Most recruitment programs focus on students, particularly those who have shown an interest in a career in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). While the percentage of women pursuing STEM courses is gradually growing, a report by Pew Research indicated that women are still underrepresented in job clusters such as physical sciences, computing, and engineering. This is despite them making gains in STEM professions in the last 25 years, especially in healthcare.

SAP aims to address this gap by launching the Girls Power Tech program in China and India. This prioritises girl students coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds and gives them opportunities to enter the corporate world. Additionally, the SAP tech initiative enables young women who do not have access to technical experiences and mentors to have internship experience in SAP.

Christian Klein, SAP Chief Executive Officer and Member of the Executive Board at SAP SE, said the company not only believes in cultivating an inclusive culture within the organisation, but also in extending it to the less fortunate ones.

“Through Girls Power Tech, our effort is to go beyond the STEM initiatives in school and colleges and bring world-class technology experiences and career opportunities at the doorstep of these girls. That, in the true sense, would be completing the circle of inclusion,” he explained.

Girls Power Tech Program in China

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic bringing unprecedented challenges globally in 2020, SAP Labs China was able to select 25 girls to join the internship and has conducted the program throughout last year. Some young changemakers traveled from Tibet and Xinjiang’s remote regions, with the majority receiving a welcome present and a computer through remote onboarding.

The participants, with most of them working remotely due to COVID-19, gathered in a two-day Girls Power Tech Bootcamp in Shanghai to meet others and discuss their experiences from the three-month internship.

Seven enablement sessions, two panels, and a Bootcamp were delivered, providing the young women with new information about programming language, methodology, and product knowledge. They also received guidance with their future career development and were able to identify areas for improvement including communication skills. Additionally, the girls experienced active community activities across SAP Labs offices and participated in product development and testing.

The 25 students from 19 colleges and 10 provinces joined 19 research and development (R&D) teams in Shanghai, Dalian, Beijing, Chengdu, and Xi’an. Five of the students have been offered full-time positions with SAP in 2021.

Empowering Young Women in India Through SAP Tech Initiative

Meanwhile, Sindhu Gangadharan, Senior Vice President and Managing Director at SAP Labs India, announced the SAP tech initiative during the SAP Developer Kick-Off Meeting (DKOM) conference last year intending to enable young women with the necessary skills to work in the IT landscape and drive entrepreneurial ventures should they desire.

SAP has been doing some pioneering work in educating girl students in STEM through its corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects such as Code Unnati. Just last month, SAP Labs India partnered with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the State Government of Karnataka to facilitate improved access to career guidance, employment, entrepreneurship opportunities, and to foster 21st-century skills in a bid to empower women and youth in the state.

Moreover, the German enterprise software giant has a great culture of connecting employees with purpose. Through the Girls Power Tech initiative, SAP employees get the opportunity to give back and play the role of a career mentor to guide the young women in the program.

The post SAP Tech Initiative Fosters Today’s Young Women Changemakers appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

In recent years, REHAU Group has been attempting to enhance its business model which accommodates both B2B and B2C requirements. There was an urgent need for digital transformation across corporate management. The polymer company needed a fully-integrated cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to help it address the following:

• swiftly respond to business needs
• promote and create an end-to-end modern smart factory
• improve employee experience
• improve productivity and collaboration
• leverage technology to support decision-making
• achieve higher process efficiency across the entire value chain

The company chose SAP S/4HANA Cloud to provide it with a next-generation environment that is scalable, mobile, and offering seamless connectivity to a vast range of other systems and cloud applications. The cloud model of SAP S/4HANA Cloud has proved to be a very suitable ERP solution for the company. It enables REHAU to evade the need and costs of tedious customizing with integrated functions such as MES, WMS, and APS.

Nils Wagner, Executive Director at REHAU Group said,

“Digital transformation is an initiative that is driving the development of our whole group and we specifically chose the Chinese market to implement this lighthouse project of implementing cloud-based ERP system for the first time.”

Automating Around SAP S/4HANA with SAP Intelligent RPA

To help REHAU China achieve a high degree of automation with its financial operational process in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Labs China and REHAU partnered for a co-innovation project that leverages SAP Intelligent RPA. The team trained a machine learning model that, when used in combination with the RPA bot, was able to achieve greater accuracy and seamless automation.

Timothy Xue, Project Manager at SAP China commented,

“We worked closely together with the technical experts from REHAU, and customized the automatic execution function templates for various operation phases at REHAU based on SAP Intelligent RPA. For example, we streamlined and automated the transfer of financial data from the original ECC into the new S/4HANA Cloud and the monitoring and processing of production orders along the assembly line.”

REHAU China has been live on SAP Intelligent RPA since January 2020. It has helped the company automate its business workflows to boost efficiency and enable employees to focus on fulfilling strategic goals. With the combination of AI and RPA, SAP has enabled REHAU China to:

• reduce its monthly manual processing time of about 1,000 account receivables from four days to 10 minutes
• reduce 50 hours of manual processing time of nearly 3,000 product orders in its IT system to less than 0.5 hours per week

In the future, REHAU Group plans to continue to explore the SAP AI Cloud Platform and promote and deploy it not only in the Asia Pacific Japan region but also in other countries throughout the group.

Wagner said,

“We will facilitate the integration and standardization of the processes within the group and achieve supply chain excellence throughout the whole industrial value chain.”

About REHAU Group

REHAU is a leading global provider of advanced polymer and composite products for industry and end-users. The company develops innovative polymer-based solutions that enable quality, efficiency, and sustainability in homes, on the road, and elsewhere.

REHAU employs about 20,000 people in more than 170 locations. The corporate headquarters for the car industry business and Commercial Construction is in Germany, while the administrative headquarters is located in Muri bei Bern, Switzerland.

The post How SAP Intelligent RPA Helped REHAU Achieve Greater Process Efficiency appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Mental challenges of the youth have been recognized in the recent studies from Europe, the U.S., and China were a fifth of all young people between 10 and 20 years old showed mental health issues. This data aligns with the experts’ account on the alarming increase in mental health problems globally among people under the age of 20.

The most common conditions such as substance-abuse related, developmental, or behavioral, if left unrecognized or untreated, can be life-threatening. As simple as feeling down can lead to anxiety or depression, or worst, thoughts of suicide. These problems can also impair students’ ability to learn.

Like many Asian cultures, the concept of the family remains very strong in China where parents are revered for their wisdom and at the same time provide utmost support to their children. Much as a lot of support is given to the children, much is expected in return in terms of academic achievement.

In China, children are exposed to the pressure of academic excellence early in life since the Chinese school system is very competitive, focused largely on results. The competitive environment that leaves the children spending many hours of schoolwork plus the pressure to excel placed by the family and society can affect one’s mental and behavioral development.

SAP Collaborates

SAP Labs China and SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Shanghai recognize these challenges and are now working together with the Beijing-based startup MIITTECH and psychologists from Institute of Developmental Psychology at Beijing Normal University. The goal is to help teachers and parents discover developmental health problems early on so that the special needs of primary and middle school students can be better met.

Dr. Xiaoyi Fang, a Family Therapist and Director of the Institute of Developmental Psychology at Beijing Normal University said,

“We currently see three main kinds of mental health problems: learning problems, emotional problems, and social relationship problems.”

Dr. Fang added that the youth in China face new kinds of challenges in the form of bullying and Internet addiction. Dr. Fang is known to have devoted his career to mental health education in schools throughout China.

SAP Innovates

The role of MIITTECH in this pilot project financed by China’s Ministry of Education, with guidance from Dr. Fang, is to develop a solution that evaluates physiological data from schoolchildren. The cloud-based solution based on SAP Technology will be gathering data from three sources: online surveys, cognitive computer games, and wearable devices. Heart rate, skin conductance, and brainwaves will be measured by the devices.

The MIITTECH Mental Health Platform is deployed on SAP Cloud Platform, an open platform that stores data in the in-memory SAP HANA database.

Tao Feng, vice president of Technology at MIITTECH, believes that SAP is the best-fit software provider that would help them build and roll out the type of solution they specifically need. He said,

“We chose SAP HANA because it supports us in storing and analyzing large amounts of data.”

MIITTECH’s goal is to reach 5 million students in 20 of China’s provinces by the end of 2019 alongside with its plan of applying machine learning to improve survey data evaluation for teachers to address students’ needs more precisely.

“With more research, I’m convinced the technology can identify developmental problems more accurately than paper-based surveys can today,” Dr. Fang stressed.

He trusts that the solution will achieve its goal in helping teachers recognize and address developmental problems the youth are facing today.

This co-innovation project reinforces SAP’s commitment to the United Nations (UN) Global Goal #3 “Good Health and Well-Being.”

The post SAP Acts on the Challenges of the Youth in China appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.