Last month, Ashoka ChangemakerXChange released The Possibilists Study, which surveyed 1,000 social entrepreneurs from 16 of the world’s leading youth social innovation networks, representing 137 countries. Supported by the SAP Foundation and Google.org, the research examined the needs and challenges that young changemakers face in today’s digital world, as well as how organisations can support these Possibilists to succeed. Alexandra van der Ploeg, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at SAP, commented:

“SAP is proud to support this research, connecting people and information to accelerate solutions for the world’s most complex challenges.”

Ryan Gersava, Founder and President at Virtualahan, participated in The Possibilists Study. Based in the Philippines, his organisation aims to break down employment barriers for disadvantaged groups of people who are often discriminated against in the workplace due to their conditions. Gersava, who mirrors SAP’s purpose of improving people’s lives, partnered with the tech giant last year through the SAP Social Sabbatical program.

Last year alone, SAP’s CSR activities reached over 4.5 million youth and 117,000 teachers across 113 countries. This is in addition to collaborating with almost 1,600 social impact organisations. In particular, the SAP Social Sabbatical program is a short-term assignment located in an emerging market in which SAP employees collaborate in small, cross-functional teams with young social enterprises or not-for-profit groups.

The Role of SAP Employees in Turning the Company’s Vision Into Action

As a portfolio of pro bono volunteering initiatives, the SAP Social Sabbatical program is designed to achieve two main goals:

• Helping nonprofit groups globally to run at their best and maximise their social impact by solving concrete business challenges and focusing on digital inclusion in various industries.
• Challenge and educate SAP leaders and talents to understand the global implications of today’s digital world, embrace the concept of lifelong learning, and serve as role models for SAP’s vision and purpose.

Since 2016, the SAP Social Sabbatical program has been helping social enterprises in the Philippines overcome pressing challenges and growth barriers. With the support of volunteer SAP employees, Teach for the Philippines (TFP) was able to conduct a brand audit focused on further enriching the branding and marketing aspects of the organisation.

The initiative improved TFP’s knowledge of what needs to be done to further promote its advocacy of recruiting young professionals to mentor students in public schools, particularly in rural areas in the country. In April this year, SAP Philippines has once again strengthened its commitment to supporting TFP by providing a US$25,000 grant for the group’s Batang Bayani Life Skills Program. The tech giant’s donation aims to boost training programs for around 100 educators, including parents, guardians, and co-teachers.

Furthermore, other Filipino social enterprises that have benefitted from SAP’s CSR projects are Messy Bessy, a producer and seller of natural cleaning and personal care products, and Cropital, a crowd-funding platform that brings people together to support farmers in raising money. Volunteers from SAP Concur in the Philippines helped streamline Messy Bessy’s accounting framework as it previously lacked cohesiveness in various functions. Meanwhile, Cropital went through a series of on-site research with SAP employees to identify and address the factors that hinder them from increasing their beneficiaries.

“We are thankful to be a part of the SAP Social Sabbatical program. It helped us gain meaningful and actionable insights to tackle our problem,” Cropital CEO Ruel Amparo stated.

Edler Panlilio, Managing Director of SAP Philippines, concluded:

“As a company, we set our goal to develop SAP leaders and talents to understand the global consequences of today’s digital shift. But more than that, we believe that this actively fulfills our purpose of helping the world run better and improve people’s lives.”

The post SAP Employees Take Part in Helping the World Run Better appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

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.

The post SAP Global Teams Drive Social Impact with SAP 1BL appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

The Friend of ASEAN award was presented by Mdm Halimah Yacob:

Mdm Halimah Yacob is the President of the Republic of Singapore. The award presentation was at the ASEAN Business Awards 2018 gala dinner, held in Singapore and hosted by the ASEAN-BAC. The Friends of ASEAN award category acknowledges non-ASEAN owned organisations for their continuous and increased commitment to growing their presence in the ASEAN. The awards were introduced in 2007 by ASEAN-BAC to mark ASEAN’s 40^th anniversary and to recognise outstanding ASEAN businesses.

From its initial single office and 16 employees in Singapore in 1989, SAP has steadily grown its ASEAN presence to its current 11 offices in 7 ASEAN member states and more than 3,800 employees.

As an employer, SAP has continuously invested in the development of its people and is recognised as an employer of choice in the region, as demonstrated by the numerous employer-focused awards it has garnered.

In addition, SAP innovations help more than 10,000 ASEAN customers — including 91 of the Top 100 ASEAN companies — work more efficiently and use business insights more effectively.

“SAP has been helping customers in Southeast Asia run better with our software innovations for close to 30 years now, and with our continued expansion, we are focusing on helping even more organisations leapfrog the technology gap to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution. We do so by bringing best practices from our global experience with 25 industries, together with leading technologies such as blockchain, IoT, machine learning and analytics, while building the capacity of local partners to better serve our customers,” said Claus Andresen, president & managing director, SAP Southeast Asia.

SAP Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives help communities:

“Receiving the Friend of ASEAN accolade is an impetus for us to do more to help companies and communities be more successful. We will be successful only when they are successful.”

A major initiative of SAP Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the SAP Social Sabbatical, enabling SAP employees to donate their skills and expertise to help non-profit organisations and social enterprises to create solutions to major business challenges. Since 2015, 111 SAP employees have volunteered more than 27,000 hours, valued at almost 1.5 million euros in support of 40 social enterprises across Southeast Asia.

“In service to SAP’s CSR mission – powering opportunity through digital inclusion — SAP collaborated with the ASEAN Foundation to establish the ASEAN Data Science Explorers (ASEAN DSE) program in 2017. ASEAN DSE have since trained close to 5000 educators and youths in SAP Analytics Cloud across all 10 ASEAN member states,” said Eugene Ho, head of corporate affairs, SAP Southeast Asia.

The initiative enables participants to visualise and analyse data on UN Sustainable Developments Goals and to develop recommendations to support the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025.

The post SAP honoured with Friend of Asean Award appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.