On-site agenda

Welcome Keynotes

Presenters:

Prof. Dr. Gerhard Kramer: Professor Kramer (b. 1970) conducts research on telecommunication technology and information theory, as well as their applications in radio, telephone and fiber glass channels. His research focuses on the core interests of the modern information society: increasing the information density and reliability of messages, expanding the capacity and efficiency of the transmission media and networks and improving data storage methods.

Professor Kramer studied electrical engineering at the University of Manitoba (Canada) and was awarded a doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 1998. From 1998 to 2000, he worked at Endora Tech (Basel) as a communication engineer. From 2000 to 2008, he was a member of technical staff at the Math Center, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Murray Hill, New Jersey (USA). In 2009, he assumed a professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Since 2010, he has held the position of Alexander von Humboldt Professor at TUM. Since October 2019, he has been Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation.

Stefan Wagner: As Global Vice President Ecosystem & Channels, he expanded SAPs Partner Management organization, where he was responsible for various partner programs and shared services.

Managing Director of the SAP Labs Latin America in São Leopoldo, Brazil, he created around 600 new jobs and a highly modern and environmentally friendly office building, Stefan Wagner and his team established this location as an influential IT service provider in Latin America.

After that, as General Manager, he took over responsibility for setting up the SAP Sports & Entertainment Industry Manager and was primarily responsible for the market launch of industry- specific solutions for sports clubs, associations and entertainment companies.

In his current position as Managing Director of SAP Lab Munich, as well as Location Head for SAP Munich, he strengthens and expands the SAP development location in Munich - development focuses are Industry 4.0, Commerce, New Mobility, Sustainability, and Mobile.

Stefan Wagner holds a degree in economics with a focus on marketing. He also completed the Sloan Executive Education Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Overview SAP & TUM Industry-University Collaboration (IUC)

Presenters:

Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes: Prof. Matthes (b. 1963) focuses his research on business information systems and software engineering. He explores enterprise architecture management, model-driven web application development, and social software architectures. As Head of the Software Architecture working group of Gesellschaft für Informatik, a member of the advisory board of the Ernst Denert foundation for software engineering, and the organizer of several international conferences, Prof. Matthes helps to foster cooperation between practitioners and scientists in computer science and information management. His academic career started at J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt (graduated in 1988). He did his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1992. He worked as a researcher at Digital Equipment Systems’ research center in Palo Alto (1992-93) and served as a professor at TU Hamburg-Harburg from 1997 to 2002. Until 2010, he was Dean of Studies at the Faculty of Computer Science and a member of the teaching board of TUM. He is co-founder and supervisory board chairman of CoreMedia AG (1996) and infoAsset AG (1999), a company that now boasts over 180 employees. Prof. Matthes is leading the SAP@TUM Collaboration Lab from the TUM side.

Dr. Rüdiger Eichin: Dr. Rüdiger Eichin is heading the SAP & TUM Industry-University Collaboration, based out of Munich/Germany. In this role, he is responsible to shape the collaboration between SAP, especially Product Engineering and Technology & Innovation, and the Technical University of Munich in the areas of Applied Research, Knowledge Exchange, and Co-Innovation. Dr. Eichin is leading the SAP@TUM Collaboration Lab from the SAP side. For 14 years he has formerly worked in SAP’s development in different roles, e.g. as a Product Manager for Cloud ERP or leading Frontrunner Innovations for the Intelligent Enterprise. Rüdiger holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Mannheim. Before joining SAP in 2006 he has been working for Arthur D. Little in the field of IT & innovation strategy.

Presentation stream "Digital Transformation":

Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes

Project Information:

Enterprise AI: Text generation through semi-supervised learning

Background Info:

The project explores semi-supervised learning frameworks with applications of text generation using deep learning models. This project addresses several research questions, such as the development of an approach for automated labeling of data generated via chatbot interactions, the integration of user feedback for an enhanced learning experience for the chatbot, and the improvement of chatbot responses where only a limited dataset is available for training. During the course of this research, the needs of a variety of applications and use cases will be analyzed with respect to state-of-the-art methods in semi-supervised learning and Natural Language Processing. ​

Presenters:

Christopher Pielke: Christopher is a DevOps Engineer in the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence at SAP. 
He wrote his bachelor thesis in 2020 as a dual student in collaboration with the Center of Excellence, comparing different approaches for building information retrieval systems based on FAQs. 
Now, Christopher is responsible for deploying and maintaining the infrastructure that supports SAP's chatbots and digital assistant, ensuring they are always running smoothly and efficiently. 
He is passionate about enhancing the chatbots' ability to understand and creatively respond to users, as well as researching new ways to leverage AI to improve the digital assistant's backend and beyond. 
In his free time, Christopher enjoys exploring ways to implement AI safely and learning about cyber-security.

Anum Afzal: Anum is a Ph.D. researcher at the chair for Software Engineering of Business Information Systems at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since September 2021. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer and Information systems engineering from NEDUET, Karachi, and a Master's degree in Computer Science from TUM. Her research interests include Text Generation in Natural Language Processing, Conversational AI, and Transformer models. She is passionate about applying state-of-the-art NLP research to create solutions for industry use-cases, and about answering theoretical research questions using an applied approach. 

Scaling the Digital Transformation for Educational Ecosystems

Background Info:

Digital platform ecosystems (DPE) which we understand as diverse agents such as platform owners, complementors, users, and competitors interacting through digital platforms open to a wide range of exchanges and interactions, play a significant part in today’s economy, society, and digital transformation. These DPE, if successful, can spawn countless innovations of substantial social and economic value, but are complex and prone to often surprising failure. This project shifts the focus from finding what autonomous actors and relationships explain the success in DPE towards presenting explanations of how and why those successes in DPE occur. This project identifies and links the parts of different DPE research streams and analyses how the efforts of autonomous actors are integrated in DPE to understand the nature of DPE success. The results will be validated by SAP subject matter experts of DPE through the SAP Platform Business Community. This ensures the transfer of the research results to these areas of the different SAP lines of business where the impact on success is maximized.

Presenters:

Prof. Dr. Carsten Hahn: Carsten joined SAP almost 22 years ago as an assistant to the executive board and held different management positions in development. He was also responsible for the user interface design of the first cloud solution of SAP which was launched in 2007. Today, he is Senior Director of Technology & Innovation and is developing new platform business models for SAP and their customers and partners. In addition, Carsten holds a professor for innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Applied Sciences Karlsruhe in Germany where he encourages students to be an entrepreneur either as a founder of startups but also as an intrapreneur in big and also mid-size companies. Carsten has a degree in computer science and business administration and a PhD in Marketing.

Dr. Holger Wittges: Dr. Holger Wittges (b. 1970) studied business information systems at the University of Bamberg. In 2004 he received his doctorate in the field of business information systems from the University of Hohenheim for his research on the connection between business process management and workflow implementation. From 2000 to 2004 he worked as an IT project manager at debitel AG in Stuttgart. As part of the IT architecture team, his focus was the development of standards for the documentation of IT architectures and the planning of software integration tests. From 2004 to 2015 he set up the SAP University Competence Center at TUM with Professor Krcmar and a research group. Together with the team he published about Very Large Business Applications and teaching. In 2013 he received the Visionary Member Award from SAP for his work in the global SAP University Alliances Program. From 2016 to 2019 he worked as co-managing director of the Center for Digitalization Bavaria, together with Professor Broy, for the Bavarian state government to initiate more publicly funded research collaborations between universities and industry on digitalization topics. Since 2020 he is the operational manager of the TUM project SAP University Competence Center and the operational project manager of the TUM School of CIT at the TUM campus in Heilbronn. The research group conducts research in collaboration with SAP and IBM on topics such as curriculum development for Very Large Business Applications and Next Generation Data Centers / (Hybrid) Cloud Computing. 

Leveraging Metrics in Large Agile Organizations:

Background Info:

The project conducts research in the area of large-scale agile software development, with a focus on new approaches to help software development organizations adapt to the required changes. This project includes several detailed research questions, such as potential patterns, roles, responsibilities, quality criteria as well as context and success factors. This includes specifically finding a balance between adapting fast and agile to fast-growing market needs in the e-commerce area and being compliant with SAP processes and standards.​

Presenters:

Michaela Schulz: After her studies of computer science at the TUM (master), Michaela joined Siemens as a software developer, and moved on to Nokia Networks as a team leader and further management roles. She joined SAP in March 2013 (via the acquired company hybris). Since 2017 Michaela has been leading software development teams in the SAP Commerce cloud area and today, she is responsible for Commerce Engineering Excellence, heading Quality Engineers as well as Scrum Masters. Michaela is passionate about lean and agile and eager to improve our agile development processes. 

Franziska Tobisch: Franziska is a Ph.D. researcher at the chair for Software Engineering of Business Information Systems at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since April 2022. During her studies, she spent a semester abroad at Stockholm University (Sweden) and gained work experience through internships at Daimler TSS and Immersight GmbH. Her research interests include knowledge sharing and coordination in large-scale agile software development environments with a focus on the successful establishment of Communities of Practices in this context.

Pascal Philipp: Mr. Philipp joined the chair for Software Engineering of Business Information Systems at the Technical University Munich in January 2020. He holds a master’s degree in Information Systems. During his studies, he spent a semester abroad at Newcastle University (UK) and gained work experience through internships at MHP – A Porsche Company, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Deutsche Bank.

LLMs and Semantic Models for Process Discovery

Background Info:

Process models provide the blueprints for model-driven process automation. However, creating process models still poses a major challenges nowadays, in particular, for domain experts. With the advent of generative AI approaches, textual sources such as process descriptions become viable input for creating process models. Hence, in this presentation, we will introduce conversational process modeling as new concept to guide domain experts in creating process models from text in interaction with chatbots. Conversational process modeling is part of our larger joint project on LLMs and semantic models in process discovery which will be also briefly introduced in the presentations.

Presenters:

Prof. Dr Stefanie Rinderle-Ma: Dr. Rinderle-Ma is a full professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and holds the Chair of Information Systems and Business Process Management. Her research interests focus on process-oriented information systems, flexible and distributed process technologies, compliance management, as well as production and process intelligence. The overarching goal of her research is to enable and accelerate digitalization and automation through processes and at the same time keep the human in the loop. Application areas comprise manufacturing, transportation and logistics, as well as medicine.

Timotheus Kampik: Timotheus Kampik is Principal Scientist at SAP Signavio, SAP's business process intelligence product line, and Adjunct Associate Professor at Umeå University, Sweden. He has acquired Ph.D. and Licentiate degrees from Umeå University in 2022 and 2020, respectively. His research interests are principle-based automated reasoning, multi-agent systems, and applications of artificial intelligence to business process and business decision management. His work has appeared in venues such as the Journal of Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), the Journal of Logic and Computation (JLC), the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, and IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine. Timotheus has served on PCs of conferences such as AAAI, AAMAS (AAMAS 'Best PC' award in 2022), and the ACM Web Conference and frequently reviews for Journals such as AIJ and JLC.

Nataliia Klievtsova: Nataliia Klievtsova is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Chair of Information Systems and Business Process Management of Prof. Dr. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma at TUM. She holds a Master's degree in Economic Cybernetics from Odesa National University, and a Master's degree in Information Systems from University of Vienna. Her research currently focuses on process model discovery and enhancement using Large Language Models (LLMs) while examining their impact on the degree of human involvement.

Presentation Stream "Sustainable Supply Networks & Finance"

Prof. Dr Gunther Friedl

Project Information:

ESG Regulations and Finance-Green Ledger:

Background Info:

With the rise of regulatory initiatives and changing business requirements for companies in the context of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), this project has the goal to analyse the effect of these changes on financial and management accounting and to develop new approaches which may be used in Enterprise Information Systems. This project addresses several research questions, such as the effect of ESG regulations on Accounting & Reporting and how the changing environment may affect IT systems like SAP S/4HANA. This project will also analyze the needs of decision makers regarding improved capabilities in SAP applications to support decision making in the context of ESG and sustainability.

Presenters: 

Prof. Dr. Gunther Friedel: Gunther Friedl is a Professor of Business Administration at the Technical University of Munich, where he holds the Chair of Management Accounting and is Dean of the TUM School of Management. His research interests span the fields of corporate governance and executive remuneration, performance measurement, company valuation, and patent evaluation. He studied physics at TUM and business management at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). He completed his doctoral studies at the LMU in 2000 and obtained his postdoctoral teaching qualification in 2004. He then moved to Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where he was a Professor of Business Administration and held the Chair of Management Accounting until 2007. Research and teaching assignments have taken him to Stanford University and the Warsaw School of Economics. Gunther Friedl has authored and co-authored several books on cost accounting and management accounting. His research has been published in the European Journal of Operation Research, OR Spectrum, Research Policy, and the Schmalenbach Business Review, among others. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his work, including the Best Textbook Award presented by the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB) and a number of Best Teaching Awards. His studies on the topic of executive remuneration are regularly profiled in Handelsblatt, the Financial Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Huffington Post, and the German broadcasters ARD and ZDF.

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Ernstberger: Jürgen Ernstberger is Full Professor for Financial Accounting at the Technical University of Munich and Research Fellow at the Ruhr University Bochum. He has been visiting scholar/visiting professor at the University of Toronto, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Aston Business School and University of Graz. Professor Ernstberger teaches courses in financial accounting, auditing, and technology-enhanced accounting and auditing. At the TUM School of Management he is Vice Dean of Academic and Student Affairs and member of the Faculty Council. He is also national coordinator of Germany at the European Accounting Association.Professor Ernstberger earned his doctoral degree and Habilitation at the University of Regensburg. Prior to this position, he was Full Professor of Accounting and Auditing at the Ruhr University Bochum.

Dr. Christoph Ernst: Dr. Christoph Ernst is heading SAP’s Product Management for Finance & Risk, based out of Walldorf/Germany. In this role, he is responsible for the product strategy of SAP S/4HANA Finance & Risk and all the related solutions which help to digitize and transform the finance function. For 15 years he has formerly been with SAP Deutschland in different customer-facing roles, shaping the Germany Presales and Business Development for LoB Finance and heading Solution Management with SAP SE for Accounting and Financial Close. Before joining SAP in 1999 he has been with SIEMENS AG.

Optimization Methods for Large Scale Logistics Distribution Scenarios:

Background Info:

This joint project conducts research on the use of data-driven approaches and decomposition algorithms in the context of the VRP to enable the solution of larger and more complex real-world problems. This touches several more detailed questions aimed to expand the state of knowledge with regards to AI and advanced optimization, e.g., how are the clusters rated when aggregating and breaking down into sub-clusters? Or how to improve the user acceptance of data-driven / AI-based approaches. ​

Presenters:

Kathrin Koffler: Kathrin Koffler is a Product Owner for SAP Digital Supply Chain Optimization with focus on logistics applications like SAP Transportation Management. She has been at SAP for 15 years, studied mathematics at the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe and started her career at SAP as a developer of the vehicle scheduling and routing optimizer.

Christoph Kerscher: Christoph Kerscher is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Chair of Logistics and Supply Chain Management of Prof. Dr. Stefan Minner at TUM. His research interests are in transportation planning and data-driven optimization in operations management. Currently, Christoph Kerscher is a reviewer for the International Journal of Production Economics.

DDMS: Dynamic Decision Models for Scheduling:

Background Info:

The project conducts research in the area of production planning and detailed scheduling, with a focus on utilizing methods of artificial intelligence (AI), e.g., machine learning (ML), to improve and automate planning and scheduling procedures. This touches on several detailed questions, e.g., how to optimize rules for heuristics with AI and also how to interpret/communicate AI methods and results gained from them, i.e., explainability of AI. The project will be approached by repeated iterations of (initial) research, modeling, and testing to ensure agility and flexibility in adjusting the desired methodology and increasing the complexity according to the learnings from the previous iteration. ​

Presenters:

Prof. Dr. Martin Grunow: Prof. Martin Grunow holds the professorship of Production and Supply Chain Management at TUM. His group has its core competence in developing analytics methodology. Martin Grunow is the recipient of numerous research grants, recently as a co-principal investigator for a research training group on “Advanced Optimisation in the Networked Economy“ funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG. He is the co-author of more than 50 publications in leading international research journals and of a textbook on Advanced Planning Systems. Martin Grunow is the head of the German Operation Research Society’s Supply Chain Management Section. He teaches MOOCs on Quality Engineering and Leans with more than 300,000 participants from all over the world.

Dr. Uta Lösch: Dr. Uta Lösch is heading one of the Data Science teams in S/4HANA AI Incubation. Her team supports the different product units in the S/4 solution area with their Machine Learning use cases from ideation to productization. The focus is on topics in Digital Supply Chain, Asset Management, and Sustainability. She obtained a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and Semantic Web from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology prior to joining SAP as a data scientist in the development organization for Predictive Maintenance in 2012.

Dr. Daria Brisker-Klaiman: Dr. Daria Brisker-Klaiman is working as a senior AI scientist in the SAP S/4 CPA AI Incubation unit, where she is developing machine learning models. Before joining SAP, she worked as a research scientist at the University of Heidelberg, where she worked on photochemical reactions in biological systems.

Jan-Nicklas Dörr: Jan-Niklas Dörr holds a Master’s degree in Management and Technology with specializations in Operations and Supply Chain Management and Computer Science from TUM. During his studies, he supported lectures such as “Applied Discrete Optimization” and “Designing and Scheduling of Lean Production Systems” as a teaching assistant. He engaged in social and sustainability topics as a student consultant and later an Alumnus of 180 Degrees Consulting. He wrote his Master’s thesis at SAP on the subject of “Genetic Programming to Solve Detailed Scheduling Using Dispatching Rules”. Afterward, Jan-Niklas started his Ph.D. at TUM's Production and Supply Chain Management Chair to further research this field.

Probabilistic Planning for a More Resilient Supply Chain

Background Info:

This project endeavors to bridge the gap between research and practical application in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. It aims to provide a comprehensive framework for assessing risk-based profit implications and representing planning decisions as adaptable ranges to address the inherent complexities stemming from uncertainties in both demand and supply. By reducing the reliance on buffer stocks and leveraging stochastic programming techniques, the project seeks to empower FMCG companies with innovative decision support tools and guidelines that optimize supply chain operations while ensuring resilience in the face of unpredictable changes. Through this initiative, we aspire to foster a more profitable, efficient, and competitive FMCG sector, benefiting both businesses and consumers alike.

Presenters:

Prof. Dr. Martin Grunow: Prof. Martin Grunow holds the professorship of Production and Supply Chain Management at TUM. His group has its core competence in developing analytics methodology. Martin Grunow is the recipient of numerous research grants, recently as a co-principal investigator for a research training group on “Advanced Optimisation in the Networked Economy“ funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG. He is the co-author of more than 50 publications in leading international research journals and of a textbook on Advanced Planning Systems. Martin Grunow is the head of the German Operation Research Society’s Supply Chain Management Section. He teaches MOOCs on Quality Engineering and Leans with more than 300,000 participants from all over the world.

Dr. Laura Tozzo: Dr. Laura Tozzo is a Product Manager for SAP Integrated Business Planning in the area of Digital Supply Chain. She is responsible for Demand Planning and Artificial Intelligence topics, including statistical forecasting, demand sensing, probabilistic planning and generative AI. She has been collaborating with TUM on the topic of Probabilistic Supply Planning since 2022. She has been at SAP for 5 years, and in her previous role she worked as a developer in the SAP Digital Supply Chain Optimization team. She holds a PhD in Mathematics from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (now RPTU).

Thorsten Greil: Currently, Thorsten Greil is a PhD candidate at TU Munich’s Chair of Production and Supply Chain Management. His research revolves around supply chain planning under uncertainty for more resilient and sustainable supply chains. Before joining TU Munich as a research associate in the fall of 2021, Thorsten worked as a strategy consultant focusing on Operations at Roland Berger for 3 years. During this time, he completed a variety of projects in Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Canada. He is an Industrial Engineer by education and a data enthusiast at heart.

SAP@TUM IUC Cross-Topics and Outlook:

Presenters:

Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes: Prof. Matthes (b. 1963) focuses his research on business information systems and software engineering. He explores enterprise architecture management, model-driven web application development, and social software architectures. As Head of the Software Architecture working group of Gesellschaft für Informatik, a member of the advisory board of the Ernst Denert foundation for software engineering, and the organizer of several international conferences, Prof. Matthes helps to foster cooperation between practitioners and scientists in computer science and information management. His academic career started at J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt (graduated in 1988). He did his doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1992. He worked as a researcher at Digital Equipment Systems’ research center in Palo Alto (1992-93) and served as a professor at TU Hamburg-Harburg from 1997 to 2002. Until 2010, he was Dean of Studies at the Faculty of Computer Science and a member of the teaching board of TUM. He is co-founder and supervisory board chairman of CoreMedia AG (1996) and infoAsset AG (1999), a company that now boasts over 180 employees. Prof. Matthes is leading the SAP@TUM Collaboration Lab from the TUM side.

Dr. Rüdiger Eichin: Dr. Rüdiger Eichin is heading the SAP & TUM Industry-University Collaboration, based out of Munich/Germany. In this role, he is responsible to shape the collaboration between SAP, especially Product Engineering and Technology & Innovation, and the Technical University of Munich in the areas of Applied Research, Knowledge Exchange, and Co-Innovation. Dr. Eichin is leading the SAP@TUM Collaboration Lab from the SAP side. For 14 years he has formerly worked in SAP’s development in different roles, e.g. as a Product Manager for Cloud ERP or leading Frontrunner Innovations for the Intelligent Enterprise. Rüdiger holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Mannheim. Before joining SAP in 2006 he has been working for Arthur D. Little in the field of IT & innovation strategy.

Dr. Katharina Wollenberg: Dr. Katharina Wollenberg is the Industry-University Collaboration Lead at SAP Labs Munich where she supports shaping SAP's strategic partnership with the Technical University of Munich. She is responsible for coordinating various projects and activities in applied research, knowledge exchange, and co-innovation. Previously, she worked as a software engineer for S/4 HANA Manufacturing, where she began her journey with SAP in 2020. Dr. Wollenberg studied physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Sussex. She holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg.