SAP strengthens its “preferred employer” status in the APJ Region
Singapore — SAP Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) today announced that its Human Resources Shared Services Organisation (HR SSO) was honoured at the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network Excellence Awards 2008, emerging as Asia’s Best New Shared Services Organisation.
The Excellence Awards, established to honour, recognise and promote SSOs that demonstrate true winning practices, form the industry’s benchmark in terms of best practice and business excellence.
SAP’s newly-built service model, which commenced operations in May 2007, impressed the panel of Shared Services experts and leaders with its design, start-up strategy, implementation initiatives and future development plans.
SAP APJ made the decision to set up an HR SSO serving all Lines of Business across 13 countries in APJ in early 2006. A comprehensive location study concluded that Singapore should be the service delivery hub and its business case was approved by August 2006.
A country-by-country roll-out plan was initiated, with the ambitious target of completing the roll-out for the first 12 countries in less than eight months. In May 2007, the first go-live was achieved in Southeast Asia and China. Following this, all targets for the first 12 countries were met, with key functional, leadership and organisational capabilities developed.
An example of this is the initiation in April 2007, of an end-to-end recruitment process as part of the HR Operations organisation, meant to reduce the dependency on external parties to acquire talent and increase the volume and quality of hiring with shorter lead times and at lower costs. By September 2007, a regional recruitment team had been built, the recruitment processes had been realigned to a global template, a regional employee referral programme was launched, an employer branding campaign went public – winning a Silver EFFIE award in the process – and SAP APJ became SAP’s first region to implement e-recruiting across all countries.
Anna Franz, Conference Director of the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network, said, “SAP has done well for itself, building up a new service model and implementing it well. Their HR operations are an obvious contributor to the overall success of the organisation, and we can’t wait to see how their strategic plans for the future further enhance this.”
Since the HR SSO went live with the first set of countries in May 2007, it has re-evaluated the service model, fine-tuned and strengthened it. Its strategic focus for the future includes expanding its service portfolio, strengthening its talent pool and increasing efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery.
Martin Prinz, Vice President and Head of HR Operations in SAP APJ, said, “In the product world, one could refer to the approach that characterised our first two years of planning, migrating and operating as ‘rapid prototyping’. We are now in the stabilisation and optimisation stage.”
The Shared Services Excellence Awards are open to SSOs from all countries, and was held as part of the 11th Annual Shared Services Asia Summit 2008, the largest Shared Services event in the Region.
About the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON)
The Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON) has been developing and growing a community of shared services and outsourcing professionals since 1997. It keeps shared services and outsourcing professionals up to date with the latest industry news and helps them make intelligent shared service and outsourcing decisions by connecting them to industry experts and enabling collaborations with their peers.
About SAP
SAP is the world’s leading provider of business software(*), offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run businesses. With approximately 75,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of Business Objects) in over 120 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol “SAP.” (For more information, visit www.sap.com)
(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related applications.
Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “expect,” “forecast,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “project,” “predict,” “should” and “will” and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP’s future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including SAP’s most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.
Copyright © 2008 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
SAP, R/3, mySAP, mySAP.com, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained in this document serve informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.
