From July 27th to 3rd August another successful #Hack2Build event, and the first edition in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), took place. Themed on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Side-by-Side Extensions built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which is the foundation for intelligent companies, these extensions enable partners to offer their customers innovative solutions beyond the SAP standard while maintaining a consistent SAP S/4HANA core.
Partners from the LAC region were invited and selected for this event.
#Hack2Build is an event series that takes the creativity and speed of a hackathon to the next level by creating a minimal viable solution offering in terms of an application, accelerator, or a solution package. The event series has been running successfully in other regions and, for the first time, it was hosted in LAC, to cater to the innovative partner ecosystem.
All participants brought dedication, enthusiasm, creativity and delivered compelling solutions in just seven days.
The Participating Companies
#Hack2Build LAC Jul/Aug 2021 Participants
We were happy to welcome nine SAP partner companies with 40 experts from four countries in the region (Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay), participated in this 1
st #Hack2Build in LAC:
CSTI Corp,
Essence,
Intelligenza,
Invenzis,
LKM,
MQA,
Numen IT,
Stratesys and
Structum.
Every #Hack2Build event demonstrates the innate innovation potential of SAP’s ecosystem, driven by their close association with SAP products and technologies and servicing customer needs over many years. Enabled by the manifold capabilities offered by the SAP Business Technology Platform, each partner demonstrated a clear value proposition with their ideas arising from the challenges they observe with our joint customers planning needs and aspirations.
It was an amazing collaboration across SAP teams and the partners to discuss the concepts, evaluate their architecture, product and roadmap questions and analyze their business plans as part of the prototype phase. Within seven days, the partners were able to prototype and showcase their innovations to an esteemed panel of judges. Although all participating teams had the potential to win, the jury had to determine the winners based on key criteria.
Demo Day and the Panel of Judges
All participants made it to the final Demo Day and showcased their inspiring innovative solutions to the audience. With only 10 minutes to present the Business Case and the functioning Prototype running on SAP BTP, they had an intense morning aiming to impress the Jury.
The Panel of Judges came from a diverse perspective and consisted of five SAP Senior Leaders:
Panel of Judges
We also had the honor of welcoming
Guillermo Brinkmann, Head of the Global Partner Organization for SAP LAC, as the award presenter to announce the winners among the finalists.
After the demonstration morning, they were all amazed with the high quality of the partner prototypes and provided their insights and shared their feedback to the partner use cases.
The Voice from the Judges
The Winners
Winner: Stratesys
Stratesys created the winning solution branded Market Piece. The solution aims to automate the selling in digital marketplaces. It integrates the main LATAM e-marketplaces with the customer's SAP S/4HANA. This gives customers a single application and interface, which handles all integration and APIs with the various marketplaces. It automates item maintenance (price, attributes, availability) and automatically synchronizes the sales transactions from the marketplaces into SAP S/4HANA.
First Runner-up: LKM
LKM showcased Invoice Converter, which does the integration of inbound service invoices into SAP S/4HANA. The application receives service invoices via an e-mail (Outlook API), which converts the invoices to structured data (Google Cloud OCR) and finally posts the invoice into SAP S/4HANA. The solution already has a larger roadmap that the partner will develop onwards.
Second Runner-up: CSTI Corp
CSTI Corp developed CSTI Quick Reply, a solution that automatically answers to customers’ requests or claims on transactions through a Chatbot or Email. It uses AI to classify the request or claim and validate its Billing Document code, Total Amount, and Issue Date. When human support is required, a ticket is created in SAP S/4HANA.
The Voice from the Winners
Beyond a Hackathon
As the intent of #Hack2Build event is to help our partners to build their solution, the move to the next BUILD phase is critical for the partners to drive successful outcome with their innovations. Most of the partners are continuing with their development and aim to bring their solutions to customers as soon as possible.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank all finalist teams, in no order, and the use cases they prototyped during this #Hack2Build:
- Essence: SAP S/4HANA systems monitoring as part of a larger service scope
- Intelligenza: Employee NPS that integrates to SAP S/4HANA
- Invenzis: AI suggestion of Account or Cost Center to invoices without Purchase Order
- MQA: Productivity Solution to track remote workers’ progress
- Numen: Automatic creation of Account Postings in SAP S/4HANA for large amount of transactions
- Structum: SkyApp automates a cumbersome Colombian legal requirement for travel expenses accounting
To award the results, all the participant partner teams received digital badges by
cred.ly from SAP.
Virtual Selfie during the Demo Day
We also would like to thank all the
SAP teams and colleagues for their passionate and tireless commitment and the tremendous support they offered, which made this event possible! Kudos and special thanks to:
Guillermo Brinkmann and
Carolina Bastos for their sponsorship and executive support
Partner Solution Center and Partner Readiness Team: João Cavalcanti,Fábio Traldi, Daniel Tellez, Rodrigo Riveros, Miguel Bermudez, Pavel Penaz and Jamil Khan
Management and Judges: Mani Pirouz, Rudolf Held, Lourdes Gomezand Thomas Jung
SAP Co-Innovation Lab: Lucas Rigo, Ronildo Santos, Hans-Joachim Odlozinski,Miliau Pape, Raghuvira Bhagavan, Phillip Phiri, Sikhumbuzo Dlamini, Joey Bronner, Tshepo Mahloko, and all colleagues from COIL who have contributed with great support, content and shared experience
Thank you for your excellent support during all phases of the event. We couldn’t have it done without your leadership, domain expertise, and dedication to the success of SAP and our Ecosystem.
SAP #Hack2Build LAC Team
Authors: Lucas Rigo and Ronildo Santos