The winners of UK&I Innovation Labs’ SAP Hackathon 2022 have been announced, with Atos, Deloitte and IBM given plaudits for innovative solutions in city planning, distribution and waste management.
Held on 10th and 11th February, the 48 hour challenge saw participants use SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to imagine new ways to feed and manage the smart cities of the future.
Participants in the event responded to the same brief, transporting them to the year 2032 and the smart city of Sci-Valley. The scenario given is one likely to be common in the near-future: with waste facilities in the imagined metropolis at full capacity, an acceleration within the production of food and drink was needed to sustain its ever-increasing number of inhabitants.
Winning in the Boundary Breakers category was Atos, with their ‘Intelliwaste’ idea having the potential for most impact. NTT Data was named as runners-up, with their proposal for an integrated closed loop citizen-centric smart city.
The SAP BTP Prodigy category was won by Deloitte, with their idea for an optimised transport supply chain making best use of technology according to judges. Incture came second with their vision of an end-to-end SCM and waste management solution.
Finally, the Vision Masters category was won by IBM, with their vertical farming idea judged as the most innovative. Delaware was awarded runner-up with their concept for an on-demand drone food delivery service.
SAP enlisted judges from within the business and external experts including Paul Esherwood, editor at ERP Today, and customers such as BorgWarner and Transport for London (TfL).
“It was great to see such a bunch of clever people using the BTP technology for the benefit of the society and a lot of things may be applicable to TfL,” said the transport body.
“The Hackathon was a great showcase for future-gazing and innovation, with teams from across the ecosystem setting their minds to tackle the challenges many cities might face in the future,“ said Esherwood. “Using SAP BTP as the foundation, teams designed a variety of innovative solutions and presented their ideas to a panel of experts with Atos, IBM and Deloitte running out as the overall winners.”
Nadine Elsham, head of alliances, SAP UKI, told ERP Today: “Over the past year, SAP has been attempting to increase market share, improve partner satisfaction and strengthen and grow its ecosystem. The partner ecosystem is one of the main pillars in that transformation process, and one of our aims is to double our growth.
“One of the ways we have been attempting to meet that ambition is to focus on partner enablement, capacity and capability, and innovation through encouraging more use of our SAP Business Technology Platform and development of more channel-led IP.
“The Hackathons are just one of the many ways that we are fostering more partner-to-partner collaboration and innovation by investing in our developer community, giving them access to our latest technologies, where they can learn, innovate and harness the power of our solutions, whilst being supported by our SAP experts.”
