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Pascal
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
During this event, we supported our partner United VARs, the leading alliance of SAP solution providers for the mid-market, in an exclusive Hack2Build to implement SAP S/4HANA Extensions leveraging AI.

This Hack2Build was conducted virtually and for the last 3 days of Hack2Build week there was an opportunity to meet in person at the Barcelona Digital Hub for a physical experience and finish the Demo Jam prototype.

Together with our excellent colleagues from the SAP BTP Solution Architects and the SAP AI product team -who all offered an outstanding support from all over the world- we were able to run this Hack2Build and deliver an innovative and inspiring experience for eight of the United VARs partners.

The United VARs Partners


United VARs is a global alliance of SAP implementation partners and solution providers for the mid-market. With over 70 members in 100 countries, the alliance serves all types of SAP rollouts and integrations across the world. The organization provides businesses with local expertise ‘on the ground’ charged at local rates. All United VARs members work together as one team to provide a more personalized service than other global systems integrators are able to, and one that is better suited to mid-market budgets.

The participating United VARs partner were coming from all over the world, spanning from China to Canada, and they were implementing and showcasing a great variety of use cases applying SAP AI Business Services and AI Core in connection with the SAP Business Technology Platform.


United VARs Participating Partners


Four of the partners - Illumiti, Seidor, Blue-Zone and 2BM - met in Barcelona at the "Barcelona Digital Hub" over the last 3 days to finalize their demo and prepare for the hybrid Demo Jam on September 29th.

Demo Jam


This Demo Jam was a hybrid event since half of the presentations were presented virtually, the other half were presented on site in Barcelona in the Digital Hub.

SAP Chief Partner Officer Karl Fahrbach opened the Demo Jam with his welcome note and each of the partners presented their exciting demo to the audience, online and on-site. Based on the partners' feedback, gathered via Mentimeter right before presenting their demo, they felt curious, excited and "stronger than one," which was the right mindset to start the demo jam.


How the Participants felt before the Hack2Build


Because every participating partner is a winner, our demo judges panel consisting of senior SAP executives, had to make a difficult decision to crown the winners.

After a hard but fair jury discussion based on defined criteria, partner 2BM from Denmark was declared as winner followed by Illumiti from Canada and Netizen from Thailand as 1st and 2nd runner-ups:


The 3 winners of the Hack2Build


Karl Fahrbach announced the winners and presented the prizes and certificates to the top three. All three partners will receive a free ICC certification for the completed solution and the winner 2BM will also receive SAP-sponsored GTM support.

Team 2BM from Denmark …


… was very excited to take home the first place! Especially in such a tough race against many skilled colleagues from the UVAR SAP partner ecosystem.

The Maintenance Data Quality solution build by the 2BM team uses supervised learning to grade the quality of Plant Maintenance data. Data quality is a key focus of companies taking their maintenance digital. It is a challenge 2BM Software has come across often during implementations of their market leading mobile app solution “2BM Mobile Work Order.” (see image below). Quality can be hard to quantify, but by embedding AI in their 2BM Maintenance Data Quality solution they are able to give organizations real time and historic insights and give live recommendations to the front-line workers.


2BM Mobile Work Order


During this Hack2Build week the 2BM team, consisting of Martin Conradsen, Priya Annamareddy, Dragos Sirbu and Olav Rask, has built an OData service for extracting maintenance notifications, designed a machine learning model to evaluate the quality of data and developed a Fiori dashboard to present the results to the end users.

Team ILLUMITI from Canada …


… followed as first runner-up delivering on their vision of an Asset Tag Scanning Solution. Congratulations to Lorraine, Peter, Aman, Fedor, and Stephen. The foresight to support multiple possible backends and mobile device types as well as an excellent usage of BTP capabilities impressed the Jury, and we can’t wait to get engaged with Illumiti on the way forward.


Illumiti’s Asset Tag Scan solution


Illumiti’s Asset Tag Scan solution prototype is a mobile application that enables maintenance technicians working in the field to identify assets via photo capture on their mobile device. The application will extract structured identification data from the image and associate this data with the assets represented in their backend SAP maintenance solution. The solution will dramatically reduce the asset master data creation effort and provide a repeatable mechanism for maintenance technicians to identify assets and extract relevant specification info from the asset tags.

The solution uses Machine Learning capability to improve the efficiency of tag data extraction on a go forward basis. Each tag is unique in terms of form and data structure so presents itself well as a machine learning opportunity.

The mobile User Interface is built on REACT Native. The solution leverages BTP workflow to provide backend integration and process flexibility for many SAP customer scenarios included Master Data Governance and traditional plant maintenance deployments.

Team Netizen from Thailand …


… came in as the second runner-up and showcased their solution supporting on the process of RTV (Return-To-Vendor) consignments. This solution also impressed the jury by showing how to automate common, tedious and "manual" tasks with the Document Information Extraction Service from SAP and is waiting to be released.


Business Potential RTV consignments


Companies with retail locations all over the country typically use consignment sales as their primary strategy. This is because the retailer is exempt from paying for the item until it is sold. Suppose the product cannot be sold within the specified period of time, for example when the shelf life approaching its expiration date. The retailer will return the product and the RTV document to the manufacturer. Once the RTV and product are received, the manufacturer or distributor must send the proper invoice and credit note.

Manufacturers receive approximately four thousand RTVs per month. The challenge is to find more than ninety thousand invoices and an average of 10 SKUs per RTV. One RTV can be matched to one invoice. The system uses accountants to match RTVs to invoices.


Solution GTM Architecture


Netizen build the solution by using the SAP BTP services to solve this business problem. The central services applied in this use case are the Document Information Extraction (DOX) from SAP and SAP Process Automation.

The success of this solution enables manufacturers to reduce the time to issue credit notes by 10x

Going forward


The United VARs Partners also shared their positive experience towards their experience of the program not only via mentimeter.


Participant Experience of the Hack2Build


As always, the journey for the partners does not end with the demo jam, but only begins to become exciting and profitable as they finalize and commercialize their solutions. The SAP Co-Innovation Lab will continue to work with all participating partners to successfully support them in this coming phase.

Not only did the United VARs partners learn that they are “stronger than one”, we as Hack2Build organizers also learned from the strong network within SAP that we can achieve more together. This is made possible by the strong commitment of everyone, for the partners, but also for us internally!

A big thank you therefore goes to the United VARs and their partners for delivering such great demos, as well as to all our leaders, experts and colleagues who contributed their time and expertise to making such a great experience possible. Without all of you this would not have been possible! Thank you very much, we are stronger than one!

If you have any question, please do not hesitate to get in contact with the author of this blog post.