Case Studies
Case Study: SAP
As the market leader in enterprise application software, SAP is at the center of today’s business and technology revolution.
SAP helps you streamline your processes, giving you the ability to use live data to predict customer trends —live and in the moment. In addition to the 355,000 customers worldwide, SAP has over 87,000 employees in sites across the world.
Ensuring they can support their people, in environments where they can innovate, and flourish in what they are doing, is key for the company. Michael Roper, EMEA Vice President, Global Real Estate & Facilities (GFR), explains the role that facilities management plays: “SAP is a corporation that values its people, and that’s why it’s vitally important to contribute to employee engagement.”
“Facilities management is traditionally seen as a bottom line department,” Roper says, “looking after buildings, but that’s actually wrong—we look after people.”
When SAP creates work environments, it looks to create a series of interactions for its employees, and the ability for them to collaborate and innovate.
With this in mind, SAP recently brought together three business groups, SAP, Ariba, and Concur, into a single building, Metronom, in Prague. “The Metronom project, is, in my mind, a shining beacon of success” says Roper. “We weren’t getting any synergies, or interactions, so we kicked off the idea of bringing everyone together.”
Facilities Manager, Ondrej Fanta, explains how they approached the project: “We wanted to have a creative and inspirational space, so we appointed members of staff to be ambassadors. People liked that Herman Miller went into deep detail to explain how everything worked.” The choice of furniture included height-adjustable Ratio desks, which we very well received. Jana Vodakova, HR Service Supervisor reports that, “the furniture creates a supportive environment. It’s nice when you can move up and down. It makes people more creative.”
The new Metronom building needed to bring people from three business groups together and provide them with places to flourish and innovate.
When SAP creates work environments, it is looking to create a series of interactions for its employees, and the ability for them to collaborate and innovate. “Having a space like this really does help,” says Victor Tymoshchuk, Quality Engineering Manager, Mobile for Concur. “We can easily get to other departments. We don’t even need a meeting room, we can go over and sit where they sit.”
A key factor in the success of the project was the relationship with the suppliers. According to Roper, it was vital that every supplier or vendor could work in harmony. “I found with Herman Miller that they never caused me any concerns in working together, and interweaving with the greater project,” Roper says. “I think one of our proudest achievements isn’t the building. It’s building the culture of the three organizations together. The building is a tool to bring out that culture and harmonize what we’re doing together.”
