ASUG mem­bers won top prizes at this year’s 10^th anniver­sary SAP Inno­va­tion Awards, announced April 12.

Held annu­al­ly to hon­or and cel­e­brate the achieve­ments of for­ward-think­ing com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als that har­nessed the pow­er of SAP prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies ​“to cre­ate pos­i­tive eco­nom­ic, envi­ron­ment, and social impact so that the world runs bet­ter,” the SAP Inno­va­tion Awards cel­e­brat­ed its 10^th edi­tion by nam­ing win­ners in ten categories: 

• 10^th Anniver­sary Superstar
• Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Hero
• Indus­try Leader
• Part­ner Paragon
• Trans­for­ma­tion Titan
• Cut­ting-Edge Genius
• Busi­ness Innovator
• Expe­ri­ence Wizard
• Adop­tion Champion
• Ser­vices Supernova

Union Pacif­ic was named an Adop­tion Cham­pi­on, while Wal­greens Boots Alliance was hon­ored with the Busi­ness Inno­va­tor Award. MOD Piz­za, mean­while, claimed the title of Expe­ri­ence Wiz­ard. Ernest & Young and Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers (PwC) were both sep­a­rate­ly award­ed the Part­ner Paragon prize, while Blue Dia­mond Grow­ers was named a Trans­for­ma­tion Titan. These ASUG mem­bers’ sub­mis­sions are detailed below. 

In hon­or of all par­tic­i­pants, SAP donat­ed $20,000 to the U.N. World Food Pro­gramme and Save the Chil­dren char­i­ties. Win­ners’ prizes include a tro­phy, a cel­e­bra­tion event, and either an SAP Sap­phire Orlan­do 2023 pass or a US$1,000 SAP4Good vouch­er for a char­i­ta­ble donation.

SAP pub­lished over 220 sub­mis­sions, all vis­i­ble on the SAP Inno­va­tion Awards web­site. 70 entries were select­ed as final­ists; 16 of those were sub­mit­ted by ASUG mem­bers. Accen­ture, Bris­tol Myers Squibb, Con­stel­la­tion Brands, Deloitte, Microsoft, Penn State Uni­ver­si­ty, Sealed Air, and The Home Depot were also among the ASUG mem­bers select­ed as SAP Inno­va­tion Awards finalists.

Inside ASUG Mem­bers’ Award-Win­ning Submissions

Union Pacif­ic, named an Adop­tion Cham­pi­on, faced the chal­lenge of mod­ern­iz­ing its exist­ing cus­tom-devel­oped IT land­scape to stream­line its busi­ness process­es, align with indus­try best prac­tices, elim­i­nate redun­dant solu­tions, and opti­mize ana­lyt­ics, vis­i­bil­i­ty, and insights. The lead­ing trans­porta­tion com­pa­ny deployed SAP S/4HANA Cloud uti­liz­ing the RISE with SAP approach, achiev­ing a major upgrade in less than 9 months.

Wal­greens Boots Alliance was award­ed the Busi­ness Inno­va­tor prize. Using a lega­cy sys­tem out­side of SAP, Wal­greens had expe­ri­enced an 11 per­cent invoice error rate in billings. Upon lever­ag­ing SAP solu­tions, Wal­greens estab­lished a bet­ter process for cre­at­ing invoic­es for scan-based trad­ing ven­dors. As a result of this deploy­ment, Wal­greens ven­dors have gained vis­i­bil­i­ty into what’s sell­ing in each store and can per­form dai­ly oper­a­tional analy­sis and accu­rate fore­cast­ing, while elim­i­nat­ing in-store scout­ing of inven­to­ry and inef­fi­cient use of shelf space.

MOD Piz­za was named an Expe­ri­ence Wiz­ard. In need of scal­able HR and ERP tech­nol­o­gy to replace its pre­vi­ous pay­roll and account­ing sys­tems, the restau­rant chain decid­ed to imple­ment SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, pub­lic edi­tion, for a cloud-based, peo­ple-cen­tric approach, also lever­ag­ing SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form, SAP Mas­ter Data Inte­gra­tion, and Qualtrics Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment solu­tions from SAP across its enter­prise. MOD’s imple­men­ta­tion of BTP played a crit­i­cal role in ensur­ing sim­pli­fied inte­gra­tion and con­tin­ued scalability.

Ernest & Young (EY), a Part­ner Paragon win­ner, was rec­og­nized for its EY Emer­gency Response Appli­ca­tion (ERA), built to con­tribute to human­i­tar­i­an aid for Ukraine. A mobile-first pro-bono appli­ca­tion, ERA was designed to help those seek­ing refuge in Poland to obtain crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion, such as a list of orga­ni­za­tions that could pro­vide aid, which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly trans­lat­ed into Ukrain­ian. EY ERA is SAP-cer­ti­fied to enable mar­ket vis­i­bil­i­ty and reachability.

PwC Ger­many, respond­ing to busi­ness chal­lenges posed by the Ger­man Sup­ply Chain Due Dili­gence Act (SCD­DA) that went into effect ear­li­er this year, devel­oped an SCD­DA-spe­cif­ic, enter­prise-ready soft­ware, ​“PwC Check Your Val­ue Chain,” to auto­mat­i­cal­ly iden­ti­fy abstract and con­crete risks in com­plex sup­ply chains. For these efforts, PwC was also named a Part­ner Paragon winner.

Blue Dia­mond Grow­ers, the world’s largest almond pro­cess­ing and mar­ket­ing coop­er­a­tive, was award­ed the title of Trans­for­ma­tion Titan for launch­ing a world-class sup­ply chain solu­tion with SAP. Chal­lenged to mod­ern­ize its dis­joint­ed and man­u­al sup­ply chain and logis­tics func­tions after sup­ply chain dis­rup­tions pre­cip­i­tat­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, Blue Dia­mond Grow­ers chose to deploy SAP Trans­porta­tion Man­age­ment and SAP Busi­ness Net­work for Logis­tics, migrate its ERP to SAP S/4HANA, and lever­age its exist­ing SAP Inte­grat­ed Busi­ness Plan­ning (IBP) and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud imple­men­ta­tions. After launch­ing its solu­tion in 2021, Blue Dia­mond Grow­ers achieved a con­sol­i­dat­ed man­age­ment view across its busi­ness, reduced sup­ply on hand by 20%, saved $1 mil­lion in logis­tics costs, and increased order fill rates to 99 percent.