SAP University Alliances together with our long time Public Sector Unit SAP customer NALCO (National Aluminum Company Ltd) collaborated to drive the SAP Next Gen Consulting via a Mini Hackathon on SAP Lumira at International Management Institute, Bhubaneswar India. NALCO was incorporated as a public sector enterprise of the Ministry of Mines, Government of India in 1981 with its registered office at Bhubaneswar, Orissa. It is Asia's largest, and the sixth largest, integrated aluminum complex, encompassing bauxite mining, alumina refining, aluminum smelting and casting, power generation, rail and port operations. Presently, Government of India holds 80.93% equity of NALCO. Through the amazing support by our INDUS User group Head in India – Mukesh Gupta, we got connected to NALCO on the SAP Next Gen Consulting which marked the beginning of a new relationship between SAP University Alliances and NALCO. The Hackathon event was kicked off by Prof Sourabh Sharma , on behalf of Prof Ramesh Behl (Director) from IMI B who thanked both SAP UA and NALCO for providing this wonderful platform to their students to challenge themselves and come out with innovative solutions. We then had Subrata Mohanty from NALCO talk about the SAP solutions that NALCO uses to manage their business processes and how they would like to include more advance offerings in the areas of Analytics, HANA etc. Rahul from SAP University Alliances spoke about the Next-Gen initiative and the plans to roll it out to the Top colleges jointly with our SAP ecosystem. We saw great participation from 46 students who were really excited wearing the cool SAP Next-Gen Consulting T-shirts.
The Hackathon was facilitated by Subhankar Pattanayak from SAP Labs Gurgaon where he gave an overview of the SAP Lumira software with hands on exercises on sample datasets. We then shared the 3 Problem Statements by NALCO who inspired the students to use their creative buds to innovate and collaborate. 1. A comprehensive system to integrate the geographically separate system under one umbrella to monitor critical targets including MoU for major areas of Production, Specific Consumption, Costs, Sales, Manpower, Raw Material Stock (including pipeline), Revenue & CSR vis-a-vis actual. (A few examples- Matrix reports on Daily/Monthly/Yearly basis / Visual reporting (Graphs & Charts) /Extrapolation/Forecast capabilities would give a view to the future. 2. Agreement that will be the basis for a successful performance of customer (A few Examples -Status of Sales vs Agreement customer wise for month, Qtr (80% for minth and 90% Qtr and 100% annual), / Laggards / Non-Performers / Failures / Performance/ Product offtake by customer against the agreement /- Region Wise agreements and performance 3. Visualization for critical raw-material in an organization ( A few examples- PR’s raised by end-user /Orders in the pipeline /Orders placed on vendors /Goods received against Orders / Consumptions /Stock position/Time for stock-out / re-order Data sets were provided for the first 2 problem statements while the students had to be creative to source data on their own for the 3rd Problem Statement The students were then divided into teams of 5 each which ensured great competitive spirit to work hard and win some cool SAP goodies and opportunities for a long term engagement with NALCO.
The student entries were closely judged by the NALCO Team, and Subhankar from SAP Labs who considered the additional efforts put in by the student to source the datasets on their own and then use Lumira to showcase some stunning Visualizations. We also had some great inputs by the NALCO team on the kind of Simple Visualization they would like students to create so that the Analysis is simple and easy to infer.
The winning team of 5 students won some cool SAP goodies and they would now be contacted by the NALCO team to provide them projects / Internships