Innovation and automation are key to modernizing business processes, driving process optimization, and improving operational efficiency. By streamlining workflows and reducing manual tasks, businesses can enhance employee productivity, while offering better experiences to customers and vendors. Automation minimizes errors, speeds up operations, and frees employees to focus on higher-value tasks, ensuring continuous improvement and adaptability in a fast-changing market.
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is an innovation platform optimized for SAP applications in the cloud. It brings together application development and automation, data and analytics, integration, and AI capabilities into one environment. But unleashing the true power of creating personalized experiences can require some inspiration. SAP Canada’s BTP team hosts Hackathon’s to help our customers discover how they can make an impact in their organization.
HINO Motors Canada (HMC) is a Toyota Group Company who produces and distributes light and medium duty commercial trucks in Canada. The company participated an SAP Canada BTP Hackathon to discover new ways of optimizing their S/4HANA Private Cloud solution. This was an experience unlike any other for HMC. As a newcomer to the BTP community, they were initially intimidated by BTP’s potential and everything it could offer. Unsure where to start, the team was excited to dive in and learn more about how it could benefit their business. The Hackathon provided an opportunity to work hands-on with experts in the SAP BTP field and was something HMC couldn’t pass up on.
HMC focused their Hackathon case study on Accounts Payable (AP) automation. As the company onboarded their RISE with SAP S/4HANA system, they were aware that AP automation was a challenge for the company. Their current AP process consumed 840 hours monthly, including data entry, approval from line of business owners, and posting and processing of payment. HMC focused their Hackathon efforts on developing an invoice automation prototype including capabilities such as vendor invoice recognition, invoice data extraction validation, approval workflows and automated posting into SAP S/4HANA for continued AP process, that would allow them to recover approximately 600 hours of time each month.
HMC was partnered with SDA, an SAP system integrator partner and specialists in SAP BTP, who helped HMC build their Hackathon prototype. SDA also gave the HMC team the confidence to explore and tackle other operational issues with an SAP BTP solution.
Reflecting on their experience, HMC realized how much they were able to accomplish in just three days working with mostly low-code/no-code solutions. BTP was not overly technical and could be leveraged by any of their users with the right support.
“The Hackathon experience was eye-opening for our team has shown us the power and scalability of SAP BTP,” said Don Cortell, IT Manager, HINO Motors Canada. “We are now scoping out our prototype including identifying opportunities for further enhancements, and we are excited to continue developing our prototype into a full-scale production solution.”
HMC’s advise to another team looking to participate in a BTP Hackathon: diversify your hackathon team, bring in people from outside your IT team. For example, HMC brought someone from their finance team who could help address finance process specific questions in real time.
“We worked hard to make the most of the opportunity,” continued Cortell. “We are confident that the lessons learned from this experience will continue to benefit our business as we move forward with our SAP BTP solutions.”
Hear more from Don Cortell about HINO Motors Canada’s SAP BTP Hackathon: SAP Video – HINO Motors Hackathon Customer Story
