One of the most diverse regions within the world, Southeast Asian countries, where the Philippines is located, is a melting pot of different cultures. Diversity is what makes the region special and it is also a key focus for SAP as part of its vision of creating the sustainable future.
“Sustainability includes social sustainability, ” said Verena Siow, President plus Managing Movie director for SAP South Eastern Asia, during an exclusive interview with the Manila Bulletin. “Diversity inclusion should be across the board and it needs to be holistic. It is one associated with the most important indexes to measure sustainability in all companies or even among individuals. ”
Reduced inequality is among the particular 17 sustainable development goals set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, which are intended to be achieved simply by 2030. Aligned to reduce inequality plus fulfill other SDGs, SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS AND PRODUCTS has launched Chasing Zero, a campaign that highlights best practices from the company’s global ecosystem of leading thinkers and academics, as well as customers plus partners. SAP sees durability as a pressing business challenge in today’s generation. Many businesses working with SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS AND PRODUCTS also discuss how they can build a more sustainable future together by taking advantage of today’s technologies.
“I’m very happy to share that inside Southeast Asia, 51% of our employee base consists associated with women. Female statistics within the Philippines are even better at 56% or regarding 2, 500 employees because we also run chat services here. This inclusion aspect helps in addressing the problem of talent shortage in technology companies around the world. We have made a lot of progress in the last 20 years versus when I started my career. Today, we get a lot more empowerment, respect, and credibility, ” stated Siow, talking about the growing presence of women in the particular technology space.
Despite the positive changes that took place in the area of diversity inclusion, particularly the growing presence of women in the technology scene, Siow, a mother of two daughters, noted that women are still getting questions with a sense of bias. “I had interviewers inside the past who blatantly asked ‘who takes care of your children when you are traveling? ’ Those interviewers would never ask the man such a question. Previously, I used to be a little bit more defensive and would throw back the question, ” she mentioned. Recognizing the issue of unconscious prejudice, Siow mentioned that SAP has solutions that help in reducing unconscious bias and promoting diversity. She emphasized that will technology can be used to make queries in interviews gender neutral.
“When all of us talk about diversity, it is not only about gender but also minorities. The last time I counted, we have 49 nationalities within Southeast Asian countries, ” she continued. With the region having a youthful population, SAP will be also empowering the youth across many universities by allowing them to leverage SAP Analytics Cloud to come up with new solutions to some associated with the world’s challenges through competition.
“We have numerous fantastic stories in which students, due to their exposure to analytics during the particular competitions, have decided to pursue a career that they might not have considered before. It’s really regarding giving visibility and access, ” the girl added.
Helping SMEs become future-ready
Apart from having diverse cultures, Southeast Asia also has the huge number of small and medium-sized enterprises. In the Philippines alone, 99. 5% of its economy consists of SMEs. Considering this percentage, SAP has a dedicated team that works and supports SME customers not only in the country but additionally in the entire region.
“Out of the approximately 2, 800 clients that we have within the Philippines, 1, 500 are SMEs. We support them in order to become future-ready through digitalization. It is important for us to support SMEs because they could become the enterprises of the future 20 many years down the road, ” said Siow.
“Today, not really only big businesses acknowledge the importance of digitalization. Technology has become relevant to companies in order to continue their businesses and be resilient. Digital transformation has picked up, which we all call hyper-growth, during the last 2 years, ” said Siow, noting the particular impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses. She added that digital transformation is also driven simply by cloud systems because that is the only way companies can become more agile during the pandemic.
“Building and getting intelligence and insights into company operations will be very important. Once you influence technology to operationalize your own business, the next stage will be what you do to the data and how you gain insights and make decisions. We work closely along with companies in order to help all of them leverage our data cleverness solutions to gain more insights, ” she continued.
“We are tracking very well our own initiatives plus we aim to reach net zero in our operations by 2025. By 2030, we plan in order to achieve net zero across our supply chains. We practice exactly what we talk about. We possess launched options to assist companies become more sustainable. How do you become a lot more sustainable is usually by getting insights and data, making assessments, plus seeing how to make improvements to achieve lasting goals, ” she additional.
“We have to transform tomorrow today to be future-ready. It takes time in order to transform and it is usually a journey so we should not postpone actions. We must start transformation today to get ready for the particular future. Getting intelligent information to help to make better choices stands for sustainability. Embedding sustainability is the most pressing challenge all of us have nowadays and it will become even more difficult in the future, ” Siow concluded.
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