Business Data Cloud for advanced reporting, and a self-learning model that continuously improves accuracy. This creates a repeatable, cost-efficient framework adaptable across industries.

The solution embeds responsible AI principles from inception. The model uses customer-specific historical data to prevent bias, includes human review before submission, and explicitly handles uncertainty to avoid hallucinations. It ensures transparency and compliance with SAP’s responsible AI framework while empowering human decision-makers.

“We believe the future of AI is not replacing people, but elevating them,” said Ruth Peng, AI specialist from 51ˇçÁ÷HANA ANZ. “AURA equips every engineer in the field, from junior to expert, with the confidence to perform at their best.”

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.

51ˇçÁ÷Joule for Developers, ABAP AI capabilities

As organizations worldwide accelerate their transition to 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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.

51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷data scientists on millions of lines of ABAP code, along with commercial models augmented with context derived from decades of 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷ERP Central Component to 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51ˇçÁ÷BTP), it empowers project managers and consultants to better scope work packages and plan code migration project timelines with far greater accuracy.

51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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.”

51ˇçÁ÷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. 51ˇçÁ÷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. 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷Document AI generates an estimated €2.6 billion in annual business value.

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51ˇçÁ÷Document AI is now natively integrated into 32 business processes across 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA, 51ˇçÁ÷Business Network, 51ˇçÁ÷Concur solutions, 51ˇçÁ÷Fieldglass solutions, 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions, the 51ˇçÁ÷Customer Experience portfolio, and 51ˇçÁ÷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. 51ˇçÁ÷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, 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷BTP for custom document automation has increased 285-fold since 2020, underscoring how developers worldwide are leveraging this technology to streamline business processes. Next, 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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.”

51ˇçÁ÷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. 51ˇçÁ÷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, 51ˇçÁ÷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.”

Three teams were selected for outstanding and innovative projects in the categories Go-to-Market, Operational Excellence, and Products and Technology.

In 2023, 115 nominations involved more than 750 employees from 35 countries. Eight teams consisting of 81 employees from around the world made it to the final round.

In honor of the three winning teams, 51ˇçÁ÷will make donations to three charities selected by the team members. The €30,000 total donation – €10,000 per team – will be split between , , and .

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Go-to-Market Winner

Reimagined RISE with 51ˇçÁ÷Business Case with 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio and 51ˇçÁ÷Value Lifecycle Manager Integration

When shifting to a cloud-first approach, it can be a challenge to pitch the cloud to customers due to the comprehensiveness of the solution spanning across the entire value chain of an enterprise.

To apply a more streamlined and dependable method for crafting compelling value propositions, the Value Advisory team at 51ˇçÁ÷implemented the 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio portfolio of cloud-based business process management solutions within their practice to demonstrate value to customers through data-driven insights.

The team created a system where business metrics from and process performance data from were merged and applied to business KPIs to identify cases of suboptimal performance. This allows customers to more easily see the connection between business outcomes and the process capabilities, supported by data.

The approach offers a robust and repeatable performance diagnostic that can be used to identify, clarify, verify, and amplify value throughout the customer value journey, helping customers better understand the value of the cloud and . The innovation helps build customer trust and intimacy while also helping our business operate at scale. To date, this process-driven value management has impacted more than 190 customers.

“Our future focus involves enhancing usability and capabilities to comprehensively cover the customer value journey,” Nitin Singh, team leader and Value Advisory principal, says. “We extend our sincere gratitude to our leaders for fostering a culture of innovation, our colleagues for experimenting and navigating challenges with us, and prior colleagues whose work paved the way for this journey. We genuinely stand on the shoulders of giants.” 

Operational Excellence Winner

Plutus: Rate Optimization and Management

Cloud services are a critical part of SAP’s recent evolution, with the company dedicating extensive time and resources to seamlessly integrate all essential services into the cloud. This effort aims to enhance customer experiences – and Plutus serves as the cornerstone of these endeavors.

Plutus, which leverages , is a one-stop solution for major hyperscalers. It’s crafted to empower lines of business by providing smarter and more efficient advice for optimizing cloud services. Plutus can centralize the management of cost optimization and intelligently navigate users through cloud expenses, providing top-notch recommendations and comprehensive end-to-end management. It caters to users’ needs from guidance to execution, helping to ensure cost savings every step of the way.

The Plutus team used cutting-edge technologies to create a 24/7, fully integrated, user-centric cloud service hub and a smooth user interface platform that can operate across various channels. Plutus provides simplified financial operations processes by offering an intuitive interface across all platforms, working to eliminate pricing disparities and provide reliable cost-saving solutions. These efforts strongly emphasize SAP’s commitment to advancing global digital sustainability through innovative enterprise solutions.

The solution uses machine learning to provide smart recommendations. The team also plans to integrate a versatile digital chatbot based on generative AI to help ensure seamless and comprehensive user support in the future.

Plutus allows for a new approach to SAP’s cloud cost optimization strategy, unlocking new avenues for significant cost savings and margin improvements. To date, Plutus has generated over US$920 million in net savings for SAP, with projections reaching $1 billion in Q1 2024. It has also achieved and maintained remarkable, best-in-industry cloud utilization and coverage rates – exceeding 97% and 90%, respectively.

“Winning the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award reflects our dedication to teamwork and innovation,” Donghua Chen, Plutus team lead, says. “Our journey to this point has required a lot of hard work. But as we celebrate this achievement, we remain committed to continually analyzing cloud usage to maximize savings for 51ˇçÁ÷through rate optimization.”

Products & Technology Winner

CAP and capGPT – 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Application Programming Model and Generative AI

The 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) was started in 2018 as a project to address the lack of guidance for developers building apps on what is now 51ˇçÁ÷BTP. At first, developers could choose from a huge number of technologies, which made integration with the platform services a relatively high effort.

As a development framework, CAP automatically solves about 80% of the problems backend developers face – such as multitenancy, expandability, or business features such as localization and translatability. But thanks to CAP’s domain-driven approach, it is no longer necessary to always change the coding in each of those cases. And for special use cases that CAP doesn’t cover, the coding can be easily added to build in this functionality. To help safeguard customers’ investments, CAP offers the possibility to interchange components, such as runtime or the database, without changing the actual implementation.

CAP, as a centerpiece of Golden Path and , is now an integral part of the consumption experience of 51ˇçÁ÷BTP. Today, thousands of internal and external developers use CAP to build business applications on 51ˇçÁ÷BTP, driving higher developer productivity and easier 51ˇçÁ÷BTP service adoption.

“This award is a great testament to the hard work and dedication of the whole CAP unit and a recognition of the impact we have both internally as well as for our customers and partners,” Ole Lilienthal, team lead, says.

To make prototyping even easier, in spring 2023, 51ˇçÁ÷software architect David Kunz applied ChatGPT’s large language model to writing code for business apps.

capGPT, as the new functionality is called, allows users to write in natural language what they want their app prototype to be able to do. In as little as 30 seconds, they can receive all the code – which previously had to be written by hand – and access the prototype to test it. This can not only save experienced developers an amazing amount of time, but can also enable non-developers to create prototypes of the apps they need. capGPT can also generate user interfaces in addition to backend applications. It will soon be available to customers through integration into 51ˇçÁ÷Build Code as part of AI-development assistant Joule.

“Seeing capGPT go from an idea to a Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award winner within a year is a true testament that everything is possible at SAP,” Kunz says. “I feel very proud and I’m energized to continue to push the limits of what generative AI can enable.”

Photo courtesy of 51ˇçÁ÷employee Fateh Kassab

Meet the 2023 finalists in the Products and Technology category.

capGPT – Create Business Apps with Generative AI

A mixture of fright and thrill rippled through the tech community when AI chatbot ChatGPT entered the stage in December 2022, setting new standards for generative AI. In Walldorf, Germany, 51ˇçÁ÷software architect David Kunz immediately wondered whether ChatGPT’s large language model could be applied not only to answering questions about everything and anything, but also to writing code for apps.

“To build 51ˇçÁ÷extensions running on 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51ˇçÁ÷BTP) – even if it’s just to build a prototype – requires a lot of deep knowledge, including learning programming languages,” Kunz explains. “Even for experienced developers, it can take up to a week to complete a prototype.”

Still, his suggestion of having a large language model like ChatGPT generate apps was met with skepticism.

“‘That’s too ambitious,’ was what everyone thought at the time,” Kunz remembers. “To be honest, this feedback was justified. I was not at all sure it was going to work. But I knew the general direction steps had to be taken in.”

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Breakthrough on a Friday night

The idea never left him. One Friday evening in spring 2023, Kunz sat down and started to work through the steps he had outlined in his proposal earlier.

At half past midnight, he sent out a video of the successfully completed process to his colleagues. From there capGPT made its way – in a refined form able to generate not only backend applications, but also user interfaces – to CTO and Executive Board Member of 51ˇçÁ÷SE Juergen Mueller’s 51ˇçÁ÷Sapphire keynote. 

“The support I received was amazing,” says Kunz, who now divides his time between capGPT and his role as an architect with the CAP team. capGPT has been adopted by many 51ˇçÁ÷developers for their own generative AI projects. 

capGPT allows users to write down in natural language what their app prototype should be able to do, receive all the code – which previously had to be written by hand – in as little as 30 seconds, and access the prototype to test it. This not only saves experienced developers an amazing amount of time, but also enables non-developers to create prototypes of the apps they need.

“From experienced developers spending a week to build a prototype to anyone spending 30 seconds – that’s what capGPT does,” Kunz says. “And by just looking at the code, it’s impossible to tell whether it was written by a human or by the machine.”

CAP – The 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Application Programming Model

When 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Platform became available, there was a hot debate going in the 51ˇçÁ÷developer community on how to best build applications on top of it.

Developers could choose from a huge number of technologies, but there was a general lack of guidance. Also, integration with the platform services required a relatively high effort.

Ole Lilienthal, senior development manager for 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Application Programming, says: “We realized that, regardless of the business problem their app was supposed to solve, each developer and every development team was facing similar efforts when integrating with all the existing cloud services the platform offered.”

With the 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Application Programming (CAP) Model, Lilienthal and his team hit the bull’s-eye.

Started in 2018, the project was aiming for a programming model that could guide developers when building apps on 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Platform, which has evolved into what is now 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform.

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Safeguarding Customers’ Investments and Increasing Speed and Productivity

“With CAP as a development framework, we wanted to automatically solve about 80% of the problems every backend developer is facing,” Lilienthal explains.

Typically, those problems include multi-tenancy, expandability, or business features such as localization and translatability. But thanks to CAP’s domain-driven approach, it is no longer necessary to always change the coding in each of those cases. As for special use cases that CAP doesn’t cover, the coding can be easily added to build in this functionality.

“This has been a huge improvement to the productivity and speed of developers and also to the alignments between development teams,”  Lilienthal says.

To help safeguard customers’ investments, CAP offers the possibility to interchange components, such as runtime or the database, without changing the actual implementation.

As they saw the advantages CAP offers, internal 51ˇçÁ÷developers started to migrate from their existing stacks. External feedback has been particularly good, leading over time to the forming of a wide external community around CAP.

The team – located mostly in Walldorf and Bangalore, India – took a couple of already existing innovations and created something new, and then brought it to the next level. In a world of rapidly changing cloud technologies, the 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Application Programming Model can accelerate development and safeguard customers’ investments.

51ˇçÁ÷Ariba Category Management

Traditionally, procurement challenges involve minimizing costs, sustaining quality, and ensuring on-time delivery. But in an increasingly volatile world, procurement goals have evolved to be more complex, as they now involve running in a sustainable and socially responsible manner.

“Category management is one of the leading practices that help procurement drive efficiencies,” says Lincy T. Elizabeth, product manager for 51ˇçÁ÷Ariba Category Management, 51ˇçÁ÷Labs Bangalore. “It allows organizations to categorize spend, focus on consolidation, and enhance efficiencies with a holistic view of all the requirements in terms of goods and services that are needed across multiple departments, regions, and geographical locations.”

“However, what has always kept category management from reaching its full potential is that it is a manual and data-intensive exercise that results in isolated offline strategy documents disconnected from execution systems,” Elizabeth says. “It seldom translates to successful execution and strategy compliance.”

This is where the 51ˇçÁ÷Ariba Category Management solution comes in: it can digitize this entire process.

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Positioning Procurement as an Enabler of Digital Transformation

Data analysis is key in this process, so instead of having to drill down to find information, 51ˇçÁ÷Ariba Category Management can serve up data intelligently. It features a guided process leveraging analytics, generative AI, and modular tools – helping to make an otherwise complex, time-consuming process into a streamlined one.

Customers have acknowledged the need for digitized category management and the value that this solution brings them.

“This is very evident in the solution’s inclusion in renewal discussions and the subsequent wins,” Elizabeth says. “In fact, most customers we speak to see category management as one of the top drivers for digital transformation in their procurement organization.”

51ˇçÁ÷Ariba Category Management can empower procurement to be a catalyst in an organization’s journey towards becoming an agile, intelligent, and sustainable enterprise.

“We saw the untapped opportunities in the manual process of category management and sprang into action,” Elizabeth explains. “Our team underscores SAP’s innovative spirit as we brought this innovation to our customers in just under two years. We’re immensely proud to see the value it can provide to customers in the longer run.”

Top photo courtesy of 51ˇçÁ÷employee Hitesh Deka

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capGPT is a Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award 2023 finalist in the Products & Technology category.

Meet the team and find out how their innovation is helping 51ˇçÁ÷generate business applications within seconds by using generative AI and saving time when building an initial prototype.

Learn more about the Products & Technology category finalists.

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The 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Application Programming Model, or CAP, helps simplify the creation of business applications in the cloud and is at the center of the 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51ˇçÁ÷BTP) consumption experience.

The 51ˇçÁ÷Cloud Application Programming Model is one of the finalists for the 2023 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award in the Products & Technology category.

Learn more about the Products & Technology category finalists.

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Category management is the foundation of an effective procurement strategy, as it allows organizations to take a holistic view of their purchases.

But until now, it has been a very manual, data-intensive process. 51ˇçÁ÷Ariba Category Management helps digitize that process, resulting in better efficiencies and reduced costs. 51ˇçÁ÷Ariba Category Management is one of the finalists for the 2023 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award in the Products & Technology category.

Learn more about the Products & Technology category finalists.

Today, we focus on the three nominees in the Operational Excellence category.

Streamlining Customer Data Extraction: SAP’s New Customer Data Hub

In the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) development, making customer data available plays a pivotal role. Traditionally, this process could take six weeks or longer, causing substantial delays and impacting overall agility. However, the introduction of SAP’s new customer data hub has transformed this scenario, compressing the timeframe down to a brief 24-hour turnover. This accelerated pace can empower data scientists to efficiently handle multiple projects, significantly enhancing their productivity.

To extract customer data previously, SAP’s data scientists had to go through a complex, time-consuming process involving a sequential series of tasks, sifting through vast volumes of entries, and coordinating with multiple departments to extract various data components securely and compliantly.

To address this challenge, a cross-functional team spearheaded by Stefan Thomas resolved to revamp the process. The team was able to develop a prototype within six weeks using the Scaled Agile Framework and then collaborated with business and engineering teams to refine the hub. Four months of concerted effort culminated in the launch of the customer data hub in May 2023, marking its inaugural release to 51ˇçÁ÷cloud ERP.

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Within this tool, data scientists can kick-start data extraction requests by defining the necessary extraction through a brief description of their needs. The Customer Data Office validates the request and once it is approved, the hub can seamlessly retrieve data from the data pipeline and push it into the internal data lake, consolidating it into a coherent format. The customer data hub can not only facilitate managing data access requests but also helps ensure complete transparency throughout the entire process.

Presently, the hub has processed 15 use cases and successfully extracted 550 customer data sets, marking a significant step forward in data extraction efficiency.

Empowering 100,000 Customers: The Service & Support Data Lake AI Expansion

AI has been a game changer, not just for 51ˇçÁ÷but for the world at large. This year, 51ˇçÁ÷took a major step forward by launching its AI copilot Joule, signaling a big change in how we handle processes and data as we embrace AI-driven business transformation. The Service & Support data lake is at the heart of this shift, aiming to enhance customer and support engineer experiences by transforming SAP’s AI-driven digital business landscape for support.

Beginning with a small, self-contained team, the project gradually engaged over 150 51ˇçÁ÷colleagues. Throughout the process, the primary goal remained unwavering: to craft a seamless, automated system that integrates all AI components – data, governance, and services – into one accessible platform.

Collaborative experimentation across teams helped overcome significant obstacles like resistance to change and resource and technology constraints. By building and successfully operating the Service & Support data lake as a swift, seamless, and scalable value system, the team has not only met its primary goals but also helped change the customer support journey process through a dynamic system that, thanks to machine learning, is constantly evolving.

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The Service & Support data lake integrates innovation, creativity, and collaboration, acting as an AI hub that can enhance processes worldwide. This new platform has gained positive feedback throughout, highlighting AI’s role in enhancing the support journey.

At present, the Service & Support data lake has enabled 51ˇçÁ÷to achieve annual cost savings of €20 million and it powers 100,000 customers through 40 AI applications. Popular services like Incident Solution Matching, categorization predictors, outbreak detection, and iSwarm are widely adopted in customer-facing and internal platforms like 51ˇçÁ÷for Me and Built-In Support.

Plutus: Mastering Rate Optimization and Management

Cloud services have become a critical part of SAP’s recent evolution, sparking a significant transformation. To solidify its position as a cloud-centric company, 51ˇçÁ÷has dedicated extensive time and resources to seamlessly integrate all essential services into the cloud. This effort aims to enhance customer experiences, with Plutus serving as the cornerstone of these endeavors.

Plutus, which leverages 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51ˇçÁ÷BTP), is a one-stop solution for major hyperscalers. It’s crafted to empower lines of business by providing smarter and more efficient advice for optimizing cloud services. Plutus takes the lead in centralizing cost optimization – also known as reserved instances (RI) – management, finely tuned for SAP’s operations. It can go beyond mere cost management, intelligently navigating users through cloud expenses to offer top-notch recommendations and comprehensive end-to-end management. From guidance to execution, it can cater to users’ needs, helping to ensure cost savings every step of the way.

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Donghua Chen and her diverse team, consisting of 60% early talent, with 40% coming directly from the 51ˇçÁ÷Next Talent program, and 35% female-identifying engineers, set out on an ambitious five-year journey to build Plutus. Their vision was to use cutting-edge technologies to create a 24/7, fully integrated, user-centric cloud service hub. Collaborating closely with multiple colleagues, the team developed a smooth user interface platform that can operate across various channels. Furthermore, Plutus can simplify financial operations processes by offering an intuitive interface across all platforms, eliminating pricing disparities and providing reliable cost-saving solutions. These efforts strongly emphasize SAP’s commitment to advancing global digital sustainability through innovative enterprise solutions.

The team harnessed fresh ideas and diverse perspectives to identify distinct cloud cost optimization needs and implement user-centric solutions to help optimize productivity. Additionally, they recognized the potential of machine learning and AI in streamlining SAP-specific RI management and recommendations. Currently, Plutus leverages machine learning to provide smart recommendations, and the team plans to introduce generative AI to integrate a versatile digital chatbot into Plutus, working to ensure seamless and comprehensive user support in the future.

Plutus allows for a new approach to SAP’s cloud cost optimization strategy, unlocking new avenues for significant cost savings and margin improvements. To date, Plutus has generated over US$920 million in net savings for SAP, with projections reaching $1 billion in Q1 2024. It has also achieved and maintained remarkable, best-in-industry cloud utilization and coverage rates – exceeding 97% and 90%, respectively.

Top image courtesy of 51ˇçÁ÷employee Sungmin Hwang.

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By creating AI scenarios that work together and share knowledge, 51ˇçÁ÷is providing the speed and power of AI in its service and support experience.

The Service & Support Data Lake team is one of the finalists for the 2023 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award in the Operational Excellence category.

Learn more about the Operational Excellence category finalists.

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Plutus is a Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award 2023 finalist in the Operational Excellence category.

Meet the team and learn how they centralize cost optimization.

Learn more about the Operational Excellence category finalists.

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The Customer Data Hub team has reduced the time necessary to curate customer data, for uses such as artificial intelligence, from six to eight weeks, to days if not hours.

In brief, it has automated a process that previously had numerous manual steps. The team is a 2023 finalist for the Hasso Plattner Founder’s Award in the Operational Excellence category.

Learn more about the Operational Excellence category finalists.

Here, we kick it off with the 2023 Go to Market finalists.

Transforming Learning in the 51ˇçÁ÷Ecosystem

Learning within the 51ˇçÁ÷ecosystem can be a daunting task. For both customers and 51ˇçÁ÷professionals, it can be hard to keep up with the landscape of ever-evolving innovations and advancing technologies. Constant learning has become somewhat of a standard with the transition to the cloud, which has resulted in a greater requirement for skilled talent. Yet the team behind the 51ˇçÁ÷Learning site noticed an unfortunate trend. “Most 51ˇçÁ÷professionals are not engaging in 51ˇçÁ÷Learning and certification activities,” says team leader Jan Meyer, global head of 51ˇçÁ÷Learning Systems. “Many customers feared a skills shortage impacting their move to 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA.” However, the 51ˇçÁ÷Learning team also determined that when customers and partners engaged in learning activities, there were tremendous positive effects in their technical skills and overall work satisfaction.

The next steps were therefore clear for the team. As team member Marina Noble, head of Learning Systems Product and Solution Management, states, “These challenges and opportunities motivated us to significantly reduce learning, experiential, and commercial barriers and to create opportunities through learning and development for everyone.” Their realization led to the creation of . In doing so, they garnered support from leaders across SAP, including Customer Success, Partner Ecosystem Success, Intelligent Enterprise Group, and 51ˇçÁ÷Learning. The goal was to tear down as many barriers to entry as possible by simplifying and consolidating information into one all-encompassing learning destination.

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Within the site, the team focused on simplifying discovery and access for all users. They eliminated the need for registration, simplified the complexity of the learning process by consolidating multiple learning destinations, and increased optimization for search engines and digital learning. They also made a wealth of learning content available for free. Timo Schuette, team member and global head of 51ˇçÁ÷Product Learning CoE, explains how, “Today, 191 learning journeys, many leading to 51ˇçÁ÷certification, are available in this new experience on 51ˇçÁ÷LearningĚýin front of the paywall.” The results of this decision have already bore fruit, with 2023 showcasing a 250% year-over-year growth in usersĚýand a record 1.7 million active learners. On the other side of the paywall, the team created a premium learning experience that uses key methods to help maximize learning impact. Premium users can gain access to hands-on practice systems, expert-led sessions, role-based certification, and advanced learning analytics. Additionally, the premium learning experience has been substantially reduced in cost, allowing more partners and customers to reap the benefits.

A New and Improved AI Customer Support Experience

The team behind the newĚýĚýapplication on 51ˇçÁ÷for Me began with a blank slate. Instead of taking the solutions from 51ˇçÁ÷ONE Support Launchpad and applying themĚýto a new application, they knew that the needs of customers using 51ˇçÁ÷for Me were different. For instance, the get support app would house the customer service requirements of many more employees using a multitude of 51ˇçÁ÷products. The case creation process would therefore have to properly support Digital Core & Platform and People & Operations, as well as 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio, 51ˇçÁ÷Fieldglass, and 51ˇçÁ÷Ariba solutions. Additionally, due to the influx in customer volume, it became a necessity to increase the customer self-service rate while making sure customers could still connect with the right experts to solve their issues.

The team found their solution to these challenges in the implementation of AI. Built alongside the Artificial Intelligence Technologies team in the Customer Support & Innovation organization, they utilized the innovative technology to help reduce customer effort and improve the accuracy of responses. One of the key improvements AI has facilitated within the get support app is helping customers correctly qualify their problems through the channel recommender. As explained by John Bowley, team leader and product manager of Support Applications in 51ˇçÁ÷for Me, “Based on data analysis, an AI service derives the most suitable support channel to solve an issue, whether that is 51ˇçÁ÷Community or Expert Chat.”

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The team also used AI to help improve the self-service features of the app. While customers are providing information and getting support, an AI service will run alongside and present relevant knowledge articles to the customer. These articles will be based on customer input and will happen in parallel with the customer receiving support, helping to expedite the whole process.

The new and improved get support app has already proven itself with positive outcomes. There is now a significant increase in the percentage of customers that start the case creation process within the app but don’t fully create a support case (64.5%, up from 32% in the previous application). This means that these customers began searching for help in the app and found a solution during the process without needing to create a case. Additionally, the app helps bolster the operational efficiency of the 51ˇçÁ÷support organization with its improvements in routing customers to the right support teams.

Reimagining Sales Engagements with 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio

The Value Advisory team collaborates with customers to help link their business strategies and experiences to their desired outcomes. But in the process of shifting to a cloud-first approach, the team faced a dilemma: it became apparent that their sales engagement strategy required modernization. An increase in the volume of deals within the cloud space required a faster, more efficient, and more consistent sales engagement approach that aligns with the specific needs of the customer. And pitching the cloud to customers came with its own unique crop of difficulties. “Justifying the value of cloud [to customers] is challenging due to the comprehensiveness of the solution spanning across the entire value chain of an enterprise,” says Nitin Singh, team leader and Value Advisory principal. The team knew that a data-driven sales perspective was the key to a more streamlined and dependable method for crafting compelling value propositions.

To aid them in this endeavor, the team implemented theĚý portfolio of cloud-based business process management solutions within their practice to demonstrate value to customers through data-driven insights. As Singh explains, “This new approach involved merging business metrics fromĚýĚýwith process performance data from 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio solutions. This integration allowed our customers to clearly see the connection between business outcomes and the process capabilities supported by data.”

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Previously, business cases relied on benchmarking a customer’s performance KPIs against competitors in specific functions, like finance and asset management, demonstrating problematic areas within the business. 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio solutions, on the other hand, rely on analyzing performance through metrics such as work order automation and backlogs, which in turn identify specific pain points. The team combined these two approaches – business centric and process centric – to create a system where data produced by 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio solutions was applied to business’ KPIs to help identify cases of suboptimal performance.

So far, this new approach has impacted 170 customers. The approach offers a highly repeatable performance diagnostic that can be utilized across the 51ˇçÁ÷sales landscape. “It can be used to identify, clarify, verify, and amplify value throughout the customer value journey,” says Singh. With the merging of 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio and Value Advisory, the team even wound up creating a new category: process-driven value management. Customer feedback regarding the innovation has already proven to be incredibly positive.

Top photo courtesy of 51ˇçÁ÷employee Denise Moll

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The 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio & 51ˇçÁ÷Value Lifecycle Manager Integration team is a Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award 2023 finalist in the Go to Market category.

Find out how the 51ˇçÁ÷team has integrated 51ˇçÁ÷Signavio solutions with 51ˇçÁ÷Value Lifecycle Manager to provide customers with business cases based on their own system data to help evaluate potential IT projects.

Learn more about the Go to Market category finalists.

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51ˇçÁ÷Learning Site and Learning Business Transformation is a Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award 2023 finalist in the Go to Market category.

Meet the team and find out how their innovation designed a new learning experience.

Learn more about the Go to Market category finalists.

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The AI-Powered Customer Support Experience team is a Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award 2023 finalist in the Go to Market category.

Meet the team and find out how the finalist uses artificial intelligence to quickly get customers the support they need.

Learn more about the Go to Market category finalists.

Three teams were selected for outstanding and innovative projects in the categories Go-To-Market, Operational Excellence, and Products and Technology.

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In 2022, 132 nominations involved almost 1,000 employees from 42 countries. Nine teams consisting of 83 employees from around the world made it to the final round. The three winning teams chose the charity organizations ˛š˛ÔťĺĚý, to which 51ˇçÁ÷will donate €10,000 on behalf of each team – €30,000 total.

Go-to-Market Winner

ĚýMidmarket Business Always-On Platform of EMEA North

To simplify and humanize how 51ˇçÁ÷connects with its prospects and customers, the Midmarket Business Always-On Platform of EMEA North puts 51ˇçÁ÷customers in the driving seat when it comes to discovering the right solutions for their business requirements.

The platform creates an immersive and interactive way to tell the 51ˇçÁ÷story by simulating a conference center with floors, elevators, and meeting rooms. Users can play demos, watch videos, partake in visit summits and exhibitions, ask questions, book meetings, and receive relevant follow-up, all thanks to the platform’s built-in analytics. The team used SAP-owned technology as well as their own developments.

Launched in 2020, the platform has generated over €80 million in pipeline, achieved 60% net-new named customers, and led to the signing of more than 150 deals.

“I’m really proud of the job the team members around the globe have done and how this award recognizes the impact of our digital platform,” said Sandrine Pons, RVP Solution Sales & Innovation EMEA North, on winning the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award.

Amaury Martin, region solution sales leader, added: “To come up with an idea and to watch it come true and have such an impact on our customers’ value journey – that was really impressive.”

To bring the platform to the next level, the team plans to integrate it with other solutions. As Olivier Demeusy, regional CoE BTP senior director, described: “It started out as a regional platform, but we know this can cater to a wider audience within the company and with our customers and partners.”

Innovation is also a matter of humanity. As Sophie Brun, chief executive assistant, said: “The platform reflects in many ways the amazing diversity among our team, our partners, and our customers.”

Operational Excellence Winner

Harmonized Adoption and Usage Management with 51ˇçÁ÷Usage Analyzer

How many customers have adopted an 51ˇçÁ÷solution? How many of them are using each functionality? Answers to these and many other questions around adoption, consumption, and usage can be found easily in 51ˇçÁ÷Usage Analyzer.

With the Harmonized Adoption and Usage Management (HAUM) project, a core team of 25 and many contributors from Product Engineering and Customer Success established a standardized framework for scalable and sustainable functional usage measurement, creating a holistic view of customers’ usage behaviors. 51ˇçÁ÷Usage Analyzer helps provide transparency on adoption and usage insights on SAP’s cloud customer base, across all public cloud products and aligned with business practices. Harmonized usage insights can be leveraged to positively impact renewals, product investments, and reduce manual efforts.

“Persistence and teamwork are the key elements. You need to stick to your goal, and you cannot afford to work in a silo,” Martin Günther, HAUM project co-lead, summed up as his most important learning. Natascha Plücken, HAUM project co-lead, added, “You need people who believe in something where others don’t and really go through it without giving up. Kudos to all teams who contributed across different functions and business units at SAP.”

As of today, 51ˇçÁ÷Usage Analyzer has been successfully rolled out to customer-facing roles, solutions, and product and portfolio management teams. More than 75% of the enabled group is regularly working with it.

“When you have a vision and you work on that vision for years, then to realize that this vision gets honored by the company and all the people who have been involved in this – it’s a super good feeling,” Thorsten Broszies, former project co-lead, commented on winning the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award.

And this vision is not accomplished yet, Iva Stojčić, transformation lead, 51ˇçÁ÷Corporate Transformation Organization, concluded: “We will take adoption to the next level by providing proactive recommendations, KPI benchmarking, and mapping usage with end-to-end business processes. Additionally, we will provide usage insights to our customers and partners.”

Products and Technology Winner

51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture

In the agribusiness and along the food value chain, there are increasing concerns about sustainability, how to make regenerative agriculture profitable, and how to remain competitive.

51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture helps make next-generation, data-driven farming processes and services a reality. For the first time, 51ˇçÁ÷customers can now rely on an enterprise-grade, native cloud solution to help capture and manage farm data at a granular level and optimize farm planning and operations based on their valuable experience. Combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and data science models, agribusinesses now have the potential to produce more while reducing water, fertilizer, and pesticides. 51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture is also a front-runner in multiple areas, such as feature-driven development supported by deploy with confidence, which helps release new features instantly, and the new Industry Cloud Enterprise Agreement.

“It’s overwhelming to win this award against such tough competition,” Cedrik Kern, solution owner, 51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture, commented. “The innovative spirit around the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is incredible and to be chosen is just pure joy.”

“This is a testament to us that we are doing the right thing,” Florian Waidner, product manager, 51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture, added. “51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture is a young product, just a year in the market and in its early adopter phase. As a next step, we want to further scale with customers and a vast partner ecosystem that we are building up.”

Also, a showcase for 51ˇçÁ÷Sapphire Orlando is in the making. “With vegan ice cream as the example, we will show the end-to-end food value chain starting on the farm gate over to sourcing from farmers, manufacturing, and delivering to the consumer,” Anja Strothkämper, global vice president, Industry Business Unit Agribusiness & Commodity Management, explained.

Here, meet the finalists in the Products and Technology 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: Carbon Data Network

In the chase for net zero, all businesses must disclose their carbon emissions, but aggregating verified emissions data along their entire supply chains is not possible.

Considering the limited accuracy of public emission databases often used for measurements, numerous suppliers and countries, and no common standards for measuring, auditing, or verifying carbon emissions, pressure is growing on businesses for transparent, credible supply chain emission information.

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Video by Esteban Villate

“If you don’t have the underlying data about the entire footprint of carbon emissions in the supply chain, how are you going to make good decisions about your suppliers? It’s just not possible if you don’t have good quality data,” says Marcus Krug, product manager at SAP.

In addition to verifiable emissions data, the team around Carbon Data Network realized that the carbon emissions sustainability space has a unique feature: all industries — or, at a minimum, certain sectors of industry — are potentially interconnected, regardless of vendor, size, or country. Ultimately, nearly every business, large or small, must track emissions. Any boundaries would be artificial and could exclude businesses.

To secure success in this space, networks must be open and inclusive. How can such a network be secure, trusted and credible?

Decarbonization Is a Team Sport

Using blockchain technology, zero-knowledge proofs, and self-sovereign identity (SSI), the team created Carbon Data Network, an interoperable network that is open to all businesses while safeguarding business data privacy and verifying carbon emissions.

Trusted issuers assign decentralized identities as verifiable credentials to businesses joining the Carbon Data Network. With SSI, businesses have control over when and how they share emissions data. When a request for emissions data is sent to a business (data owner) from another business (requester), the data owner transfers the requested emissions data directly from its back end to the requester’s back end. Zero-knowledge proofs verify accounting standards in the emissions calculations.

Pilot customers include Maersk and H&M, , among others. The team also has proof feasibility in the Chinese blockchain infrastructure, as well as the EU and U.S.

Decentralized and open, Carbon Data Network can be monetized via the network clients. If successful, this network will connect businesses globally and extend the reach of 51ˇçÁ÷Business Network. A plan to issue decentralized identities to the 3 million customers in 51ˇçÁ÷Business Network offers another possible revenue stream for SAP; existing 51ˇçÁ÷Business Network customers will request emissions data from non-51ˇçÁ÷Business Network customers.

Decarbonization Is a Global Collaborative Process

With a permission-less blockchain infrastructure and an extremely low barrier for entry, Carbon Data Network offers a vendor-neutral network. Decentralized identifiers guarantee that businesses in the network can be trusted, so every business on the planet will have access to verifiable carbon emissions data and decarbonization becomes a global collaborative process.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Carbon Data Network
• Team: Marcus Krug, Mehran Shakeri, Nicola Zanon, Anne Taubitz, Niko Lockenvitz, Madhubala Ganesan, Pembe Karahan, Phipps Xue, Jesper Schleimann, Mohan Shekar, Yan Zhao, Pouline Mensen
• Number of employees: 12
• Achievement: An open, decentralized network application allows every business on the planet — regardless of geography, industry, or company size — to share trustworthy, verifiable carbon emission data with each other.
• Impact: The ability to measure and reduce carbon emissions influences the planet’s decarbonization. The established network could be leveraged to enable any other cross-company business collaboration and is not restricted to sharing only carbon emission data.

Finalist: 51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture

While more than one quarter of the global workforce is employed in agriculture and feeds Earth’s population, agriculture is currently facing an unprecedented mix of challenges driven by climate change, global conflicts, and limited resources.

All players along the agribusiness and food value chain are increasingly concerned about sustainability, how to make regenerative agriculture profitable, and how to remain competitive. A common vision has emerged of efficient, sustainable, and resilient agriculture.

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Video by Matt Dillman

The team around 51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture leveraged the 51ˇçÁ÷Advisory Council for Agribusiness and worked with the associated Workgroup for Efficient and Sustainable Farming with 14 customers to understand needs and challenges.

“We discovered that the vision of applying technology to make farming smart in many aspects just practically wasn’t working yet,” recalls Cedrik Kern, solution owner at SAP. “Many of our customers had already invested in new capabilities such as drones and AI models, but had significant challenges to leverage these investments in their day-to-day farming processes, services, and decisions.”

Industry Cloud Solution Helps Future Food Security

“We knew we needed to deliver fast to capture a critical time window in the market, so the whole team committed to releasing after only nine months of development,” says Florian Waidner, product manager at SAP. “The team worked relentlessly and we were able to get the solution to the market in time, which is truly remarkable.”

51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture makes next-generation, data-driven farming processes and services a reality. For the first time, 51ˇçÁ÷customers can now rely on an enterprise-grade, native cloud solution to capture and manage farm data at a granular level and optimize farm planning and operations based on their valuable experience. Combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and data science models, agribusinesses now have the potential to produce more while reducing water, fertilizer, and pesticides.

Driving innovation, 51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture is also a frontrunner in multiple areas, such as feature-driven development supported by deploy with confidence, which helps to release new features instantly, and the new Industry Cloud Enterprise Agreement.

Royal Eswatini Sugar Corporation Limited is already on board as an early adopter customer, with others in the pipeline.

Farming for the Future

51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture is unlocking a market of intelligent farming operations for 51ˇçÁ÷– estimated to be worth US$1 to $2 billion – empowering agriculture customers to remain competitive, run resilient operations, farm efficiently and sustainably, and help ensure food security.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title:Ěý51ˇçÁ÷Intelligent Agriculture – Sustainably Feeding the World
• Team: Cross-functional team
• Number of employees: Core team of approximately 50, with many other stakeholders and supporters across the company
• Achievement: Enabling data-driven farming processes and services for more a sustainable, efficient, and resilient agricultural production, now working with the first early adoption customer to bring the solution capabilities to the field.
• Impact: Enormous potential for 51ˇçÁ÷to grow with cloud solutions in the agribusiness industry’s total addressable market of US$5 to $10 billion, with the solution as a driver and enabler for 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA, 51ˇçÁ÷Digital Supply Chain, 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform, and 51ˇçÁ÷Customer Experience solutions in the space.

Finalist: Feather by SAP

Brand retailers often use dedicated brand-owned channels to sell their premium apparel. These channels offer carefully curated customer journeys and customer touchpoints. Outstanding customer experience is the key to customer brand loyalty.

However, Joanna Maryeswka, general manager and founder of the SAP.iO Venture Studio program in New York, experienced another journey when selling and buying secondhand brand apparel, a journey that “felt very tedious” to her as a customer. “Why,” she wondered, “are these consignment marketplaces making so much money out of a product they never made?”

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Venture capital funding trends today are showing the continued rise of the secondhand apparel market. One estimate projects that the global market for secondhand apparel will grow 127% to US$218 billion in the next five years, driven in part by a demographic looking for lower acquisition costs, concern for the planet, or both.

How can brand retailers appeal to this market, particularly consumers motivated by lower acquisition costs and concern for the planet? How can they take control of their secondhand apparel, monetize it, promote responsible consumption, and protect their brand?

Apparel Retailers Grow Sales Without Manufacturing More

The answer is Feather by SAP, which unlocks recommerce, a new growth area for 51ˇçÁ÷and brand retailers, with an end-to-end solution to launch, manage, and scale resell.

Built on a cloud-based platform, Feather by SAP, now part of the 51ˇçÁ÷Customer Experience portfolio, comprises back-end integrations and workflows that feed all transaction data to a reporting dashboard. From managing inventory and taking back the apparel to issuing store credits, preparing apparel for recommerce, and posting the apparel to a branded storefront, Feather by 51ˇçÁ÷manages the complete resell cycle.

From five full-time members after their first year to 11 today, the lean team has had more than 30 customer engagements, including Tapestry, PVH, and one active pilot customer, Sports Basement.

Fashion for the Future

With this new business model and solution, Feather by 51ˇçÁ÷is shifting brand retailers from a linear to a circular business model, increasing business value with no additional resource consumption with a model that manages the green line, unlocks a new market for customers and SAP, and grows the customer’s and SAP’s top line at the same time.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Feather by 51ˇçÁ÷– Reimagine Recommerce
• Team: Joanna Maryewska, Raghunath Posa, Kenneth Fajardo, and a global team spanning four continents
• Number of employees: 11 employees supported by fellows and interns
• Achievement: The enterprise-ready end-to-end solution for a new sustainable business model of resale had its first customer onboarded, a planned a recommerce pilot, and more than 30+ accounts engaged this year. Resale capabilities to 51ˇçÁ÷customers at scale are in the pipeline.
• Impact: For a better, more sustainable tomorrow, Feather by 51ˇçÁ÷is an enabler for launching and scaling recommerce, allowing customers to purchase, manage, and resell pre-owned goods while simultaneously tracking key financial and performance indicators.

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: Harmonized Adoption and Usage Management with Usage Analyzer

How many customers have adopted an 51ˇçÁ÷solution? How many of them are using which functionality? Answers to those and many other questions around adoption, consumption, and usage can now be found more easily.

In the past, harmonized usage data and KPIs were not available. Insights were only available in silos and high manual efforts were required to create a holistic view of customers’ usage behaviors, which resulted in missed opportunities to generate additional revenue and value.

Unwilling to accept the status quo, a cross-functional team initiated the Harmonized Adoption and Usage Management project. Together they established a standardized framework for scalable and sustainable functional usage measurement. This included the design, rollout, and execution of usage metering standards, along with central data collection leveraging state-of-the-art technologies. Ultimately, Usage Analyzer was developed, providing a 360-degree view of cloud customers and public cloud products.

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ĚýAs of today, the Usage Analyzer has been successfully rolled out to select customer-facing roles, solutions, and product and portfolio management teams. More than 75% of the enabled group are regularly working with it.

Usage Analyzer provides intuitive, role-based, and concise views into the way customers adopt and consume 51ˇçÁ÷products. The Customer Success organization leverages these usage insights to prepare customer meetings, drive adoption campaigns, and perform intelligent goal planning based on usage patterns. Product and solution management teams make use of this data to prioritize their investments and to monitor product adoption and release success.

What’s next on the team’s list? They continue to engage with business experts to expand the integration of usage insights into day-to-day activities and operations. The continuous growth of harmonized telemetric data points across cloud solutions from 51ˇçÁ÷will remain a key focus. Furthermore, the Harmonized Adoption and Usage Management team is evaluating possibilities to display usage information and KPIs along end-to-end processes to illustrate and highlight the value that 51ˇçÁ÷software provides to customers.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Harmonized Adoption and Usage Management with Usage Analyzer
• Team:ĚýMartin Guenther, Natascha Pluecken, Carmen Fuhlbruegge, Martin Layer, Rainer Hillebrand, Denise Schmidt, Raquel Torrents, Iva Stojcic, Richard Grandpierre,ĚýThorsten Broszies
• Number of employees:Ěý10
• Achievement:ĚýThe Usage AnalyzerĚýprovides transparency on harmonized adoption and usage insights on SAP’s cloud customer base, across all cloud products and all aligned with business practices
• Impact: Harmonized usage insights positively impact renewals and product investments, and reduce manual efforts.

Finalist: Multicloud Hyperscaler Event Monitor

Prior to the development of Multicloud Hyperscaler Event Monitor, responses to public cloud outages were reactive.

“A lack of real-time, relevant data made collaboration across incident management and problem management teams a challenge,” explains David Cruickshank, vice president of Multicloud DevOps at SAP, GCS Multicloud.

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But Multicloud Hyperscaler Event Monitor delivers a continuous feed of events for all hyperscaler services consumed by 51ˇçÁ÷cloud accounts and users.

By pulling health event data from hyperscaler service health APIs, the team provided an aggregated view of public cloud outages across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The hyperscaler data is enriched with metadata from multicloud internal proprietary systems, bringing additional context — including the name of the line of business responsible for the cloud account and the cloud accounts that are hosting production systems.

As a next step, the team correlated the data from support tickets raised by 51ˇçÁ÷lines of business with hyperscalers in order to accelerate confirmation of impact and lower mean time to resolve.

Process for Centralized Public Cloud Services

The team went on to automate identification of service-level agreement (SLA) violations by monitoring SLA performance for the hyperscalers’ platform services. The SLA violations are published on a dedicated dashboard and SLA credit requests are raised automatically with hyperscalers.

Additionally, a risk report highlighted that 51ˇçÁ÷historically had not initiated claims for SLA credit from public cloud provider partners after outages impacting 51ˇçÁ÷services. The team was tasked with mitigating this and implementing a centralized SLA credit claiming service.

“As more SAP-critical platforms, applications, and data come to rely upon the infrastructure and services of public cloud providers, SLAs represent a commitment to customers to meet fundamental operating requirements,” Cruickshank shares. “The Multicloud Hyperscaler Event Monitor provides an automated, accurate, and centralized service, filing SLA claims on behalf of lines of business when hyperscaler commitments fail.”

The enriched data brings early awareness and visibility to teams that need it during public cloud provider outages. This is especially relevant for mission-critical services like the medical industry and government agencies.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Multicloud Hyperscaler Event Monitor
• Team:ĚýDavid Cruickshank, Richard Bolan, Gerry McPhillips, Darren Chambers, Eimear O’Hare, Joey Lee, Abhishek Yadav, Xander O’Dempsey, Chandradhar Alla
• Number of employees: Nine
• Achievement: First-ever central aggregated view of service health events and support tickets across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The centralized monitoring of hyperscaler platform services has resulted in identification of hyperscaler SLA violations through automation and successful SLA credit claims for lines of business.
• Impact: Enhanced visibility and awareness during hyperscaler service outages for 51ˇçÁ÷lines of business, central incident response teams, and other key stakeholders, contributing to reduction in mean time to resolve for incidents and increased operational excellence through early awareness of incidents. Successful identification and raising of SLA credit claims, helping ensure that 51ˇçÁ÷can run more efficiently in the public cloud.

Finalist: CMI Crystal Ball

What if every single 51ˇçÁ÷seller and marketer had a crystal ball that gave them unique, data-driven insights into their customers’ in-moment buying interests and strategic needs?

The majority of customers’ buying journey has now become digital, a trend that has only accelerated post-COVID-19. Customers are more empowered than ever to explore, learn, and find solutions — all online. CMI Crystal Ball was built with one simple goal: to listen to customers’ needs within their digital journey to serve them in compelling and predictive ways.

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Built by passionate data enthusiasts from across the CMI and IES Infused Intelligence teams, the CMI Crystal Ball platform injects billions of external digital signals from various data vendors. A common taxonomy model allows that data to seamlessly “talk” to each other. Finally, sophisticated patent-pending scoring algorithms driven by artificial intelligence (AI) are applied to predict exactly which companies 51ˇçÁ÷should prioritize by use case.

Empowering Every Employee with Data-Driven Customer Insights

Starting with 50 pilot users in North America, the excitement has grown to well over 7,000 active users worldwide. And the underlying data graph has grown just as fast, now covering all 1.3 million accounts in CRM plus 10 million more outside CRM.

This had also led to a wave of grassroots ingenuity from customer teams all over the world that are applying CMI Crystal Ball in an ever-expanding list of use cases, including prospecting, cross and upsell, net-new logos, competitive attack, digital activation, events, renewals, and churn.

“As an AI-driven platform designed to listen to customers’ needs, CMI Crystal Ball is truly unique in the market,” says Paul Logue, head of 51ˇçÁ÷CMI. “Enabling 51ˇçÁ÷with data-driven insights on our customers — well before our competition — can set us apart in our ability to serve our customers’ most precise needs.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: CMI Crystal Ball
• Team: Paul Logue, Franklin Herbas, William Doyle, Roja Saidi, Shreerang Javadekar, Susanne Beckers, Christoph Kommer, Damien Garnier, Behroz Sikander, Wei-Yi Chen
• Number of employees:Ěý10
• Achievement: The team’s achievements are recognized through broad adoption, with 7,000 users per quarter, as well as significant business impact.Ěý Externally, CMI Crystal Ball has received several industry awards from leading sales and marketing organizations (IDG, ITSMA, CIO 100) and has two pending patents (SuperScore, Topic Networks).
• Impact: Crystal Ball supercharges account engagement as measured by website clicks and registrations, a 6x to 39x increase, and major event registrations, 546 new to 51ˇçÁ÷TechEd 2022. In progressing and closing business, accounts with high predictive scores have 2.9x larger deal values and $210 million revenue influenced in Outreach.io.

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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷is using to position itself in the market.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title:ĚýInteractive 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:ĚýNine
• 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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51ˇçÁ÷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’ ‘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 51ˇçÁ÷sales and marketing. The result is a better, streamlined 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷BTP, 51ˇçÁ÷Event Mesh, and 51ˇçÁ÷HANA Cloud, to show that 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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.

Three teams were selected for outstanding and innovative projects in the categories Go-To-Market, Operational Excellence, and Products and Technology.

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In 2021, 196 nominations involved more than 1,300 employees from 42 countries. Nine teams consisting of 49 employees from around the world made it to the final round. The three winning teams chose the charity organizations and , to which 51ˇçÁ÷will donate €10,000 on behalf of each team — €30,000 total.

Go-To-Market Winner

Support Assistant: Delighting Customers by Solving Issues Faster

To stay No. 1 in customer satisfaction, 51ˇçÁ÷continues to look for new ways to create positive customer experiences by providing fast reactions and effective solutions to their customers seeking support.

The Support Assistant is a cloud-based application that uses automation and machine learning to connect customers directly to solutions and further reduce the time needed to resolve customer support cases — without the need for a support engineer.

Customers are guided through a conversational user interface that helps them easily access knowledge repositories and act on solutions quickly and on their own. If the support of a human engineer is needed, the previous conversation thread is aggregated into a comprehensive case description that can be shared with the human.

With more than 65,000 requests in 2021 via 51ˇçÁ÷Support Portal, the Support Assistant shows impressive results. Tens of thousands fewer support cases required help from a human support engineer thanks to the automated assistant.

Winning team member Jonathan Wiens says, “While still a little bit in shock, I can say it is an absolutely amazing and incredibly proud moment.ĚýI have always believed in all the people that have contributed to the Support Assistant and today was a validation of the ideas and hard work that everyone put in to make our vision a reality.ĚýWe will go forward now, bolstered with the confidence of this win, to further evolve the Support Assistant and execute on our plans to integrate it as a central piece of SAP’s support workflow.”

Operational Excellence Winner

Cloud Customer Health Score Based on Machine Learning

Customer Health Score specifies a customer’s renewal risk and helps account teams create a positive customer experience and improve customer relationships.

The solution relies on machine learning for real-time insights to predict the renewal risk for 94% of nearly 68,000 cloud customers and use these findings to alert account teams at an early stage.

The Customer Health Score is used both regionally and globally across 11 cloud lines of business 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.

“Many 51ˇçÁ÷colleagues gave us their best effort, time, and talents,” from the winning team says. “The diverse skill sets represented across the team were our winning strategy. Where one pushes, the other balances. We are all equal and we contribute as one team. There is plenty of work ahead in 2022 for Customer Health Score to become even more valuable and relevant to predicting cloud renewal health at SAP.”

Products and Technology Winner

51ˇçÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences

The issue of drug counterfeiting has experienced a dramatic rise in recent years, particularly in developing nations. It is estimated that currently more than 50% of the drugs in Africa are counterfeit.

51ˇçÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences is an industry network based on software-as-a-service (SaaS) that helps 51ˇçÁ÷customers in the pharmaceutical industry share information on their products with supply chain partners and government agencies to enable traceability and verification of individual product packs.

With over 1,000 live trading partners, including eight of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and most COVID-19 vaccine manufactures, the hub currently hosts 2.2 billion product packs in the blockchain for verification in the U.S. market. It manages tens of thousands of messages every day reported to governments around the world to help prevent counterfeit products being introduced into the legitimate supply chain.

“This award is a milestone in the long journey that started with a customer meeting in 2015 and that yielded a solution essential for our customers’ business while helping make the pharmaceutical supply chain safer,” winning team member says. “I am grateful for the passionate team that made this work.”

Here, meet the finalists in the Products and Technology 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: GreenToken by 51ˇçÁ÷

Eighty percent of the world’s palm oil originates from Indonesia and Malaysia. While some of it is being sustainably sourced in sustainable fair-trade plantations and small holdings, much is also being harvested on recently deforested land. How can you tell one from the other?

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The GreenToken by 51ˇçÁ÷solution was designed to address this issue by providing a new level of transparency into complex raw material supply chains.

“In 2019 a group of 51ˇçÁ÷palm oil customers approached us with this very problem – they wanted a robust solution to maintain facts across the value chain from smallholder to end customer,” says GreenToken Co-Founder James Veale. “Traditional batch-based inventory systems with their simple rules don’t truly reflect the exact makeup of a raw material inventory, which may be a mix of sustainable and non-sustainable sources. At scale, we would be dealing with millions of batches.”

GreenToken instead uses a digital twin token to represent a fixed and usually small amount of the raw material. Records are kept on a blockchain ledger, and as the material moves along the supply chain GreenToken passes the equivalent number of tokens that represent the volume of material moved, from one supply chain actor’s wallet to another. This creates a tracing history — an immutable chain of custody that adds complete supply chain transparency and makes the data trustworthy.

Transforming the World Economy

GreenToken’s elegant yet powerful design has found applications in many industries. The tokens can carry information on any kind of raw materials to help answer a variety of questions: “Are these food crops sustainably sourced? Has this cobalt been mined free of child labor? Is this plastic recycled with a high percentage coming from molecular recycling of plastic waste?”

With over 77% of the world’s manufactured goods passing through an 51ˇçÁ÷system, GreenToken is receiving huge interest from 51ˇçÁ÷customers under increasing pressure from both legislation and their own customer base to prove that their raw material sourcing, processing, and supply chain practices are the best that they can be.

“GreenToken is SAP’s answer to that,” says Nitin Jain, GreenToken co-founder. “We have found a truly innovative use for tokens on a blockchain ledger that gives transparency to these formerly opaque raw material supply chains. GreenToken’s purpose is to help the world transform to a sustainable and circular economy — and our innovation has made it available in the cloud using simple, frictionless browser-based interfaces.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: GreenToken by SAP
• Team: Nitin Jain in Canada and James Veale in Australia, co-founders, with a global team of 18, including full-time employees and fellows spread across Asia-Pacific Japan, Europe, and North America regions
• Number of employees: 20
• Achievement: Developed an elegant yet powerful method to add complete supply chain transparency to previously opaque raw material supply chains using digital twin tokens on a blockchain ledger. The solution works for any raw material supply chain. The team is currently deploying the system in the U.S. and Europe to prove that plastic has a high degree of circular recycled content.
• Impact: GreenToken allows 51ˇçÁ÷customers to not only measure and make claims on their current sustainable, ethical, and circular sourcing practices, but also use their procurement spending power to promote good supply chains over bad.

Finalist: Ecosilient

While optimizing resources and capacities is not exactly a new business challenge, B2B circular sharing platform Ecosilient aims to commodify demand, supply, and services, connecting organizations in a community to generate value more efficiently and sustainably with special focus on existing resources and capacities.

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Ecosilient helps businesses leverage resources such as obsolete assets, surplus inventory, waste, and other byproducts into a circular economy. It creates a community layer based on enterprise resource planning (ERP) to enable this growing demand for businesses, stakeholders, and investors to make more responsible decisions that drive meaningful impact on critical issues.

Ecosilient Founder Avital Ben-Natan says the team’s mission is to “decouple economic growth from natural extraction and corrosive business practices. It’s about creating a trust platform to discover and facilitate collaboration opportunities around shared values.”

The goal is no less than to address interlinked problems like the climate crisis, social inequities, or broken supply chains. Ecosilient serves as a framework for evolving SAP’s core technologies, data, and its global ecosystem into an engine for a sustainable economy.

Users will be able to work with 51ˇçÁ÷software as they are accustomed — sourcing materials, signing contracts, tracing their shipping, and managing their inventories. “But with Ecosilient,” Ben-Natan says, “there is this additional layer in our software that users can trust will guide them to make responsible choices — to do more and better with less.”

Leading the Sustainable Economy

Fostered within the 51ˇçÁ÷Intrapreneurs program, the idea of Ecosilient resonated with many people at 51ˇçÁ÷from the start and attracted like-minded employees willing to engage in their spare time. “Even though few of us have ever been in the same room, we’ve all become very close while building Ecosilient over the last one and a half years.”

Ben-Natan says names the impact of climate change as his team’s motivation. “As parents, we feel responsible for the future of our kids and our communities. We have to answer the challenges that we face as a species, but also as a planet and as an economy, and find an appropriate response.”

The team considers its solution as a natural evolution of what 51ˇçÁ÷stands for: to create order in chaos, to create opportunities and collaboration, to create a fair, responsible, and ultimately more efficient economy.

But Ecosilient is also a way for 51ˇçÁ÷to innovate its own infrastructure and the way it operates as a company, as Ben-Natan stresses: “It’s about creating a fundamental direction for 51ˇçÁ÷to lead in the sustainable economy.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Ecosilient, the B2B Circular Sharing Platform
• Team: Avital Ben Natan, Umesh Shekar
• Number of employees: More than 20, with engineers, designers, innovation specialists, and mentors that have contributed to the business model, design thinking, demo, MVP, and customer engagement, and with special thanks to New Ventures and Technologies, Services IMM, and 51ˇçÁ÷Experience Garage for platforming.
• Achievement: Leveraged market research and data analysis to identify target industries and organizations for freight pooling; implemented a WIP MVP and a demo for a sustainable shipping network; started customer engagement and GTM with companies like Unilever, Bechtle, Steelcase, Cargill, and others.
• Impact: Ecosilient helps companies increase resource efficiency while promoting a sustainable economy by engaging the ecosystem to create shared value.

Finalist: 51ˇçÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences

In recent years, the world has seen the issue of drug counterfeiting increase dramatically. In Africa alone, over 120,000 people die each year because they are being treated with fake malaria medication. It is estimated that currently over 50% of the drugs in Africa are counterfeit.

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Enter 51ˇçÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences: this industry network based on software-as-a-service (SaaS) helps 51ˇçÁ÷pharmaceutical customers share information on their pharmaceutical products with supply chain partners and government agencies to enable traceability and verification of individual product packs in these markets.

“It was really a joint effort with plenty of input from 51ˇçÁ÷customers that inspired the info hub,” says Oliver Nuernberg, chief product owner, 51ˇçÁ÷Life Sciences. “They pointed out the need for a global network that would minimize the effort by connecting once while sharing data with many participants.”

Running on 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform, the information hub leverages the platform’s integration services to exchange messages, 51ˇçÁ÷Blockchain Business Services to make data available for verification, and portal services. In 2021, new innovative capabilities enabling the automation of onboarding processes and self-onboarding of trading partners were delivered to enable customers to efficiently onboard hundreds of partners in parallel for new markets.

The largest eight pharmaceutical manufacturers, and 14 of the top 20, are already using 51ˇçÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences, including most of the COVID-19 vaccines manufacturers.

Next, we plan to offer 51ˇçÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences together with 51ˇçÁ÷Advanced Track and Trace for Pharmaceuticals to enable aid workers from organizations such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders to verify, for example, COVID-19 vaccines that they receive on the spot toĚý low- to middle-income countries.

Initially, the team was made up of just a handful of 51ˇçÁ÷employees working out of Germany and Ireland. Today, there are more than 50 team members from the Customer Innovation & Maintenance organization, mainly located in India, who develop and operate the solution as well as help onboard customers and their business partners.

Amba Bisht, senior developer for Engineering in Customer Innovation & Maintenance, says: “What’s so rewarding about working on this project is how it really brings the spirit of 51ˇçÁ÷— to make the world run better — to life, because by increasing security in the pharmaceutical supply chain and preventing counterfeit medication from reaching patients, 51ˇçÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences may ultimately save lives.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: 51ˇçÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences, Saving Lives One Serial Number at a Time
• Team: Oliver Nuernberg, Martin Janssen, Dennis Keilbach, Vincent Varain, Sandeep Kumar Dikshit, Shashank Goyal, Amba Bisht, Anil Kumar Suresh, Geetha Ranjani G M, Athul Umesh
• Number of employees: More than 50
• Achievement: Global network with the eight largest pharmaceutical companies and 14 of the top 20, most COVID-19 vaccine manufactures, over 1,000 live trading partners. The hub currently hosts 2.2 billion product packs in the blockchain for verification in the U.S. market, manages tens of thousands of messages reported to government agencies, such as those in the EU, Russia, Brazil, and other markets, every day, all to prevent counterfeit products being introduced into the legitimate supply chain.
• Impact: Increase patient safety by authenticating pharmaceutical products, thus avoiding counterfeit drugs reaching patients; increase sustainability by reducing drug wastage.

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: 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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, 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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

Here, meet the finalists in the Go-to-MarketĚýcategory.

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:ĚýAn innovative, best practice deliveryĚýand collaborationĚýplatform toĚýdriveĚýcustomer 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:ĚýSupport 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.

The three teams were selected for outstanding and innovative projects in the new categories Customer Success, Operational Excellence, and Products and Technology.

In 2020, more than 200 nominations involved over 1,400 employees from 37 countries. Eight teams consisting of 51 employees from all over the world made it to the final round, and the winning teams have chosen charity organizations to which 51ˇçÁ÷will donate €10,000: and .

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Intelligent Case Routing: Making the Machine Understand the Issue

The Customer Success category winner set out with the challenge to simplify the support triage and routing process within 51ˇçÁ÷Concur software. As tickets get older and remain unanswered, customer satisfaction score drastically drops.

“With over 200,000 support tickets created per year in 51ˇçÁ÷Concur alone, we understood that any improvement on the overall process would be multiplied and have a significant impact on our key customer support and experience metrics,” Frantisek Zdvoran explained. “We found that combining a deep understanding of the customer support world, processes, and challenges with the right teams behind SAP’s machine learning services would provide real, business value-driven results.”

Working on Intelligent Case Routing as a side project over the course of three years, Zdvoran and his team of Justin Lew, Alena Bartunkova, Lukas Tancer, and Radovan Murin built and implemented a machine learning solution that cuts down the manual effort using text recognition to examine past tickets.

Intelligent Case Routing assigns the cases to specialists faster and more accurately. The goal was to eliminate the labor-intensive, repetitive, and slow ticketing process. “We didn’t want to add complexity, but to remove it,” Zdvoran said. “Support cases run through our application have a six percent higher customer experience score, 16% faster time to close, 11% higher first contact resolution metric, and have a 8.4% lower change of hands number.”

On winning the award, Lew said: “We are beyond grateful and honored to have been selected as a winner and cannot give enough thanks to everyone that has helped and been supportive of us. We are so proud of how our diverse team has been able to marshal SAP’s intelligent enterprise and combine that with our customer-first approach to deliver an application that helps enhance our customer and employee experience.”

Monitor of Monitors: Holistic Picture of Cloud Health

The winning team in the Operational Excellence category successfully tackled the challenge of creating a single source of information on the condition of SAP’s cloud. The Monitor of Monitors brings all monitoring tools into a cohesive and consistent view that shows the complete picture of SAP’s cloud health.

Information that was previously siloed in disconnected monitoring tools, is now accessible and transparent in single service window. Monitor of Monitors not only enables 51ˇçÁ÷teams to detect, determine, and resolve problems and risks in the cloud much faster, it also allows operations and support teams across 51ˇçÁ÷to work faster and more collaboratively toward a common goal.

“Recognize faster, react faster, respond faster, fix faster,” Anthony Sanchez said, summing up what Monitor of Monitors enables 51ˇçÁ÷support teams to do to improve the lives of their customers. “Monitor of Monitors isn’t a niche; it has value for everyone in SAP. It integrates well with any technology or tool a team is using to manage the cloud health and alert management. It simply opens an exchange of information that is centralized and transparent.”

After the announcement that Monitor of Monitors had won the award, he added: “Today is one of the proudest days of my professional career. There are no words to capture the enormity of the pride I feel toward the team and the support we received from every corner. This was a true one 51ˇçÁ÷effort. We are all excited and motivated for the future of SAP, and the contributions we can continue to make.“

Team members also include Vittalraya Shenoy Adige, Gabor Kaszonyi, JĂłzsef KertĂŠsz, Birk Bohne, Marcus Mrozowski, Gregory Melasecca-Jr, Yu Chen, Alexander Julian Danek, and Daniel Koller.

51ˇçÁ÷HANA Data Anonymization: Inventing a New Market

The winner in the category Products and Technology took on a particularly complex topic that is the subject of frequent legal and governmental changes. With 51ˇçÁ÷HANA Data Anonymization, the team developed a cross-industry solution for the anonymization of personal data that can be applied to a variety of use cases.

“Data privacy constraints have been road blockers to a number of use cases,” Stephan Kessler shared. “51ˇçÁ÷HANA data anonymization strives to make privacy guarantees available throughout an entire organization, while integrating seamlessly into business applications.”

To achieve this, 51ˇçÁ÷HANA data anonymization is implemented at the database level, following the 51ˇçÁ÷HANA code “push-down” paradigm, leading to a tight integration of data and privacy mechanisms.

“As data privacy becomes a priority on business agendas, we are the first to offer this sort of anonymization features in the database core system,” Kessler explained. “The solution thus permits 51ˇçÁ÷to satisfy an urgent need of customers and society.”

On winning the award, the team said: “We are humbled and very honored to have received the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award. 51ˇçÁ÷HANA data anonymization solves the challenge of combining privacy and innovation for internal and external stakeholders. We now have momentum to accelerate development and customer adoption to further improve our product, while helping customers, research, and society to demonstrate digital responsibility.”

Team members include Kristin Ulrich, Matthias Menz, Brian Raver, Kai Morich, Kaweh Amoi-Taleghani, and Kessler.

Here, meet the finalists in the Products and Technology 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: Hidden Champion – 51ˇçÁ÷HANA Data Anonymization

In our data-driven world, large amounts of personal and sensitive information are collected everywhere. Protecting the privacy of the individual is a prerequisite, though, for fully leveraging that data. As an example, today more than ever before, doctors and medical researchers worldwide need to share patient records cross-countries and cross-institutions. Lifesaving lessons can be learned from conjoint datasets in order to improve therapies and treatments.

“It is clear that personal data of the patients has to be anonymized,” says Dr.-Ing. , lead developer for 51ˇçÁ÷HANA data anonymization. “And with 51ˇçÁ÷HANA data anonymization, we can achieve a level of protection that allows hospitals to share such data safely.”

51ˇçÁ÷HANA data anonymization enables new data-centric applications and facilitates new business models — for example, the syndication of data that has been constrained by privacy concerns until now. As a result, organizations can unlock value that might otherwise have been lost because data was either deemed inaccessible or made too generic to draw insights from it.

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From “Privacy or ąő˛Ô˛Ô´Çąš˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô” to “Privacy and ąő˛Ô˛Ô´Çąš˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô”

Data privacy is a complex topic, partly, because it is subject to constant legal and governmental changes. Kessler and his team took findings from academia and productized them. The outcome was a solution that can be applied across industries and permits 51ˇçÁ÷to address an important customer pain point, as data privacy has become a priority on business agendas.

In addition to health applications, the underlying technology can be applied to range of issues from tracking CO2 emissions to analyzing buyer behavior and predicting traffic jams.

“51ˇçÁ÷HANA data anonymization symbolizes the birth of a new market,” Kessler says. “It is the first IT solution to offer anonymization features in the database core system. There is no peer to our solution yet.”

In developing 51ˇçÁ÷HANA data anonymization, team members in Berlin, Minneapolis, and Walldorf came to rely on each other’s expertise and could draw on a very diverse skill set including solution management, development, and consulting. This allowed them to approach the problem holistically and spark innovative ideas. Kessler explains: “Even though we never met in person during the whole process, we came to trust each other blindly.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: The Hidden Champion — 51ˇçÁ÷HANA Data Anonymization
• Team: 51ˇçÁ÷HANA Solution Management and Development
• Number of employees: Six (Brian Raver, Kai Morich, Kristin Ulrich, Matthias Menz, Kaweh Amoi-Taleghani, Stephan Kessler)
• Achievement: The team productized scientifically proven anonymization methods in the 51ˇçÁ÷HANA database, allowing 51ˇçÁ÷customers and 51ˇçÁ÷applications to use personal and sensitive data without inferring the privacy of individuals.
• Impact: 51ˇçÁ÷HANA data anonymization can be applied to any industry and any organization; it is about giving a capability to society that helps to protect people’s privacy while making use of their data.

Finalist: Usage Explorer – Platform for Product Insights

Have you ever wondered what the most common actions are that users take between two points in your product; for example, from the time they start a workflow until they click “cancel”? As simple as it sounds, finding an answer to these questions requires writing a complex query to a database. And if you happen to be a non-technical user, chances of getting a quick answer are slim.

Rather, they were slim. The usage explorer and its query editor were specifically developed by Semih Sezer and his team to simplify pattern discovery for non-technical users. By leveraging pattern recognition, graph technology, and machine learning, usage explorer can automatically discover usability challenges and product issues – even before customers bring them up.

Such insights are worth a lot to product teams because they allow them to proactively discover usability challenges, build more user-centric products, and create more seamless experiences for customers. For example, using pattern recognition, usage explorer can help identify the root cause of product issues and product bugs. This can save tremendous amount of time for product support and development teams, resulting in more focused development.

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Usage explorer helps product managers understand exactly how customers are using their products and what their actual workflows look like. It can also automatically identify customers at risk of not renewing their subscription, so that customer success and sales teams can reach out to these customers to understand their needs. This reduces churn and increases Ěýrenewals and revenues.

Three Dreamers from Vancouver Demonstrate Ability to Execute

Usage explorer was born as result of a conversation over lunch between , senior developer for 51ˇçÁ÷Analytics Cloud, and product expert . Sezer, Ekeland and UX designer built the app in their free time. In Sezer’s words, “Usage explorer was created by a diverse team of three dreamers from Vancouver as a side project in our free time. We observed a problem and an opportunity, and we had immense desire to solve it.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Usage Explorer — A Platform for Product Insights
• Team: Usage Explorer
• Number of employees: Three (Semih Sezer, Ashley Chen, Paul Ekeland)
• Achievement: Usage explorer was built completely as a side project by a team of three to create change from within. The project became the winning team of 51ˇçÁ÷Experience Garage global accelerator. UX and Product teams for 51ˇçÁ÷Analytics Cloud are integrating usage explorer into their processes for more data-driven product design.
• Impact: Data-driven usage insights can bring immense value to any process where understanding the individual customer experience is key — from development to sales, support, and customer 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 51ˇçÁ÷technologies and innovations that have made 51ˇçÁ÷an intelligent enterprise – and thereby makes the notion of the Intelligent Enterprise readily accessible to internal and external audiences. The 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷offices in Walldorf, and soon in Bangalore and Newtown Square. And inĚý 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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷and can be consumed in a guided or self-guided way. It presents scalable “51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷employees and 1,600 external guests have taken guided tours of the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom and “51ˇçÁ÷runs SAP” storytelling packages
• Impact: The showroom enables customers to understand what the Intelligent Enterprise is and how 51ˇçÁ÷can help them transform, using 51ˇçÁ÷itself as a reference customer

Finalist: ĚýIntelligent 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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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.”

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Intelligent Case Routing
• Team: Lukas Tancer, Frantisek Zdvoran, Justin Lew, Alena Bartunkova, and Radovan Murin
• Number of employees: The current project team has five employees, with more than 30 support engineers and other employees contributing during the different phases of the project
• Achievement: The application has improved the overall customer experience by leveraging machine learning 51ˇçÁ÷technology to classify and automate the triage and routing of labor-intensive customer cases, enabling support engineers to focus on resolving customer issues instead of on categorizing them
• Impact: Enabled for the majority of 51ˇçÁ÷Concur support cases, the application has improved overall customer and employee experience as well as first contact resolution and time to close, and has the potential to be applied to any team within 51ˇçÁ÷and extended to customers

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.

Upon receiving the award in January, Neumann said: “I am so happy! The award gives me great motivation, and the recognition of my work is an important step for my professional future.”

Posting Automation: Invoices Processed in Minutes, Not Days

Processing complex cross-company invoices is a complicated task that used to take days to complete. Creating this type of invoice manually is inefficient and allows for error. This was Neumann’s job as an accounts payable analyst

Located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Neumann joined the company in 2016 through the Autism at Work program. Because he felt increasingly overwhelmed by the thousands of items awaiting his attention, he started thinking about how technology could help. That is how he came up with the idea for the posting automation tool.

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

COVID-19: Hunkering Down at Home

After attending the award ceremony in Walldorf, Germany, Neumann returned to Argentina. Soon the novel coronavirus emerged in China and began to spread, with 51ˇçÁ÷instructing employees in China to work from home to protect their well-being. Not long after, the company asked nearly all employees worldwide to work from home.

The pandemic put an end to plans to visit a team of developers in China, as well as to a fellowship Neumann was hoping to take up — one step that would have gotten him closer to fulfilling his dream of becoming a software developer. Instead, he had to adjust to working from his parents’ home and collaborating online with the team in China.

Having the entire development team working from their home offices presented some challenges, but work is still on track and application is planned to be ready for use at 51ˇçÁ÷toward the end of the year. Over time, it is planned for availability to 51ˇçÁ÷customers as well, once localized for each country.

Argentina’s Long Lockdown

Argentina has been in lockdown since the middle of March. Public life has practically ground to a halt and almost everything is closed. The country is in one of the longest periods of quarantine anywhere in the world and although it has not managed to contain the virus entirely, transmission is under control.

The pandemic has directly affected Neumann’s family: After showing symptoms, his father tested positive for COVID-19. A couple of days later, Neumann also developed symptoms, and the family spent 14 days in quarantine. Fortunately, their cases were mild and all have since made a full recovery.

An Award That Opens Many Doors

Neumann and his mentors are understandably frustrated that he could not take up his fellowship.

“It would have been really great,” he says. “Right now, I’m still spending half my working time on accounting and half on software development. My aim — my dream — is a full-time job in development.”

When asked what has changed most since receiving the award, he says: “I feel that people really listen to me. They take my plans and ideas seriously.” Underscoring that, Neumann is already working on his next idea: a solution to automate tax processing.

After three months of lockdown, the walls of the family living room started to feel like they were closing in on the young inventor. It was time for time for him to take the leap and move into an apartment of his own. The prize money made it possible.

“Making this decision had a big impact on my life and on my personal development,” he says.

It is a big step that shows how Neumann keeps pushing his own boundaries. The apartment brings responsibility and makes him more independent.

“Having a quiet place to myself does me good. And it makes me much more self-reliant. I now have a lot more time – not just for my work but also for me. This experience has taught me so much. And I’m really grateful for that.”

Then it was time to announce the winner: It was 21-year-old Nicolas Neumann, who took the trophy for his innovation posting automation, which radically simplifies accounting processes. Visibly moved, Neumann took a deep breath when he stepped onto the stage to receive the award.

In his home city of Buenos Aires, many colleagues followed the award ceremony via live transmission and erupted in loud cheers — not unlike the excitement when Argentina wins the World Cup. The strong community around Neumann provided him with the confidence, courage, and the platform to develop his idea and bring it to life.

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The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the co-CEOs to an individual or a team. This year, for the first time, the award was taken home by a single person, with a tool that is simplifying accounting.

Innovation: Posting Automation

The posting automation tool simplifies accounting processes enormously by automatically structuring invoices and feeding them directly into an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Neumann had the idea for its development during his daily work as an accounts payable analyst at SAP.

“I felt exhausted by the tons of material that I had to process by hand,” he recalls. At the same time, he began thinking about a solution and developed an algorithm for automating the posting of complex cross-company invoices.

Neumann has the ability to acquire complex knowledge in a short time, and as a child learned basic programming skills. Autodidactically — and with great zeal — he deepened this knowledge and began to develop a solution in his spare time. Recognizing his great potential and intrinsic motivation, his mentors gave him the freedom to devote one day per week exclusively to developing posting automation.

Posting Automation Simplifies, Accelerates Accounting

The manual creation of complex cross-company invoices previously took two to three days. With Neumann’s tool, processing time has been reduced to 20 minutes. The application has already been implemented in the Financial Accounting department at SAP, and the 51ˇçÁ÷customers also stand to benefit as well.

In addition to time savings, posting automation helps avoid processing errors of manual entry and accurately displays data in real time. The increased operational efficiency supports improved customer service, as employees have time for more productive activities. Implementation requires only minimal investment and brief training for employees.

Christian Klein was excited about Neumann’s intrinsic motivation to find a way to apply technology to solve the problem. “I am extremely impressed how Nicolas identified a challenge and took action. His tool will not only be applied internally, our customers will also reap the benefits from it going forward. This is a perfect example of what innovation means.”

Jennifer Morgan was impressed by the all of the 2019 finalists. “When I see these amazing innovators who are doing this on their own time, I think they’re setting the bar for all of us. It also shows us the amazing talent we have in this company — and how we have to unleash that talent to continue innovating our products and 51ˇçÁ÷as a whole.”

Neumann is currently working on making posting automation accessible to other disciplines. At present, the requirements and ideas of potential users are being collected from a wide variety of areas. Once the data is collected, the long-term goal is to use the software throughout finance. There is also already great interest among customers in the solution.

Innovation Reflecting SAP’s Vision

Neumann joined 51ˇçÁ÷in 2016 through the Autism at Work program. 51ˇçÁ÷believes that . He is the first individual winner of the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award, which celebrates projects within 51ˇçÁ÷that capture the founders’ spirit of innovation, entrepreneurship, and courage.

After the award ceremony, Neumann shared, “I am very happy! The award gives me great motivation in this project. And the recognition of my work is an important step for my professional future.” He explained that his life has changed a lot since his nomination. Social interactions have always been a challenge for him, and the project often forced him to go beyond himself. “The project has helped me a lot in my personal development. And it opens many doors for me professionally to do what I enjoy doing: developing!”

CFO and Executive Board Member Luka Mucic, whose Finance organization currently benefits the most from posting automation, was also impressed by Neumann’s innovation: “Up until now, teams have won the award, so it’s also great to see how a single human being with a simple idea but a great drive to achieve it can change the world.”