fbpx

SAP Global Teams Drive Social Impact with SAP 1BL

SAP-Global.png

SAP 1BL (One Billion Lives) is SAP’s CSR initiative that endeavours to improve one billion lives by helping solve some of the world’s biggest social and environmental problems. Under the CSR initiative, SAP runs a social intrapreneurship program—dubbed ‘SAP 1BL Ventures’—where SAP global employees are granted the opportunity, time, technology and mentorship they need to turn their passion for making a difference into sustainable, income-generating ventures.

SAP 1BL Ventures—launched in 2018 in parallel with SAP’s business strategy—was first developed at SAP APJ under Adaire Fox-Martin’s leadership. The SAP Executive Board Member (who is reportedly departing the company at the end of the month) explains SAP 1BL’s purpose:

“Despite the challenges in today’s world, I believe humans are inherently good. This program gives SAP employees an opportunity to live large, and demonstrate that faith in humanity.”

The SAP 1BL Ventures program cultivates social intrapreneurs by offering the stability of an established business and the speed and innovative thinking of a startup. 

A look at SAP Global 1BL Ventures

According to Deb Kaplan, head of SAP 1BL, the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has provided greater motivation for SAP global teams to develop social and environmental solutions. Kaplan comments:

“This year’s teams have been put to the test to solve social and environmental problems focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and COVID-19 in a fully virtual environment. With a global pandemic displacing many teams from one another due to lockdowns and quarantines, these teams continued to push themselves to find new ways to work together, solve problems, communicate more effectively, and complete the journey that they started and refused to give up on.”

Over 2,000 SAP global employees participated in the 2020 SAP 1BL program. In this article, we’ll look at teams that presented the most developed and impactful social innovation ideas focused on addressing the growing issue of unemployment.

Social Recruitment

The SAP 1BL Japan team found a solution that proposes to solve Japan’s poverty issues by helping disadvantaged citizens find work through a customizable digital job-matching platform.

Led by SAP Value Advisor Expert Satoru Ota, the team worked with SAP Fieldglass and came up with ‘Social Recruitment Platform.’ The team is also working with Grameen Nippon to further develop the solution.

According to Ota, in the future, their team hopes to roll out the solution globally to poverty-stricken areas. Moreover, Ota aspires to use the venture to also help professionals whose industries may offer poorer visibility into open positions (such as artists and independent contractors).

Athena

Team Athena from SAP China hopes to create ways to improve differently-abled people’ lives through meaningful employment. The team collaborated with Taicang Inclusion Factory to build and deploy an intelligent production planning application. They are also working to develop more intelligent tools to help recruiters effectively find differently-abled individuals and also support individuals in overcoming personal barriers.

Jason Sun, a principal support engineer with SAP China, explained:

“We hope to really help these people improve their lives in every way.”

Sebenza

The Sebenza team decided to create a mobile-first job search approach to help blue-collar workers who still struggle to find available employment opportunities, especially with the challenges created by the current global pandemic. Through its partnership with the Southern Caribbean Islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the team was able to engage IT students on the islands and identify ministries within the country with which they could further partner with.

Share this post

Leave a Reply

scroll to top