SAP’s social sabbatical program helps 4 organizations

SAP’s eleven employees have successfully completed a month-long Social Sabbatical assignment in Chennai to help four non-profit organizations develop best practices and attain operational efficiency.

Eleven SAP employees from the US, Germany, China, Czech Republic, United Arab Emirates, and Australia leveraged their expertise in areas such as project management, data management, HR and marketing to guide Bhumi, Hand in Hand, Villgro Innovations foundation and Arunodhaya – the four non-profit organizations in Chennai.

This unique program is part of the SAP Social Sabbatical, a short term assignment for top talents who work in international, cross functional teams to solve business challenges for the social entrepreneurial or education sector in emerging markets, while strengthening their leadership competencies, cross industry sector know-how and intercultural sensitivity.

As of 2015, SAP’s Social Sabbatical program has activated over 75,000 pro-bono service hours by 221 employees from 36 nations, across 71 organizations worldwide.

"Employees participating in SAP's Social Sabbatical program get an opportunity to solve business challenges for the entrepreneurial or education sector in emerging markets, while developing leadership, cross-cultural as well as entrepreneurial skills and mindset. This initiative is helping SAP strengthen strategic social investments in key markets,” said Dilip Kumar Khandelwal, MD, SAP Labs.

Dr. Prahalathan, co-founder, Bhumi said, “Bhumi’s rapid growth in one decade, left us with little time for more strategic considerations, especially in internal and external marketing strategies. We thank SAP for helping us define and align our communications internally and crafting a marketing and communications plan for an external audience.”

"Before our partnership with SAP Social Sabbatical, our internal and external processes lacked some systems and implementation methodology. Reviews and tracking were weak spots and needed to be made more efficient," said PR Ganapathy, President (India), Villgro. “Our collaboration with SAP has helped bring everyone onto one page and identify a strategy for implementing the necessary systems and processes"

Virgil D’Samy, CEO, Arunodhaya said, “We were struggling with an IT system that couldn’t meet our needs. It resulted in inefficiencies, duplications of effort, and unnecessary, time-consuming manual effort. Collaborating with SAP, helped us in implementing comprehensive data management plans after a critical review with proper recommendations too”.