Last week, to a virtual audience of nearly 50,000 employees, the Executive Board of SAP SE 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 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 World Food Programme and Partners in Health, to which SAP will donate €10,000 on behalf of each team – €30,000 total.
Go-to-Market Winner
Midmarket Business Always-On Platform of EMEA North
To simplify and humanize how SAP connects with its prospects and customers, the Midmarket Business Always-On Platform of EMEA North puts SAP 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 SAP 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 SAP Usage Analyzer
How many customers have adopted an SAP 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 SAP 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. SAP 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, SAP 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, SAP 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
SAP 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.
SAP Intelligent Agriculture helps make next-generation, data-driven farming processes and services a reality. For the first time, SAP 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. SAP 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, SAP 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, SAP Intelligent Agriculture, added. “SAP 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 SAP 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.