By Sindhu Gangadharan, Managing Director, SAP Labs India & SVP, SAP User Enablement
The second wave of COVID19 in India has been brutal – on both the general public and the governments. Just days into the second wave, the average number of new cases rose from 50,000 to 400,000, overwhelming the country’s health infrastructure. At SAP Labs India, we have been providing 24x7 support to our colleagues and their families – from emergency medical supplies to financial aid and effective vaccination drives. We’re in the process of vaccinating our 14,000+ employees and their families across our five locations in India: Bangalore, Hyderabad,Gurgaon, Mumbai and Pune.
Cognizant of our responsibility as a major organisation in India, we have been extending continued support to the Government of India (GoI), industry bodies and local communities by leveraging our biggest strength: Technology.
At the peak of the second wave, the shortage of medical oxygen was one of the biggest challenges faced across the country. SAP Labs India offered to build a solution that integrates directly with the government’s Oxygen Digital Tracking System (ODTS) and helps streamline oxygen supplies across the country with an efficient supply chain model leveraging SAP’s in-house technology. The fact that almost all major oxygen manufacturers, like JSW and SAIL, run SAP software accelerated the integration allowing us to roll out and test the solution in record time. We are now on course to enable more and more Oxygen suppliers to integrate their systems with ODTS, enabling India to move Oxygen more efficiently.
Separately, we also shipped ventilators from SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany and donated the same to the Government of Karnataka (GoK), who used it to augment the health infrastructure of Karnataka’s rural regions. Just days into the second wave of the pandemic, our teams at SAP Labs India partnered with GoK and multiple NGOs to create a live directory to help citizens find verified information on COVID19 test centres, ambulance services, doctor teleconsultation, oxygen concentrator suppliers and medical and food supplies.
Parallelly, we also relaunched the #KarnatakaFightsCorona Sankalpa portal, initially launched last year, with new features to help manage the COVID19 second wave. The platform has facilitated over 4,300 volunteers to contribute to the state’s fight against COVID19 and is leveraged for donations to the CM’s Office. Additionally, our Labs India colleagues also support the GoK COVID19 war rooms by catering to over 1,600 distress calls every day.
In an unfolding crisis like this, knowing how and where to acquire emergency resources is vital. Therefore, we leveraged SAP JAM as a collaboration platform to build a marketplace for IGCC to help facilitate the easy exchange of COVID resources among member companies. We onboarded over 400 organisations in less than a week and helped bridge the demand-supply gap, thereby accelerating the process and saving crucial time. As the leading innovation Labs in the country, we’re blessed with some of the finest tech minds who recognise our responsibility to step up during a crisis like this and offer solutions that support humankind in general. Over the last few weeks, the overwhelming number of tech solutions proposed by our colleagues has led to the creation of SAP’s first-ever COVID19 Tech Committee to accelerate the development of these solutions and connect with the relevant stakeholders in government and external agencies to help mitigate the situation at hand.
In order to scale relief efforts for our colleagues and their families, we built SAPMitra, an AI-powered COVID19 support Chatbot. A Cloud Foundry based application designed using SAP Conversational AI platform -SAPMitra assists our colleagues with COVID-related resources and services offered by SAP, like Emergency Hotline, Quarantine Facility, Insurance coverage, financial assistance, doctor teleconsultation, post-COVID Care, etc.
Earlier this year, before the second wave of COVID19 took us all by surprise, we started the phased reopening of our campuses to facilitate teams who wanted to work from the office. And we wanted to do this without compromising the safety of our colleagues. Therefore, our SAP Smart Labs team leveraged in-house technology to develop the AppaNE App to book office visits and ensure everyone’s safety on the campus with AI-based mask detection and contact tracing. Our campuses were closed once again at the onset of the second wave.
We, at SAP, firmly believe that technology and innovation should benefit the society at large, especially during a pandemic like this. There are innumerable scenarios where timely tech intervention can help save lives and improve the overall situation with efficient solutions and systems. We’re very proud that we’re able to do our bit.