Sabine Bendiek, chief people and operating officer and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE: How low-code and no-code technology helps HR and operations teams manage employee data.
A colleague recently asked me, “What is driving business change right now?” From my point of vista the expectations of employees, the company and stakeholders. And the speed of change has also significantly accelerated. When you put these elements together, the question for managers becomes: “What can we do to enable our people to bring their best to a virtual and expansive workplace that requires collaboration, innovation and efficiency every day?”
Offer new opportunities
At the heart of this challenge is another important question, namely: “How can we achieve our goals while providing people with new opportunities to grow their skills and be successful in their jobs?”. Digital technologies have always been a factor enabling, but low-code no-code solutions, such as SAP Build, have become imperative for organizations. And this is to keep up with the speed of change and offer people new opportunities to extend their technological skills.
SAP’s solution
SAP Build enables business users to develop their own custom applications and automated processes, without the need to be an expert software programmer. The statistics on the potential value of low-code no-code solutions are hard to ignore:
complete projects 31% faster; 63% fewer business processes with errors; 21 hours saved per user per year; 495% three-year ROI. Low code and no-code technology
But first, what is SAP Build? SAP Build is one platform cloud native and easy to use with visual interfaces. Simple drag-and-drop tools and pre-built templates that can help business users jump-start their own IT projects without needing to be coding experts. SAP Build comes with training and community support to help users get started and continue with the development of more complex apps. With the demand for IT support exceeding the availability of IT resources, it is critical to enable business users access to no-code low-code solutions.
Process Automation: Helping teams work 15x faster
One way I see SAP Build making our customers’ businesses more efficient is through the automation of HR processes. The low code and no-code platforms allow HR teams to automate time-consuming processes like onboarding, offboarding, and performance management. This can free up hundreds of hours a year for some employees, giving them the opportunity to focus on higher value-added tasks. Example: standard welcome email, gathering required documents and assigning training courses. At SAP, we used SAP Build to automate the creation of 27,000 offer letters per year, working 15 times faster than manual processes.
Data Management: Identify operational risks and opportunities
With low-code and no-code software, HR teams can manage employee data more efficiently and accurately. Dashboards are easy to create, allowing managers, leaders and colleagues across the organization to collaborate on key metrics, gain insights into key workforce dynamics and make decisions quickly.
Low code and no-code technology and increased productivity
One example is creating custom reports that track employee turnover rates, time to hire, succession data, and employee engagement. This data could be used, for example, to report business risk, evaluate employee performance, identify new trends and identify areas for improvement.
Reduce costs: improve the employee experience at scale
Low-code and no-code applications can reduce the time employees spend on routine manual tasks and free up time for more satisfying work. Research shows that reducing administrative burdens can help improve the employee experience. One example is invoice processing. A SAP customer estimated by save up to 160 hours a year per person thanks to the reduced load for managing administrative tasks. The low-code no-code invoice processing solution went live within days.
An intuitive and simple technology
We find a second example instead in the bonus area. At SAP, we are using SAP Build to transform manual closing activities in 120 branches and to achieve up to four times faster processing of these operations. Many of us have heard the saying “every company is becoming a technology company”. SAP Build goes exactly in this direction, putting an intuitive and simple technology in the hands of business users and helping to do more quickly