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Mitigate Risk During Employment Separation with Onwards HR

Talent acquisition remains a focal point for most organizations in this dynamic and highly competitive corporate environment. Unfortunately, the pivotal process of offboarding often takes a back seat. An efficient employment separation process plays a key role in enhancing the employee experience, protecting the company’s reputation and mitigating potential legal and financial risks associated with employee separation. One solution that effectively addresses these complexities is Onwards HR, a platform that automates key portions of the separation process to ensure accuracy, compliance and a positive overall brand experience for those leaving the organization and those charged with executing what is often an emotional and stressful process.

Even under the best circumstances, employment separation is traditionally a labor-intensive and challenging process. It involves multiple stakeholders, including human resources representatives, line managers, legal counsel and executives, who must ensure a smooth and compliant transition while managing their primary job responsibilities. This dual responsibility often leads to overstretched staff and an increased risk of errors, creating a potential minefield of financial and legal implications for the organization. Examples include lawsuits resulting from unlawful terminations, potential violations of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (or WARN) Act during mass layoffs, adverse impact on protected groups and the financial pitfalls due to clerical errors or improperly executed severance agreements. The stakes are higher than often appreciated, considering legal fees and the potential damage to the organization’s reputation. Plus, the emotionally charged nature of the circumstances surrounding these events further compounds stress, making it essential to manage with precision and sensitivity.

In light of these challenges, organizations are turning to technology to ensure a structured, automated separation process that safeguards accuracy and compliance. This is a natural extension of the ongoing movement to automation in HR technology, which is critical to achieving the best business outcomes. We assert that by 2025, three-quarters of organizations will identify use cases that specify human capital management system requirements for optimum agility. This critical business process is a perfect example of how technology brings structure and automation to a business-critical but sometimes highly risky process.

Enter Onwards HR: an innovative system that streamlines employee separation actions, minimizes financial and legal risks and saves time and costs typically incurred by a long and redundant process with the engagement of external legal counsel. Onwards HR is a comprehensive digital platform that seamlessly manages the most critical elements of the separation process. The technology ensures strict adherence to laws and regulations, minimizing the potential for costly litigation. For instance, Onwards HR has built-in compliance checks for WARN Act implications, flagging potential violations during large-scale layoffs. This preemptive risk mitigation is an invaluable asset for organizations navigating the complex legal landscape of offboarding.

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SAP.iO Foundry Berlin Kicks Off Startup Program to Support Digital Transformation in the Public Sector

June 20, 2023SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced it has launched its next startup program focused on Public Services and Government Technology (GovTech) at SAP.iO Foundry Berlin. After months of scouting globally, five startups were chosen to join the program with the aim of addressing the needs of the public sector.

The public sector is facing many challenges in today’s environment. Outdated technology often makes it difficult to provide efficient and comprehensive services to citizens. Agility is key to responding quickly to the latest challenges and mitigate their impact. Thus, innovation is crucial as it enables public sector entities to personalize and automate processes and make predictions by leveraging data. The SAP.iO Foundry Berlin Public Services & GovTech program is focused on accelerating the digital transformation journey of SAP customers, including public sector entities. The selected startups have keen insight and expertise in citizen communication, social and environmental risk prediction, data democratization, government engagement, payments and more.

Over the next 6 months, the startups will have access to curated mentorship from SAP executives, exposure to SAP® technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers around the world.

The following startups are participating in the SAP.iO Foundry Public Services & GovTech program:

  1. Urban Footprint is a resilient decision intelligence platform enabling a more efficient, equitable, and resilient future through powerful geospatial data insights.
  2. Citibeats ethical artificial intelligence platform harnesses collective intelligence and incorporates insights from citizens into decision-making processes, helping institutions to make better, faster, and more efficient decisions.
  3. Opendatasoft is a global leader in the democratization of data and allows users to create their own data experiences with Opendatasoft’s all-in-one platform.
  4. Convaise provides an intuitive and effective way of interacting with governments by leveraging their no-code software platform to help governments build intelligent chat assistants on their own.
  5. PayIt delivers a digital platform that allows government agencies to streamline operations and offer residents a single profile to interact with state, local, and provincial governments.

SAP customers who want to support this cohort can expect to dive right into curated innovation and design thinking workshops, close collaboration on use case definitions, proof of concepts, and ready-to-implement integrations on SAP solutions at the end of the program.

If you want to learn more about how you can get involved and benefit from this cohort, check out the SAP.iO Foundry Berlin website. If you want to dive deeper, contact the team.

About SAP.iO
SAP.iO curates a relevant and diverse startup ecosystem that extends the value of SAP solutions and meets the continuously evolving needs of our customers. Our programs provide dedicated support to the most promising startups as they launch and scale relationships with SAP and our global network of customers, partners, and employees. Since 2017, we have connected thousands of SAP customers with innovative enterprise software startups, helping them find solutions to their unique needs. For more information, visit http://sap.io/ 

AI-Fueled Satellites Are First-Movers In Launch Of The Space Economy

Just as satellites revolutionized the space age in the 20th century, artificial intelligence (AI) has ignited the newest era in space commercialization with advanced analytics that can make the world’s infrastructure grid safer and more reliable. This latest innovation comes from LiveEO, a startup that delivers AI-powered analytics from satellite imagery of linear grids. The cloud-based service is already helping electric, railway, and pipeline companies detect and act on earthbound risks fast and safely.

“Intelligent satellite-based data is an efficient and eco-friendly way to monitor the ground environment around infrastructure,” said Martina Baccolo, global partner and alliances director at LiveEO. “Using AI to analyze satellite data from the earth’s surface, our solutions help companies identify and locate potential hazards to energy and transportation lines in record time with greater efficiencies.”

Headquartered in Berlin with offices in the US, UK and Latvia, LiveEO primarily serves organizations that operate electric power lines, oil and gas pipelines, and railways. Baccolo said that customers can typically reduce electrical outages by 14% within three years, and decrease operational expenses by 30%. She shared the company’s strategy with me at the International SAP Conference for Utilities in Basel.

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Astræa Launches New Satellite Tasking Capabilities With Major Satellite Imagery Providers

Astraea, a platform for spatiotemporal data and analytics, announces a new ordering service offering access to advanced satellite imagery sources from providers like Planet Labs PBC, among others. With the launch of the ordering service, Astræa customers get scalable access to the most advanced commercial satellite imagery on the market.

“The advanced monitoring capabilities that are enabled by Planet’s tasking combined with Astræa’s spatiotemporal platform enable highly detailed monitoring applications related to elevating market intelligence in the renewable energy, commodity trading, and ESG sectors in particular”

By providing access to all of the world’s best imagery providers within a single solution and a flexible, pay-per-use pricing model, Astræa is making imagery-derived insights more accessible and an enterprise-grade space strategy more obtainable. The unique pairing of Astræa’s platform with the new ordering service helps position Astræa as an industry leader in strategic imagery collection and spatiotemporal analysis. Enterprises can now maximize the value of Earth observation (EO) by leveraging scientific imagery for broad analysis and zeroing in on risk and opportunity indicators with commercial imagery. Flexible delivery operations support integration into existing business systems and platforms.

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SAP Startup Spotlight: Footprint Technologies

SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all. E-3 Magazine has selected the most interesting companies to showcase in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series. In this article, we will take a look at Footprint Technologies, which has an app listed in the SAP store.

Matthias Brendel’s is the CEO and co-founder of Footprint Technologies. He founded his first company at the age of 17 and has been working as a “sidepreneur” ever since. After finishing his degree in environmental engineering, Brendel became interested in reducing carbon emissions in combustion engines and joined Audi in 2007. He later had the opportunity to create and lead an innovation unit for new business development in Berlin’s startup ecosystem from scratch: Audi Denkwerkstatt. In November 2020, he joined his early-stage start-up, Footprint Technologies. Since then, he has contributed to the transformation of online shoe shopping into a more individual and sustainable experience. In this interview, he mentions what Footprint Technologies has to offer, how his solution works, and what’s next for the startup.

What is Footprint Technologies and what do you offer?

Footprint Technologies transforms online shoe shopping into a sustainable and individual experience: our software enables online shoppers to precisely measure their feet via smartphone and receive our perfect size and fit recommendation for the selected shoe model. The whole process is seamlessly integrated into their shopping experience: it starts directly in their favorite shop and ends up with the perfectly fitting shoe in the shopping cart. Thus we are avoiding shoe returns for a more profitable and sustainable e-commerce. Our team is based in Berlin, Germany but serves clients from all over Europe, Japan, and the USA.

How does your solution work?

Our software enables people to measure their feet easily with their smartphone and a standard sheet of paper (DIN A4 or US Letter). Using the latest cloud-based computer vision technology, we can determine the length and width of the foot to the millimeter. But measuring the exact foot size is only half the solution. In order to give the best possible size recommendation for the chosen model, we use our unique shoe database. In cooperation with the shoe manufacturers, we have identified and stored the relevant size and fit information for each shoe model here. Knowing feet and shoe dimensions and integrating the latest scientific research from University of Gothenburg Sweden, we recommend a comfortable fit that makes the user happy and prevents returns.

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German Robotics Pioneer Wandelbots Expands No-Code Solution to U.S.

Wandelbots, the German-based no-code robotics software firm, recently opened a U.S. headquarters in Chicago to expand its global operations and accelerate human-centered robotics solutions in the manufacturing industry. Its signature software, Wandelbots Teaching, works the same with any robot, allowing users to control various models with no prior programming knowledge.

As the industrial robotics market continues to grow, developers and end users need an easy-to-use platform for robotic automation. The Wandelbots’ no-code solution is built to provide users of all competencies the ability to program a robot for maximum efficiency and automation.

“Our product is tailor-made for the U.S. market, which is ideal as a prerequisite for successful expansion,” said Christian Piechnick, Wandelbots founder and CEO. “The labor shortage in the United States is severe right now and is getting worse. Wandelbots can help to face this challenge and support U.S. companies on their way towards automation and digitization of manufacturing processes.”

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Top Innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Powered Startups Based in Canada (2022)

Artificial intelligence is transforming the innovation landscape around the world. There are numerous instances of startups leveraging AI to address issues of all sizes. In this article, they look at MindBridge Analytics, an SAP.iO startup from the Foundry Berlin program.

MindBridge enables financial professionals to access improved working methods by discovering, surfacing, and assessing risk across large financial datasets. The application integrates audit and finance experience with data science and AI innovation to support professional judgment and meet financial openness needs. MindBridge’s patented platform helps users trust their figures and lessen ambiguity by offering crucial insights into the company’s financials.

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SAP.iO selects seven startups to join its Future of Work program in Berlin

September 26, 2022SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) is about to launch its next startup program focused on the future of work at SAP.iO Foundry Berlin. After months of scouting and evaluating more than 90 startups from 22 countries with 25 experts from within and outside of SAP, seven startups made it into the program.

“As organizations navigate the post-pandemic world, the future of work continues to be a top priority,” said Meg Bear, President & Chief Product Officer at SAP SuccessFactors. “To make sure we continue to help customers put people at the center of every aspect of work, we constantly expand our ecosystem with new and exciting startup partners.”

During the program, the startups will receive mentorship from SAP executives and leading industry experts from Capgemini as well as access to SAP® technology, application programming interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers.

“Business today are looking for innovative solutions that help shape their future of work strategies. This includes solving complex business challenges around cloud, digital and platforms,” said Martin Schmidt, Head of People & Technology Consulting at Capgemini in Germany. “Understanding the skills that are needed to drive this transformation is crucial for them to stay ahead of the curve. We’re excited to work with the selected startups to foster innovation and deliver sustainable value to our joint clients.”

The selected startups represent and deliver innovation in four different categories: Talent Management, Core HR & Payroll, Human Experience Management and Workforce Planning & Analytics. The following are joining the program:

  1. Cobrainer addresses the war for talent from within by automatically profiling employees’ skills and ambitions and providing personalized internal growth recommendations in seconds.
  2. Fifty bridges the intention-action gap in trainings and business transformations. Fifty’s eDoing platform enables rapid and measurable adoption of new behaviors. It combines nudge and artificial intelligence for use at scale.
  3. gradar is the job grading system for the modern workplace. It’s the complete solution to design and manage a job architecture helping businesses perform consistent job evaluation that establishes fair and transparent pay structures.
  4. Onwards HR is a risk mitigation platform that streamlines employee separations and provides advanced analytics to help organizations support their DEI and talent strategies.
  5. Rolebot is the world’s first AI-powered ‘job board in reverse’ for top-tier passive talent, surfacing the other 75% of the skilled workforce who never apply. Its customers provenly land diverse, fresh talent in half the time and exceed their DEI goals.
  6. shyftplan is an AI-based solution for shift scheduling and focused on manufacturing customers. One of the key capabilities in shyftplan is the automation of the scheduling process. The solution is scalable to thousands of employees, even for complex cases.
  7. Workmotion enables companies to grow and expand their teams without regard to national borders. It digitizes and simplifies time-consuming onboarding processes, helping companies create employment contracts instantly and onboard talent from all over the world quickly, easily and with compliance.

With this announcement, SAP.iO Foundry Berlin goes into the next phase and is calling innovative businesses who run on SAP SuccessFactors and want to be the frontrunners in adopting and bringing new value to their workforce, leaders and HR teams.

SAP customers who want to support this cohort can expect to dive right into curated innovation and design thinking workshops, close collaboration on use case definitions, proof of concepts, and ready-to-implement integrations on SAP solutions at the end of the program.

If you want to learn more about how you can get involved and benefit from this cohort, check out the SAP.iO Foundry Berlin website.

If you want to dive deeper, get in touch with the team.

About SAP.iO
SAP.iO delivers new partnerships and products for SAP by accelerating and scaling startup innovation as well as incubating employee ventures. SAP.iO brings together innovators from every region, industry, and line of business to transform how businesses run. Since 2017, SAP.iO has helped 450+ external startups and internal ventures accelerate their growth while enabling thousands of SAP customers to access innovation. For more information, visit http://sap.io/.

 

 

Inspiring Innovators: Chicko Sousa Founder of GreenPlat, On No Time for Waste

At SAP.iO, we work with innovative people and new technologies that positively impact our world every day, and we think it’s time to share their stories with you! In our series, “Inspiring Innovators,” we get to hear how leaders of cutting-edge startup technologies overcame, thrived, and pursued their goals. SAP.iO’s Alexa Gorman sat down to discuss the road to success and lessons learned with some of our most inspiring startup founders.

Meet Chicko Sousa

It has been said that Chico Sousa is a Mechanical Engineer by choice, but a specialist in the acceleration of clean production by nature aptly sums up his journey to entrepreneurship. Starting as a mechanical engineer working for Volvo, Chicko was assigned to projects that produced scrap materials needing to be recycled or reimagined. He left Volvo after successfully managing those projects to start a company that built recycling plants in Brazil, creating 13 new plants over 11 years before selling his company in 2013. He then came to Sao Paulo to help the municipality with public projects, generating environmental improvements in the fight against CO2 emissions and plastic use.

From there, Chicko created a YouTube series where he did interviews inside garbage trucks, much like Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”, to raise recycling awareness. The wild success of this web series helped increase the municipality’s recycling rates significantly but created new issues. They started to see problems with permits as they began selling the recycled materials. At this time, Chicko realized a need to control and manage information to produce the proper flow of materials for licensed recycling and founded the company GreenPlat in 2016.

Working with recycling technologies for over 20 years and with software for almost ten years, Chicko created GreenPlat, a clean production SaaS, which today has more than 690,000 companies registered on the platform. Since 2018, GreenPlat has been a part of the World Economic Forum in the Pioneering Technology category, as they were the first company to use blockchain technology for waste traceability. So far, 1 million tons of waste have been managed through their software; all disposed of correctly without polluting the environment. This means a cleaner and healthier environment for all and for businesses, increased visibility into recycling, compliance, and traceability.

“I think this is a worldwide situation where people are done talking and ready to act. We can see this movement, and it is encouraging. We are ready for action; there is no time for waste.”

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Chekkit’s Traceability and Consumer Intelligence SaaS now available on the SAP store

Chekkit Technologies today announced that its Traceability and Consumer Intelligence SaaS is now available on SAP ® Store, which recently merged with SAP App Center as the single digital marketplace for SAP and partner offerings.

By integrating with SAP Advanced Track & Trace for Pharmaceuticals, Chekkit’s Traceability and Consumer Intelligence SaaS helps Pharmaceutical Producers, Marketing Authorisation Holders (MAH), and Pharmaceutical Contract Manufacturers (CMO) comply with traceability & anti-counterfeit regulations in Nigeria and across Africa, giving them access to real-time market data, patient insights, and supply chain visibility (diversion tracking). This service allows for a real-time remote understanding of product supply chain journeys as well as data-driven decision-making using insights on product efficacy, side effects, and preferences in order to serve consumers better.

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Manufacturing companies plan their material purchases for production with this AI

Read why SAP Customers like Merck work with GenLots

Dear reader,

If you are looking for …

  1. Latest AI innovation for more sustainable supply chain management
  2. A way to rapidly decrease costs in upstream logistics
  3. An increased digitalization of your operations
  4. A better understanding of your supply chain triangle (costs, cash, and service)
  5. A product already integrated with your SAP system

…for your manufacturing company, then read on:

Why AI in upstream logistics and why now?

SAP customers generate 87% of total global commerce ($46 trillion) and 99 of the 100 largest companies in the world are SAP customers (SAP Corporate Factsheet, July 2022). SAP’s utmost priority is to connect these enterprises in a global sustainable business network.

As we partner with innovative startups like GenLots, we still put our customers first and we leverage the vast number of businesses worldwide that run on SAP to act smarter, more efficiently and more sustainably.

At the recent Viva Technology 2022 in Paris — Europe’s biggest tech event where business meets innovation, my team at SAP.iO (SAP’s startup program) was thrilled to host our partner startup GenLots and discuss on stage how they’ve helped SAP’s customer Merck, a large pharmaceutical company, adapt their upstream logistics (i.e. all operations related to the sourcing of goods destined to be assembled in production) to the challenges of today.

What is GenLots?

GenLots is an AI application helping leading manufacturing companies to achieve their sustainability and efficiency goals through the digitalization of supply and upstream logistics.

In practice, usage of GenLots looks like this:

Let’s say a manufacturing company uses Active Ingredient X in its production and knows the production requirements for this material for the 12 months to come, i.e. the dates on which it will be used and in which quantity. GenLots will automatically compute the Total Cost of sourcing of this material for the next 12 months, including the cost of the material itself (which can be influenced by quantity discounts), the cost of bringing a batch to the manufacturing site each time an order is placed (quality control or transport fees for example), and the cost of holding it until it is used in production (inventory cost).

According to these costs, GenLots’ AI will then optimize the timing and quantity of each order. It may group certain orders to reach a better price, reschedule some deliveries, etc. The savings associated to these changes can reach up to 10% of the Total Cost.

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Digital Thread of Life Sciences: Building Bridges with Software Solutions – Podcast

Tom’s special Guest this week is Chris Chambers, Solution Architect at Pangaea Solutions Inc, and Partner of Endeavor Consulting Group, LLC,. Chris discusses enterprise solution implementations for life science companies. Tune in!

During the discussion Tom finds out more about how digitization is impacting the Life Sciences industry. Pharmaceutical companies have been primarily paper-based and digitization can potentially speed up drug creation. By connecting all the various systems like digital threads, the entire process will be more conducive to streamlining clinical phases.

Listen Here…

Half a Million Shoppers Have Now Shopped At a Zippin-Powered Store

With 50 Stores Launched Worldwide, Zippin Hits Key Milestones in Adoption of Checkout-free Technology

Zippin, the leading provider of checkout-free technology, announced that it has reached a key milestone having served over half a million shoppers in one of its 50 Zippin-powered stores. Zippin calculates that it has saved consumers over 83,000 hours to-date, conservatively estimating that frictionless retail reduces the average shopping trip by 10 minutes.

As our desire for more and more frictionless experiences continues to grow, Zippin plans to scale rollout of its technology with key partners around the globe, improving the overall retail experience, and establishing its position as the top checkout-free platform provider.

“Retailers are under immense pressure to deliver fast, frictionless experiences for consumers, and this is especially true in high-traffic venues where time is limited,” said Krishna Motukuri, CEO and co-founder of Zippin. “We recognize that speed can’t come at the expense of accuracy. With each new store launch, Zippin’s AI improves its ability to provide the best experience for both retailers and shoppers, who are fast coming to expect this level of convenience. That’s why it’s so important that we continue to scale, quickly.”

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Vyasa Layar Now Available on SAP Store

 Vyasa Analytics LLC, an innovative provider of highly scalable deep learning AI analytics software for healthcare, life sciences, and business applications, announced today the availability of its Vyasa Layar offering on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. Through Vyasa Layar data fabric, users can connect to Sybase® and to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) with SAP HANA® to create a unified data experience regardless of data format or storage location.

Vyasa’s offering accelerates the discovery of actionable intelligence by improving the accessibility and visualization of organizational data. Its deep learning data fabric, Vyasa Layar, unifies data across disparate silos, regardless of where data are stored or structured, and without requiring a data lake. When connected to SAP environments such as SAP HANA, Vyasa Layar is able to create a harmonized data experience for customers to extract critical insights from both structured and unstructured content within a single platform. Recently, Vyasa collaborated with SAP to provide a public sector client with a data fabric solution that unifies silos of unstructured content with structured customer data in SAP HANA to enable a paradigm shift in their analytics capabilities that will help improve financial forecasting and customer interactions.

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