SAP Boosts the United Nations’ Humanitarian Response with Faster, More Accurate Data

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 7 December 2021 – SAP SE (NYSE: SAP)
today announced that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) selected SAP’s 4W-Wizard tool that aims
at enabling customers to realise time savings and to focus on delivering
humanitarian aid during disasters.

OCHA’s
adoption of the SAP 4W Wizard tool in humanitarian missions across the Asia
Pacific region is intended to help people in Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam,
and Cambodia, as well as recent crises in the Philippines, Turkey, and South
Sudan by bringing together conversational AI, data analytics, and automation.

“Every minute counts
when it comes to providing fast and effective humanitarian relief. In one case,
the 4W-Wizard tool from SAP helped us to reduce the time taken to process data,
transforming what used to take a massive amount of effort and resources into
something easy and quick to do. That makes a huge difference in our work – and
by extension, to the people we support,” said John Marinos, former Regional
Information Management Officer for Asia Pacific-Japan at OCHA.

Tried and tested
technology to save time – and lives

“About 235 million
people globally have needed humanitarian assistance and protection in 2021. But
COVID-19 and the ongoing travel restrictions have forced us to scale back the
number of international aid workers we can deploy, severely impacting the
support we could provide to vulnerable populations. It means we have to find
new ways to save time and resources, so can ensure every second and every
dollar is put to the right place,” added Marinos.

In Nepal, for example, the
OCHA team utilized the SAP 4W-Wizard in its launch of a Humanitarian Response
Plan for COVID-19 response, requesting US$83 million worth of live-saving
assistance to more than 9 million people. The tool was aimed at minimising
time-consuming manual tasks and allowing workers to focus on implementing a
proactive, anticipatory approach to prepare for future disasters like monsoons,
securing emergency funds and mitigating suffering for the most vulnerable.

OCHA also used the SAP
4W-Wizard tool to embark on its objective of achieving seamless coordination
between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to empower local organisations
while collecting more information than ever before. In Nepal, the inclusion of
more local NGOs and community-based organisations proved critical in driving trust
in and donations for OCHA’s humanitarian efforts.

Innovative technology
to make every second count in a disaster

The 4W-Wizard, which
runs on the SAP Business Technology Platform and uses machine learning and
natural language processing technologies, uses information on the aid rendered
by NGOs to help improve visibility, collaboration, and planning on a common
platform.

“We’ve been aiming to prototype
new ways that could help humanitarian response at SAP for some years. We
designed the SAP 4W-Wizard as an innovative way that helps organisations like the
UN to achieve addressing the big challenges we face today, be it climate
change, natural disasters, or COVID-19. Rapid access to useable data is crucial
for aid personnel to respond accurately to crises and disaster situations, and
to be prepared for what might happen in the future,” said Carsten Boekholt, Industry and Customer
Innovation Advisor, SAP APJ.

“The future of
humanitarian response will be smarter – tapping on technology to help connect
the dots, enable coordination, and mitigate waste and inefficiencies that result
from manual reporting,” added Mr. Boekholt.

The SAP 4W-Wizard tool was
initiated by Relief.iO, a fully funded, internal SAP start-up committed to
building a supply chain collaboration platform for disaster relief. Relief.iO
emerged out of South-East Asia under SAP’s One Billion Lives program, a
crowd-sourced program that employs SAP technology with the intention of delivering
sustainable, commercially viable social impact. Ongoing projects include
tackling cancer drug effectiveness in India and aiming to improve disaster
prevention and preparedness in Japan.

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