The IT Nerd

SAP Canada has announced the appointment of Brian Moore as SAP Canada’s Chief Operating Officer. As COO, Brian will design and implement business strategies, set performance and growth targets, drive operational excellence that supports customer success, and promote SAP’s award-winning company culture.

Based in Calgary, Brian has served as North America’s COO for SAP’s Intelligent Spend Management Team, leading the transformation of the business in partnership with regional leaders across the continent. He has earned a reputation as being customer-focused, outcome-oriented, and as an advocate for promoting diversity and early talent across his teams.

Prior to his North American role, Brian led the Intelligent Spend Management business turnaround in Canada, with his team winning accolades internally for its success in 2018 and 2019, which he credits to the culture of the team. Recently celebrating a decade with SAP, Brian also previously served as Canada’s western leader. Prior to SAP, he led successful teams with SAS and Sun Microsystems.

Brian will take over from former Canadian COO Sam Masri, who has taken on a new role as the Global Head of the Industry and Value Advisory organization. Sam has joined a global league of industry-leading professionals who partner with SAP customers around the world to create business and societal value by leveraging SAP innovations.

SAP Canada has become one of Canada’s most revered employers. In 2021, the company was honored with a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award, recognizing SAP Canada as one of the best places to work in Canada.

SAP Canada Inc. has been honored with a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award, recognizing the Best Places to Work in 2021 in Canada. The Employees’ Choice Award, now in its 13th year, is based solely on the input of employees, who elect to provide anonymous feedback by completing a company review about their job, work environment and employer on Glassdoor, the worldwide leader on insights about jobs and companies.

On Glassdoor, current and former employees voluntarily and anonymously share insights and opinions about their work environments by sharing a company review, designed to capture a genuine and authentic inside look at what a specific job may be like at a particular company. When sharing a company review on Glassdoor, employees are asked to rate their satisfaction with the company overall, and key workplace factors like career opportunities, compensation and benefits, culture and values, senior management and work/life balance. In addition, employees are asked to describe the best reasons to work at their companies as well as any downsides.

Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work were determined using company reviews shared by U.S.-based employees between October 22, 2019 and October 19, 2020. To be considered for the Canada category, a company must have had at least 1,000 employees and have received at least 25 ratings across each of the eight workplace attributes from Canada-based employees during the period of eligibility. The final list is compiled using Glassdoor’s proprietary algorithm, led by its Economic Research Team, and takes into account quantity, quality and consistency of reviews. Complete awards methodology can be found here: https://www.glassdoor.com/Award/index.htm

For the complete list of the Glassdoor Best Places to Work winners in 2021, pleasevisit: https://www.glassdoor.ca/Award/Best-Places-to-Work-Canada-LST_KQ0,26.htm

SAP today announced the launch of the SAP® Intelligent Trade Claims Management solution, which enables consumer products companies to increase their financial efficiency. SAP Intelligent Trade Claims Management is a cloud native solution in SAP’s industry cloud that applies intelligent technologies to automate and improve the trade claims process between consumer products companies and retailers.

By utilizing SAP Intelligent Trade Claims Management, companies are able to auto-match deductions instead of the previous time-consuming, inaccurate and costly manual matching process. The virtual assistant uses a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate claims processing, to recommend actions to accounts receivable analysts for faster exception handling, and to provide visibility from the retailers to the consumer products company. The solution enables brands such as MapleLeaf Foods Inc. to save money, improve compliance and reduce financial risk.

The consumer products industry is expected to grow to $14 trillion by 2025, and brands spend at least 20 per cent of their gross revenue on trade promotions with retailers. Furthermore, trade promotions are the second line item on a consumer products company’s profit and loss statement, and they have a direct impact on key performance indicators. 

With an estimated 20 per cent of gross revenue tied up on the balance sheet, many companies write off thousands of small claims, aged deductions and invalid deductions. SAP Intelligent Trade Claims Management helps companies reduce their financial loss and reinvest the savings into growing their businesses. As this Harvard Business Review study notes, companies that survive economic downturns “master the delicate balance between cutting costs to survive today and investing to grow tomorrow do well after a recession.”

Changes to the workplace are accelerating in Canada, forcing leaders to adapt to unexpected disruptions, anticipate future challenges, and plan for strategic changes, according to a survey released today by Oxford Economics, the Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) and SAP SuccessFactors, a division of SAP SE.

Some 50 per cent of Canadian respondents said they expect flexible work policies to be a talent differentiator, according to the report “The Future of Work Arrives Early: How HR Leaders are Leveraging the Lessons of Disruptions.” However, 57 per cent expect maintaining productivity given new ways of working to be an ongoing challenge. More than 37 per cent of respondents said that establishing a culture that supports remote employees will also be a challenge when the pandemic subsides, and most acknowledge that their workers have had very different experiences depending on if they are salaried, hourly, office or field workers. Nearly 30 per cent of respondents plan to invest in listening tools or employee surveys, which could help organizations keep a pulse on employee sentiment as changes to the workplace continue.

The report found that 74 per cent of respondents in Canada said their company has the technology it needs to navigate the changing work environment, and 37 per cent expect to invest in remote collaboration tools. Still, only 22 per cent of respondents said that their workers can work remotely and have the necessary technology and environment to do so effectively. Some 38 per cent of respondents expect to reduce their office footprint.

When it comes to attracting talent, 17 per cent of respondents in Canada believe competing for talent will be a major challenge. Top factors to attract and retain talent include flexible work policies (62 per cent), finding new ways of delivering/selling/marketing existing products and services (61 per cent), and the financial stability of the organization (59 per cent).

Looking forward, only 27 per cent of respondents in Canada are planning to invest in learning programs for reskilling and upskilling over the next 12 months. This compares to 22 per cent of U.S. respondents and 38 per cent of respondents outside of the U.S., despite employee readiness to learn new skills.

“The Future of Work Arrives Early: How HR Leaders are Leveraging the Lessons of Disruption” reportsurveyed HR leaders in 10 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. The data in this press release represents more than 300 HR leaders in Canada. Download the Canadian report and the global report.

A new SAP study conducted in partnership with IDC Canada discovered that companies that were well into their digital transformation, performed better through the COVID-19 pandemic, while companies without a robust digital strategy are being left behind.

The study found that while 95 per cent of enterprises surveyed had established a formal digital strategy, up from 85 per cent in 2019, most companies were at wildly different stages on their journey to becoming a digitally transformed “intelligent enterprise.”

Of the 17 per cent of Canadian enterprises identified as Intelligent Enterprise (IE) Leaders, 82 per cent have a digital strategy that is fully integrated into the core of the business or is complete and already producing significant results. At the other end of the spectrum, 98 per cent of Canadian enterprises categorized as IE Observers (14%) are only just beginning to build their digital strategies or executing on them. This divide in digital readiness has revealed a clear connection between COVID-19 resiliency and IE progress. 

The study examined the impact of COVID-19 on organizations’ revenue, workforce, operational capacity, and facilities. While these core business functions have been impacted in two thirds of Canadian enterprises, IE Leaders have been more resilient, with 14 per cent of IE Leaders indicating they expect a revenue increase during the pandemic.

The new study also found key attributes that have helped IE Leaders remain resilient through the pandemic:

• 49 per cent of IE Leaders are very willing to adjust their workforce mix to support digital initiatives, compared with only 7 per cent of IE Observers.
• 91 per cent of IE Leaders believe it is very important to improve employee experience while improving customer experience, compared to 42 per cent of IE Observers.
• 47 per cent of IE Leaders have a change management strategy that is fully integrated into the digital strategy, as compared with IE Observers, who either are still developing a change management strategy or do not have one at all.  

Created by IDC Canada, The Intelligent Enterprise: Building an Agile and Resilient Business, can be read here.

AppDynamics, a part of Cisco and the world’s #1 APM solution, today announced SAP Peak. This is the latest innovation in application and business performance monitoring, which allows IT technologists to manage complex ERP and business intelligence environments in real-time.

The ability to monitor these environments is crucial, but limitations with SAP has meant that technologists have struggled to identify performance issues across their SAP landscapes and the applications they connect. Resulting outages, issues with core transactions and lengthy mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) all negatively impact the customer and employee digital experience and ultimately cause a loss in productivity and revenue.

With AppDynamics SAP Peak, technologists can now utilize the world’s leading application and business performance monitoring tools to monitor the SAP landscape in real-time, including logs, metadata, background jobs, S/4HANA database and the application server. This enables technologists to gather the business critical insights they need to ensure the smooth running of their operations. With full stack observability across SAP and non-SAP components before, during and after migration, organizations can also mitigate risk and confidently move to S/4HANA or the cloud.

SAP Peak builds on AppDynamics’ existing SAP monitoring solution by providing new and advanced functionality, including:

• Business iQ for Business Scenario Transaction Analytics: Bringing visibility and understanding to how bottlenecks are impacting critical business processes by allowing users to monitor key SAP business scenarios, starting with Order to Cash, and then correlating that information back to business performance.
• ABAP Code-Level Visibility: Provides base-level APM functionality for SAP monitoring that includes transaction/code level visibility, dynamic baselining, easier Root Cause Analysis of issues, reduced MTTR and application flow maps of the SAP ABAP stack.
• Deep SAP Performance Insights: Supplies dashboards that display performance metrics, logs and events for the overall SAP landscape, including processes outside of the user business transactions. These views can help to reduce cost of managing data, save time in performance and regression testing, and help provide visibility into the availability of business related transactions.
• Server and Network Visibility: Facilitates full-stack visibility across SAP landscapes to identify and isolate infrastructure performance issues, further reducing MTTR and breaking down operational silos.

AppDynamics SAP Peak is generally available today. Read more about SAP Peak on the AppDynamics blog to get started.

Although it is difficult to predict what the future of business travel will look like, one thing that’s certain is the key role technology will play in easing the concerns of business travellers.

A recent survey of business travellers by SAP Concur – a leader in integrated travel, expense and invoice management solutions – shows:

• Mobile check-in is the most important mobile app feature (52%) Canadians want when travel resumes, followed by traveller safety information (38%,), the ability to book air travel (38%), andthe ability to view and manage their trip itinerary (36%). 

• Canadian business travellers are looking for a breadth of on-demand functions, including loyalty programs (30%), the ability to automatically create and submit an expense report (21%), and even the ability to track and offset their carbon footprint (12%)
  • Nearly 3 in 10 (28%) also want automatic notifications for out-of-policy bookings or expenses.

• 93 per cent of Canadian business travellers note some measures are critical for safely returning to the road, especially mandatory personal health screenings for travelling employees (40%), limiting travel to only the most critical trips (38%), and real-time health and safety updates (34%).

• When travel starts, Canadian business travellers are most likely to start their booking with online travel agencies (24%) or directly with an airline or hotel website/app (22%). 

Additional findings:

Notable highlights of the 200 responding Canadian business travellers in the global study include:

·       Business travel plays an important role in the success of today’s enterprise:

o   Canadian business travellers expect their company to experience negative outcomes due to travel restrictions around COVID-19, including a reduced number of deals or contracts signed that require in-person interactions (51%) and declines in new business wins that require in-person meetings (44%).

·       Business travellers expect an increase in discrimination against certain groups while travelling:

• Nearly 9 in 10 Canadian business travellers (89%) expect increased discrimination in the wake of COVID-19, especially against travellers exhibiting cold or flu symptoms (59%), travellers from countries with high infection rates (43%)—and even travellers of Asian descent (43%).
• More than 1 in 4 Canadian business travellers (27%) also believe there will be an increase in discrimination against the elderly, as well as those wearing enhanced personal protective equipment (26%).

• Health and safety are now top priority for business travellers when on the road:

• Health and safety have become the top priority for 2 in 5 (43%) Canadian business travellers which is more than three times as many who prioritize business needs (13%).
• Safety was only the second priority last year, but the effects of COVID-19 have exacerbated the issue from 24% to 43%.
• Top concerns about returning to business travel also include infecting their families (69%) and getting sick themselves (68%).

·       Companies need to update travel policies to help business travellers return to the road safely:

• 93% of Canadian business travellers consider some measures critical for safely returning to the road, including:
  • Mandatory personal health screenings for travelling employees (40%), limiting travel to only the most critical trips (38%), real-time health and safety updates (34%), and easier access to personal protective equipment (28%).
• More than 9 in 10 Canadian business travellers (92%) believe they’d benefit from company training, especially, trainings on how to protect their health and safety during travel (50%) and how to maintain healthy habits while travelling (50%).

The full global white paper and Canadian findings can be found here.

SAP Canada, a subsidiary of SAP SE is today pleased to announce the winners of the Innovating for Canada: We vs. Virus hackathon, a collaborative project that virtually brought together more than 700 highly-skilled talent from eight leading organizations in Canada:Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, EY Canada, IBM, Microsoft, PwC Canada and SAP to deliver new ideas and innovations to help Canadians win the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The hackathon began in the afternoon on Thursday, April 2 and ended at 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, April 5 with 105 teams of volunteers. Many of the teams were cross-organizational, from the eight participating organizations, and devoted thousands of hours across four days towards developing solutions for the following challenges associated with COVID-19:

• Helping Canadians manage the physical and emotional effects of isolation
• Encouraging citizens to follow pandemic safety measures
• Supporting families and children to work and study more effectively from home
• Finding ways to support those industries most severely impacted by the pandemic
• Finding or creating temporary sources of work and income for affected Canadians
• Better supporting our essential service providers and health care professionals on the front lines
• Assisting the most vulnerable communities at high risk or impacted by the pandemic

Leaders at the eight participating organizations reviewed the short-listed teams earlier this week, selecting the following five projects as the winners of the Innovating for Canada: We vs. Virus hackathon.

Participating organizations are working on next steps and will meet with the government to explore how some of these solutions can be deployed in Canada in the near future.

The Winning Teams

Hungry Heroes

Team Hungry Heroes

Canadians are doing their part by staying at home as essential workers are outside working tirelessly in the frontlines. The application, Hungry Heroes aims to boost their spirits and to show community support. By partnering with local restaurants to deliver individual safely packaged meals to workers, users who are social distancing show their appreciation and donate meals for organizations and hospitals that they care about.

NBHR

Team NBHR

While we work to flatten the curve, others are putting their lives at risk every day fighting the pandemic. NHBR is a one-to-one person application that aims to give ease to essential workers by connecting them to neighbors around their area who are looking to give back. Through their match, front-line users can create a list of to do’s for the helper along with requests they need help with ranging from dog walking and grocery shopping. This application will allow essential workers to continue to do what they for Canada while receiving basic help from Canadians who want to give back.

Back to the Market

Team Anti-Virus

As government scrambles to provide necessary supplies and services to citizens finding themselves unemployed, and businesses are facing an increasing demand to fill select jobs, Team Aspire Aniti-Virus introduces a platform called Back to the Market to connect all three stakeholders. In the platform, businesses will be able to post job opportunities, the app will provide recommended hires based on matching skills, certifications and work preferences in the job-seeking database. The online platform will bridge the gap and address newfound shortfalls in the Canadian supply chain.

Lean On

Covict 6

Team Covict 6 understands the difficulties to get necessities to vulnerable communities and the loneliness that comes with isolation. To combat these issues, they have created a service, Lean On, to connect those who need help with those willing to provide it. With this online platform, users in need can identify their needs and request a helper. Once a helper accepts a request, a match will be made between the two users to come together and communicate their needs. This application will help create a connected community that supports the most vulnerable.

Neighborhood Connect

The Bug Stops Here

Vulnerable communities often face challenges in receiving essential goods. Team The Bug Stops Here proposes an easy-to-use application, Neighbourhood Connect. With this app, the elderly can tap to request groceries based on geolocation mapping – a person signed up as a helper will be notified. Once a connection is made, the two parties can chat via the in-app messenger as the helper grabs items that the user requests and delivers the groceries to the user’s doorsteps. The app can also process payment. This tool can bridge the gap between all essential services, the vulnerable population, and healthy volunteers.