In January 2021, SAP and Microsoft announced plans to accelerate the adoption of SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure, to integrate Microsoft Teams with SAP business applications and to expand interoperability with Microsoft Azure. The joint commitment set the stage to both simplify and modernise the customer journey to the cloud. The partnership led to integration projects covering three key areas of collaboration: people, systems, and technology. The Collaboration prompted joint essential architectures that provide detailed technical guidance to deploy, run, integrate, and interoperate our respective products to achieve optimal outcomes.
With interest to further the regional collaboration between SAP and Microsoft in Asia Pacific region, the Hack2Build , a virtual prototyping initiative was introduced for the benefit of our mutual partners to co-innovate. The idea was to bring together Partners in the region, to combine SAP Business Technology Platform and Microsoft Azure to create intelligent and frictionless end-to-end business processes. with SAP and non-SAP applications quickly.
9 Partners joined the Hack2Build initiative which was held between March 28-April 5, 2022. The Partners set out to combine the capabilities offered by SAP Business Technology Platform and Microsoft Azure and bring forth practical solutions to address business needs of our customers. The spread of ideas from the partners was quite diverse spanning both line of business applications and Industry focused solutions. The use-cases varied with interesting ideas to leverage Chatbots in Teams to address Field Services; to maintain computer system validation(CSV) document for Pharma manufacturing companies; to providing context sensitive chatbots to help end user fetch the right information from any environment and many other interesting ideas which were demonstrated during the demo jam.
SAP and Microsoft experts provided technical guidance on the combined architecture, answered questions on choice of platform capabilities and integration requirements.The Winning prototypes were selected by a panel of executives from SAP and Microsoft.You will find the highlights of winning solutions below.
Winner: Tech Mahindra
The challenges faced by Contractors in project related work orders and subsequent inspection approval process in engineering, construction, and operations (EC&O) industry was addressed with this Winning prototype by Tech Mahindra. This application aims at streamlining the entire inspection process by bringing transparency on the 'work package results' recording and completion status which is submitted by the contractor.The User interface (UI) was designed using Microsoft Power Apps and the Cognitive services of Azure was leveraged for automation of request creation. The inspection app integrates to SAP S/4HANA using SAP API Management. The interesting feature was the Intelligent chatbot which was built using SAP Conversational AI and was enabled on Microsoft Teams leveraging the Azure Bot services for real time status and decision making and ease of use by the Contractor and Quality inspector personas.
Picture 1: Inspection Management in EC&O Industry by Tech Mahindra
1st Runner Up: Netizen
Efficient use of COVID-19 Antigen Test kits and preventing infections in the organisation was the motivation to demonstrate VROK (We are OK), an app by Netizen.VROK is an application to record Antigen Test Kit (ATK) results for employees attending office and to ensure safety of the employees at the workplace. VROK was built from SAP AppGyver and hosted in SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). The images of test results are detected automatically with Custom Vision capability from Microsoft Azure. The images so detected reduces the effort of administrators and/or HR officers in reading visual images of the testing done with ATK.The test results using ATK, for all employees attending office are updated with higher accuracy while reporting. In case the ATK results reveal an infected person, then notifications from VROK are sent to employees and the key stakeholders in Admin and HR, to help prevent the employees from being in contact with the infected person.
Picture 2: VROK, a COVID test result application by Netizen
2nd Runner Up: EY TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS SDN. BHD
With the objective to enhance and grow home seekers post-Covid-19 with buying insights, the application aims to address information disparity in the Real Estate industry by leveraging information on housing prices across different types of houses in Malaysia in one place to provide centralised, curated, and conveniently viewed insights that is accessible 24/7 by home seekers and property investors. Housing transaction data like house price based on the type and location in latitude and longitude are stored in Azure Database which will be sourced by Azure Machine Learning to perform outlier detection, K-means unsupervised machine learning technique and with additional computation. Processed result is then pipelined back to Azure Database and connected to SAP Analytics Cloud to create insightful visualization with personalized user experience.
Picture 3: Application for Home Seekers and Property Investors in Malaysia by EY
We thank all the Partner companies who participated with robust and relevant use-cases. They enthralled the judges and the audience during this event, by showing their capabilities to combine in innovative ways, the two leading platform technologies from SAP and Microsoft. Congratulations to the Winners and the Finalists of this event!
Many thanks to our Senior Executives who provided the Keynote address and the experts from both SAP and Microsoft on providing technical enablement sessions and continuous guidance and support to the partners, which was key to ensure success of the First Hack2Build joint initiative with Microsoft in Asia Pacific in 2022.
As part of the Hack2Build initiative, moving forward SAP Co-Innovation Lab team will support the participating partners who have expressed their interest to move beyond the 'Hack phase' to the 'Build phase'.
Special thanks to philly_cdia1300frank.freitag for their invaluable drive, in planning, for their collaboration across SAP and Microsoft, and with participating partners to ensure success of this initiative.
Author:
vasanth.kumar
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