ASUG members won top prizes at this year’s 10th anniversary SAP Innovation Awards, announced April 12.
Held annually to honor and celebrate the achievements of forward-thinking companies and individuals that harnessed the power of SAP products and technologies “to create positive economic, environment, and social impact so that the world runs better,” the SAP Innovation Awards celebrated its 10th edition by naming winners in ten categories:
- 10th Anniversary Superstar
- Sustainability Hero
- Industry Leader
- Partner Paragon
- Transformation Titan
- Cutting-Edge Genius
- Business Innovator
- Experience Wizard
- Adoption Champion
- Services Supernova
Union Pacific was named an Adoption Champion, while Walgreens Boots Alliance was honored with the Business Innovator Award. MOD Pizza, meanwhile, claimed the title of Experience Wizard. Ernest & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) were both separately awarded the Partner Paragon prize, while Blue Diamond Growers was named a Transformation Titan. These ASUG members’ submissions are detailed below.
In honor of all participants, SAP donated $20,000 to the U.N. World Food Programme and Save the Children charities. Winners’ prizes include a trophy, a celebration event, and either an SAP Sapphire Orlando 2023 pass or a US$1,000 SAP4Good voucher for a charitable donation.
SAP published over 220 submissions, all visible on the SAP Innovation Awards website. 70 entries were selected as finalists; 16 of those were submitted by ASUG members. Accenture, Bristol Myers Squibb, Constellation Brands, Deloitte, Microsoft, Penn State University, Sealed Air, and The Home Depot were also among the ASUG members selected as SAP Innovation Awards finalists.
Inside ASUG Members’ Award-Winning Submissions
Union Pacific, named an Adoption Champion, faced the challenge of modernizing its existing custom-developed IT landscape to streamline its business processes, align with industry best practices, eliminate redundant solutions, and optimize analytics, visibility, and insights. The leading transportation company deployed SAP S/4HANA Cloud utilizing the RISE with SAP approach, achieving a major upgrade in less than 9 months.
Walgreens Boots Alliance was awarded the Business Innovator prize. Using a legacy system outside of SAP, Walgreens had experienced an 11 percent invoice error rate in billings. Upon leveraging SAP solutions, Walgreens established a better process for creating invoices for scan-based trading vendors. As a result of this deployment, Walgreens vendors have gained visibility into what’s selling in each store and can perform daily operational analysis and accurate forecasting, while eliminating in-store scouting of inventory and inefficient use of shelf space.
MOD Pizza was named an Experience Wizard. In need of scalable HR and ERP technology to replace its previous payroll and accounting systems, the restaurant chain decided to implement SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, for a cloud-based, people-centric approach, also leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Master Data Integration, and Qualtrics Experience Management solutions from SAP across its enterprise. MOD’s implementation of BTP played a critical role in ensuring simplified integration and continued scalability.
Ernest & Young (EY), a Partner Paragon winner, was recognized for its EY Emergency Response Application (ERA), built to contribute to humanitarian aid for Ukraine. A mobile-first pro-bono application, ERA was designed to help those seeking refuge in Poland to obtain critical information, such as a list of organizations that could provide aid, which is automatically translated into Ukrainian. EY ERA is SAP-certified to enable market visibility and reachability.
PwC Germany, responding to business challenges posed by the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (SCDDA) that went into effect earlier this year, developed an SCDDA-specific, enterprise-ready software, “PwC Check Your Value Chain,” to automatically identify abstract and concrete risks in complex supply chains. For these efforts, PwC was also named a Partner Paragon winner.
Blue Diamond Growers, the world’s largest almond processing and marketing cooperative, was awarded the title of Transformation Titan for launching a world-class supply chain solution with SAP. Challenged to modernize its disjointed and manual supply chain and logistics functions after supply chain disruptions precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Blue Diamond Growers chose to deploy SAP Transportation Management and SAP Business Network for Logistics, migrate its ERP to SAP S/4HANA, and leverage its existing SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) and SAP Analytics Cloud implementations. After launching its solution in 2021, Blue Diamond Growers achieved a consolidated management view across its business, reduced supply on hand by 20%, saved $1 million in logistics costs, and increased order fill rates to 99 percent.