There's really no way to overstate the importance of innovation at Utegration. Our people are passionate about using technology to improve the outcomes and experience of our clients. If you're familiar with our 4U™ family of solutions and services, for example, you know our passion often turns into products that address white space in SAP technology or in the utilities and energy industry at large.
To give our experts an extra opportunity to cultivate innovation (not to mention, spur a little healthy competition), Utegration hosts a hackathon for our employees each year. The annual event, called UHack, allows our experts to step outside their daily work and let their imaginations run wild — and they do not disappoint!
Between April 25 and May 10, several of our industry and technology experts teamed up to bring to life innovative ideas and solutions that will serve utility and energy companies. When the two weeks were up, each team had 30 minutes to present their project to the distinguished judges (members of Utegration's leadership team). The judges scored each presentation on a point-scale system for the following categories: application, innovation, presentation delivery, functional design, and market potential.
And now for the winners! Drum roll please...
The first-place innovation is: ANA4U (Analytics4U)
Members: Chuan Wang, Vincent Wang, Jerry Hsu
Project: BPEM Monitoring and Drilldown Dashboard for Better Decision Making
Overview: This team built out a Fiori 3.0 dashboard for Business Process Exception Management (BPEM) monitoring and drilldown. The team was able to demonstrate the usefulness and interactivity of Fiori dashboards that included drilldown from charts into a detailed table display with only the data selected from the chart. They highlighted the responsive capabilities of UI5 with a QR code that everyone could use to pull up the same dashboard on their phone or tablet.
Most importantly, they showed how smart design in Fiori 3.0 can empower business users to select a single BPEM case from the dashboard table display and navigate seamlessly into the SAP NetWeaver Portal, which allows users to close the loop on insight to action. By doing this, analysts and managers can use similar analytics applications with the same design principal to take the next step and immediately make business decisions that improve the way utilities do business.
ANA4U was selected as the first-place innovation because of the value the solution delivers. It was judged an opportunity that can immediately impact our customers value and improve the way we deliver analytics in projects that feature Fiori 3.0 design.
Fun fact: Team member Chuan Wang is Utegration employee #1! Thanks, Chuan – 14 years and still bringing the innovations!
The second place innovation is: Chatbot Assistant and Asset Management Situational Awareness
Members: Vinay Suneja, Tam Nguyen, Harikrishna Munirathnappa, Vincent Wang, Roney Mathew
Project: Using Next-Gen Technology to Drive Efficiency (Situational Awareness and Chat Bots)
Overview: This team built out two use cases to show at the hackathon:
- a situational awareness asset tracking dashboard
- a chatbot empowered by AI
The situational awareness asset tracking dashboard visualizes information for asset management to show status and availability of asset inventory. A robust data and statistical model allow the display to highlight asset types that are running short and may not fulfill the business needs beyond a certain number of days. The dashboard user can interactively select different scenarios showing where supply is short 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, etc. Utilities that implement this dashboard could immediately see value if they are struggling to find assets for maintenance orders, especially in areas sensitive to extreme weather events.
The chatbot presented was integrated into internal Utegration metrics for PTO and utilization. The team showed how users can interact with the chat bot to bring up their own utilization through a casual text-messaging conversation over Microsoft Teams. Rather than searching through bookmarks, emails or files, users can simply ask the chatbot for it as they would a personal assistant with everyday conversation. The applications are truly limitless, and the judges saw the potential of chatbots through the team's application in their hackathon project.
The Hackathon event was a total testament to Utegration's company culture. Though a "winner" and "runner up" were named based on points earned, every single team presented ideas and solutions that deliver value for our customers.
A special note to Utegration clients: Be sure to ask your account executive for more details to see how these innovations can help your organization!