Last week, to a virtual audience of nearly 50,000 employees, SAP CEO Christian Klein announced the winners of the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award, the company’s most prestigious employee recognition.
Three teams were selected for outstanding and innovative projects in the categories Go-To-Market, Operational Excellence, and Products and Technology.
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 World Food Programme and Tech for All, to which SAP 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, SAP 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 SAP 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. I 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. We 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 SAP colleagues gave us their best effort, time, and talents,” Angela Reichert 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
SAP 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.
SAP Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences is an industry network based on software-as-a-service (SaaS) that helps SAP 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 Oliver Nuernberg says. “I am grateful for the passionate team that made this work.”