Hundreds of companies vied to be the best digital trailblazers, analytical wizards, process simplifiers, and next-gen app builders.

SAP HANA is a godsend for companies that continuously reinvent themselves to adapt to customer needs. In fact, SAP HANA is perfect for enterprises that understand the true meaning of innovation, and many of them are keen to tell their story.

Hundreds of companies submitted their entries in the four categories of the third annual SAP HANA Innovation Awards competition. Greg McStravick, GM and global head, SAP Digital Enterprise Platform GTM, announced the winners at a jam packed ceremony at SAPPHIRE NOW.

“We’ve come from a field of dreams to a time where we have a myriad of killer use cases about SAP HANA Innovation,” said McStravick as he opened the ceremony.

And the Winners Are….

Mercy Hospital, the winner of the Analytics Wizard category, was able to save $13 million dollars across multiple procedures and improve operating room utilization by 12%. These impressive results helped them beat out some serious competition, namely Reuters (3rd place) which is using the SAP HANA database to process over 100 million survey results in in real-time, and China Customs (2nd place) which is now conducting real-time fraud detection. These are great examples of how real time analytics is helping companies empower the workforce and customers.

Vodafone was the number one Digital Trailblazer. Competitors in this category are all aces in harnessing big data and the Internet of Things for breakthrough results.

Thanks to the SAP Margin Assurance solution with SAP HANA, Vodafone now has a granular view of customer profitability. Using fast detailed analytical capabilities Vodafone is able to identify tens of millions of previously unidentified revenue leakage points.

Runner up in this category, Nanjing City is leveraging Big Data from different sensors and in-memory technology. The operations team of this smart city worked with SAP to develop a system that provides real-time awareness and multi-dimensional analysis on speed, traffic flow, and congestion, significantly improving traffic conditions in a congested metropolis. The third place winner, Meteo Protect is using analytics to ensure farmers are protected in the case of adverse weather conditions.

Lenovo took the prize as No. 1 Process Simplifier for building a new E2E supply chain platform for their plants in the US, Mexico and China. Other winners that demonstrated their expertise in operating business critical processes in real time include 2^nd place winner Zalando. This company was able to dramatically accelerate payment processing, radically reduce business reporting times, and improve call center efficiency by as much as a third with SAP HANA. Third place went to Bundesdruckerei for driving the integration and digitization of key business processes with SAP HANA.

Last But Not Least

The fourth category celebrates those companies that are building innovative Next-Gen Apps using the SAP HANA platform and the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. First prize in this category went to Stanford Medicine for creating the medical record of the future with SAP HANA. Second prize went to Aegro for reducing crop management complexity to increase productivity, and third prize went to Building Radar, a company that uses search algorithms, natural language processing, data mining algorithms, and satellite imagery to identify new construction projects for their customers.

And That’s Not All!

For more details on all of these and many other companies that are using SAP HANA to create new revenue streams, improve efficiency and develop new business models, visit the SAP HANA Innovation Awards site.

This story originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.

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