Industry and Line of Business, SAP Artificial Intelligence based innovations from Partners

[cvasanthk]

Intelligent Enterprises leverage technologies to optimise, automate and re-imagine business processes. Today, Organizations across a variety of industries are using Artificial intelligence (AI) as a catalyst for business process disruption, digital transformation, and accelerated innovation.

SAP offers an open and AI-ready infrastructure to build and deploy AI applications at scale using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), with ready-to-use business services, AI-driven data orchestration, and pipelining on an open-source framework. With the recent announcement by SAP on general availability (GA) of SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad to our customers and partners, it was an opportune moment to engage with our partner ecosystem to drive innovations together to support this vision of our Intelligent Enterprise.

#Hack2Build, the established program from Partner ecosystem success, was conceived to engage with partners early-on to bring life to their ideas based on applicability of AI to business processes. What better ways than to expose, enable and experience SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad with our Partners so that they could get to experiment with the technology first-hand and bring forth their AI powered ideas to a working solution model.

We had an overwhelming response from both our global and regional partners who set out on the first course to join the virtual hackathon and build a working prototype, all in 7 days. As #Hack2Build is purposed 'beyond a hackathon' the program encourages partners to  develop a holistic AI solution, to bring the solutions to our customers, to power the Intelligent Enterprise journey.

 

Based on the interest on this topic, the partners was clustered around two themes:

1. Line of Business solutions powered by SAP Artificial Intelligence


2. Industry solutions leveraging SAP Artificial Intelligence

We saw excellent scenarios demonstrated by our partners on how to apply AI in the context of Line of Business solutions and leveraging AI to address end-to-end Industry business process.

We had 7 partners participating for each theme and in this blog the Podium Winners solutions are highlighted.

1. Line of Business solutions powered by SAP Artificial Intelligence

Bosch was adjudged the Winner in this category with their 'Reliable Sourcing Model' which addresses supplier risk and mitigates them by bringing  awareness to prevent delivery failures. For the situation, where purchase request (PR) does not have source assignment, and where requirements are coming from multiple sources and systems, the AI based model proposes the right source by considering several factors like contract expiry, consumption pattern and future demands. When supplier contracts do not exist, the model suggests supplier for quotation process. The solution proposes the best-fit score for source of supply to meet the various PR item requirements. The aim of the solution is to provide for reliable sourcing to meet the demanding requirements of the industry by Integrating SAP S/4HANA with SAP Business Technology Platform leveraging SAP Intelligent Technology stack managing end to end Artificial Intelligence applications’ lifecycle management with SAP AI Core, SAP AI Launchpad, including SAP Conversational AI.

Reliable Sourcing Model from Bosch

Kaar Technologies was awarded the 1^st Runner-up. Kaar demonstrated a 'Predictive Maintenance – Automated Notification Creation' solution which attempts to predict the failure in advance by detecting the anomalies in the equipment by analysing the sensor data before system failure occurs. The model receives the input sensor data from SAP S/4HANA using the AI API service and read response from the deployed machine language (ML) model. Any equipment failure data pattern is detected by the ML model and the system responds with notifications before the equipment fails. Real time Senor data will be loaded into SAP S/4HANA using SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) or SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI).

Kaar Tech’s Automated Maintenance Notification Creation

Cognizant was adjudged the 2^nd Runner-up for the 'IntelliHire' Solution which simplifies mass scale hiring process and intends to enhance the candidate experience during the hiring process. The solution reduces ‘Time to Hire’ by automating top-of-funnel recruiting tasks like Candidate Prequalification, Interview Scheduling and removes unconscious bias in the hiring process. The showcase of the IntelliHire included facial recognition-based authentication, chatbot screening, auto scoring model, dynamic evaluation with notifications on the go. Various SAP Business Technology Platform capabilities were at play with SAP AI Core, SAP AI Launchpad, SAP Conversational AI, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP HANA 2.0

IntelliHire by Cognizant

Hear from the Judges and from the participating partners their views on the theme 'Line of Business solutions powered by SAP Artificial Intelligence'.

https://sapvideoa35699dc5.hana.ondemand.com/?entry_id=1_ibmwycx7

https://sapvideoa35699dc5.hana.ondemand.com/?entry_id=1_3072uv59

2. Industry solutions leveraging SAP Artificial Intelligence

7 partners from 5 countries, built very compelling Industry focused AI scenarios using SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launch pad.  The industry scenarios varied from Energy&Natural Resources, Retail, Life Science/ Food, Agriculture , Railways and Utility.

NTT DATA was selected as the Winner with their 'AI Nose' for Life Science/Food industry. Although it’s not obvious that smell is our most powerful sense, NTT Data went on to explore how ‘Smelling is the better seeing’ using AI. They developed interestingly an ‘AI Nose’ which is capable to recognize smelling parameters. Based on trained quality thresholds, the AI Nose is designed to automate backend processes like goods receipts or quality inspections. A custom application built on SAP BTP pulls the AI nose data, which is referenced from a smell data repository and sends the request to SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad where the ML model is modeled, trained and tested. The ‘inference result’ from the model execution, is integrated with SAP S/4 HANA as well as Microsoft Teams to send notification regarding Goods receipt (GR) posting.

NTT Data- AI Nose for GR and Quality Inspection

Capgemini, as the 1^st Runner-up demonstrated how retailers using an 'Augmented data management' solution powered by AI could help eliminate disparate Customer records, bespoke fields and multiple references. The solution would enhance Customer care service and support the retailers by designing their loyalty programs and offers, by ensuring cleaner master data. The source of data from multiple point of sale (PoS) applications is passed to the model in SAP AI Core for duplicity checks and in combination with SAP AI Business services, able to predict customer characteristics. The solution can add as a supporting model to SAP Master Data Governance (SAP MDG).

Capgemini’s Augmented customer data management

LABS, SAP Partner based in the Middle East, was adjudged the 2^nd Runner-up with their 'Maze-Merizer', an SAP AI add-on solution to optimize Agriculture practices. To address the challenges in agriculture such as climate change, water scarcity, soil degradation, pest infestation, biodiversity loss and other challenges, the solution was conceptualized to optimize the agricultural practices including crop management, irrigation systems, fertilization and pesticides use. The solution provides Governments & Farm Related business with real time data on their farms, comparing it to the expected crop yield to make more informed decisions. It also helps them to manage their crops better, optimize water/pesticides/fertilizers usage, and even advise when and in what form to sell the produce to save money and enhance profits. The GEO satellite data along with the sensor data is combined and compared with Agri-prediction engine (for Maze) to predict the crop yield. The predictions are compared with actuals to adjust and enhance yield plans, material requirements (Antiseptics & fertilizers) in SAP S/4HANA.

Maze-Merizer, an SAP AI add-on by LABS

Listen to the Judges and the partners impressions on the theme 'Industry solutions leveraging SAP Artificial Intelligence'.



https://sapvideoa35699dc5.hana.ondemand.com/?entry_id=1_7o8c6ulc

Many thanks to all the participating partners for their interest, enthusiasm, and their effort to develop and pitch their novel ideas using SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad, to the panel of judges.

It was nice to have a senior panel of judges for both the themes and I sincerely thank them for dedicating many hours interacting with the participants and evaluating the various solution showcases.

I would like to acknowledge the contributions from our partners for this blog. Also specifically thank my colleague raghuvira.bhagavan  for compiling the videos and for the holistic support to plan and execute this program. This program would not be possible without the many hours of dedication and support from out SAP AI product team and experts to ensure partners are equipped with the requisite knowledge and hands-on support during the prototype phase. Big thanks to my colleagues in Partner Readiness team for their partnership during  this program, right from the beginning of this program and their co-operation and willingness to continously support partners post build with  their Go-to-Market models.

As next steps, SAP would support all the partners who had participated to complete the development of their solution and get them market ready for deployments.

If you are interested, as a Partner,  to participate in forthcoming #Hack2Build programs, do join us by registering your interests using the link https://events.sap.com/hack2build/en/home

Author: vasanth.kumar