It is important to remember that we do not work alone, and our successes often require labors of many experts across functional lines
at SAP. My name is Dennis Yang, and I am an Engineering / QA manager from the Dublin, California office working on DMS products.
I attended two Month of Inclusion events these past few weeks, the Valentine’s Day Beer Bash (VBB) and
the Chinese Culture Group’s celebration of the Chinese/Lunar New Year (LNY). Both events were filled with fun, prizes, music, finger foods, drinks and
most importantly, colleagues from different departments with whom we exchanged ideas and shared gripes.
VBB is not the first Beer Bash at Dublin, but in my opinion, one of the most successful Beer Bashes ever held at this office. This success was in part due to the fact that managers were invited to help serve beverages to employees at this event. When managers, like myself, were taking breaks and volunteering to serve, all attendees were naturally more relaxed and more willing to socialize. In one of the conversations I had with our IT experts, I learned of the fragility of SAP’s old SAN storage infrastructure at Dublin. Once I understood what the underlying issue was, it was easy for me to make a decision to migrate onto new and supported hardware. Because of this conversation, this is a project we are now starting, and this project will yield much benefits such as less downtime and more productivity for engineers. In addition, as a manager/wine-server, I got the chance to catch up with many colleagues in other product groups whom I had not talked to in months. We chit-chatted while I poured wine, and in doing so, opened doors to more collaborations. I was very appreciative of this opportunity.
Lunar New Year celebrates the coming of spring, and is a tradition celebrated by more than 1 billion people in the world across many Asian countries. The Chinese Culture Group at Dublin, in conjunction with other CCGs at other sites, put together a wonderful slide show and trivia contest on China for attendees of the LNY Beer Bash. Being born Chinese, I congratulated myself on knowing some of the trivia questions (Great Wall: about 2000 years old), and was also glad to have the opportunity to learn many new things about China. Of course there was also good food at this CCG event. My fortune cookie even reminded me to “Use the Mobile Leave Request App.” How clever! Conversations around the table centered on the Chinese Zodiac, and the good work our colleagues at the SAP China Labs are doing. This event was a reminder that we are a global company, with many men and women all over the world contributing to our success.
I want to thank all the people who put in the time to make Month of Inclusion a special month for SAP employees. VBB and LNY are just two examples of
successful gatherings that provided breaks to our routines and opportunities for collaborations. Intellectually, we know that we must count on other people outside of our product groups in order to succeed as a company. These Month of Inclusion events help put human faces to those “other people.”
