For the first time in the award’s history, ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ CEO Christian Klein last week announced three winners of the Hasso Plattner Foundersβ Award, the companyβs most prestigious employee recognition.
The three teams were selected for outstanding and innovative projects in the new categories Customer Success, Operational Excellence, and Products and Technology.
In 2020, more than 200 nominations involved over 1,400 employees from 37 countries. Eight teams consisting of 51 employees from all over the world made it to the final round, and the winning teams have chosen charity organizations to which ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ will donate β¬10,000: and .
Intelligent Case Routing: Making the Machine Understand the Issue
The Customer Success category winner set out with the challenge to simplify the support triage and routing process within ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ Concur software. As tickets get older and remain unanswered, customer satisfaction score drastically drops.
βWith over 200,000 support tickets created per year in ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ Concur alone, we understood that any improvement on the overall process would be multiplied and have a significant impact on our key customer support and experience metrics,” Frantisek Zdvoran explained. βWe found that combining a deep understanding of the customer support world, processes, and challenges with the right teams behind ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄βs machine learning services would provide real, business value-driven results.β
Working on Intelligent Case Routing as a side project over the course of three years, Zdvoran and his team of Justin Lew, Alena Bartunkova, Lukas Tancer, and Radovan Murin built and implemented a machine learning solution that cuts down the manual effort using text recognition to examine past tickets.
Intelligent Case Routing assigns the cases to specialists faster and more accurately. The goal was to eliminate the labor-intensive, repetitive, and slow ticketing process. βWe didnβt want to add complexity, but to remove it,β Zdvoran said. βSupport cases run through our application have a six percent higher customer experience score, 16% faster time to close, 11% higher first contact resolution metric, and have a 8.4% lower change of hands number.β
On winning the award, Lew said: βWe are beyond grateful and honored to have been selected as a winner and cannot give enough thanks to everyone that has helped and been supportive of us. We are so proud of how our diverse team has been able to marshal ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄’s intelligent enterprise and combine that with our customer-first approach to deliver an application that helps enhance our customer and employee experience.”
Monitor of Monitors: Holistic Picture of Cloud Health
The winning team in the Operational Excellence category successfully tackled the challenge of creating a single source of information on the condition of ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄βs cloud. The Monitor of Monitors brings all monitoring tools into a cohesive and consistent view that shows the complete picture of ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄βs cloud health.
Information that was previously siloed in disconnected monitoring tools, is now accessible and transparent in single service window. Monitor of Monitors not only enables ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ teams to detect, determine, and resolve problems and risks in the cloud much faster, it also allows operations and support teams across ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ to work faster and more collaboratively toward a common goal.
βRecognize faster, react faster, respond faster, fix faster,β Anthony Sanchez said, summing up what Monitor of Monitors enables ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ support teams to do to improve the lives of their customers. βMonitor of Monitors isnβt a niche; it has value for everyone in ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄. It integrates well with any technology or tool a team is using to manage the cloud health and alert management. It simply opens an exchange of information that is centralized and transparent.β
After the announcement that Monitor of Monitors had won the award, he added: βToday is one of the proudest days of my professional career. There are no words to capture the enormity of the pride I feel toward the team and the support we received from every corner. This was a true one ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ effort. We are all excited and motivated for the future of ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄, and the contributions we can continue to make.β
Team members also include Vittalraya Shenoy Adige, Gabor Kaszonyi, JΓ³zsef KertΓ©sz, Birk Bohne, Marcus Mrozowski, Gregory Melasecca-Jr, Yu Chen, Alexander Julian Danek, and Daniel Koller.
ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ HANA Data Anonymization: Inventing a New Market
The winner in the category Products and Technology took on a particularly complex topic that is the subject of frequent legal and governmental changes. With ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ HANA Data Anonymization, the team developed a cross-industry solution for the anonymization of personal data that can be applied to a variety of use cases.
βData privacy constraints have been road blockers to a number of use cases,β Stephan Kessler shared. “ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ HANA data anonymization strives to make privacy guarantees available throughout an entire organization, while integrating seamlessly into business applications.”
To achieve this, ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ HANA data anonymization is implemented at the database level, following the ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ HANA code “push-down” paradigm, leading to a tight integration of data and privacy mechanisms.
βAs data privacy becomes a priority on business agendas, we are the first to offer this sort of anonymization features in the database core system,” Kessler explained. βThe solution thus permits ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ to satisfy an urgent need of customers and society.”
On winning the award, the team said: βWe are humbled and very honored to have received the Hasso Plattner Foundersβ Award. ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ HANA data anonymization solves the challenge of combining privacy and innovation for internal and external stakeholders. We now have momentum to accelerate development and customer adoption to further improve our product, while helping customers, research, and society to demonstrate digital responsibility.β
Team members include Kristin Ulrich, Matthias Menz, Brian Raver, Kai Morich, Kaweh Amoi-Taleghani, and Kessler.
