Maximilian Auerbach

I grew up in Berlin with a German father and Russian mother so I’m bilingual. I left my hometown for a semester abroad and for an international internship for my B.Sc and M.Sc studies in Industrial Engineering & Management at Technical University but nowadays I am back living and working in Berlin, and luckily I only live ten minutes away from the SAP office.

The first time I heard about SAP was during an internship for a German industrial enterprise, where I used SAP’s ERP for procurement tasks. During my Masters’ program I came across SAP again through a social media job posting regarding an internship in the SAP Innovation Center in Potsdam. My wonderful SAP journey started thanks to that advert - even if when I was a child, I always dreamed of being a garbage collector, driving this big dust cart and being outside all day long!

I joined SAP in April 2019 as a Strategy & Operations intern where I was contributing to the continuous evaluation of the innovation portfolio as well as improving the internal innovation stage-gate process. After 9 months, I joined the product strategy team, where I was involved in various Business Technology Platform related efforts and the good thing was that this topic was linked to my Master Thesis.

Now I’m part of the newly formed Business Process Intelligence (BPI) team as a Business Development Associate. Being part of a growing organizational unit means that everyone’s contribution can play a lasting impact on defining internal processes as well as future-proofing all offerings under the BPI umbrella, on the other side this means working on somethings completely “new” within the SAP world. I am playing a crucial role in increasing our brand awareness due to the fact that I usually act as the first touchpoint for our external and internal customers to learn more about our offerings and the vision behind us. I am responsible for leading the first customer interactions into the right directions and translating customer demand into our product vision. However, it also challenges me in terms of mediating between so many different stakeholders at the same time each having specific requirements.

When talking about BPI it’s crucial to understand that business processes are the working foundation of any enterprise. But it’s not a secret that once you get your processes right, most probably a great customer experience will follow, so will increasing revenue and growth. That’s why we at SAP BPI made it to our goal to help companies understand and improve their business processes in a data driven way.

Working for BPI means to have the opportunity to be part of a newly formed start-up-style unit in which SAP brings together incredibly talented and motivated people and where everyone is having an equally high stake in building a unique value proposition for the market. To keep it short, I believe with BPI we are striving for constantly trying to identify the right customer problems, co-innovate together and support them with all the facets of their digital transformation.

The first thing that attracted me to SAP was the enormous footprint that this brand has all over the world, in the sense that so many enterprises heavily rely on SAP software and the respective business processes. Secondly, I got highly attracted by the idea of working in the award-winning Innovation Center in Potsdam, where I had the possibility to get to know cutting-edge technologies.

I really enjoy working for SAP with so many bright, talented and super motivated people that I haven’t experienced in any of my previous professional experiences. In my view, the focus on diversity and the openness to network really distinguishes SAP’s working culture from other companies. Diversity is crucial for a company long-term success. Simply because I believe that diverse teams are more innovative, since they are fostering different perspectives and experiences. Moreover, SAP is particularly successful in cultivating diversity, not only internally by hiring diverse and highly skilled people but also externally by promoting its diverse mindset and respective workforce.

Without this role at SAP I wouldn’t have had the possibility to meet and work with so many incredibly exciting people. Working at SAP opened so many new possibilities for me, not only looking at it from a professional perspective but also from a personal side that speeded up my overall development.

SAP support employees with a great work life balance. That’s why I can spend my free time to stay with my family and friends, or to simply be physically active by doing different sports, this helps me to unwind my mind, to refresh batteries and hence, being more focused when it comes to work.