Today, I would like to share with you our team story and encourage you to believe in your ideas, give them room to grow and add value. Learn how we turned a simple thought into a big vision and never tire up to create beautiful experiences for our colleagues and their families. My name is Veronika Ivanova and I am part of the TIES team at SAP.

As a global leader, SAP stands for a higher purpose that goes beyond economic success — our purpose is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. Being the entrepreneurial company that SAP is, I was given the opportunity to express an idea and inspire a team of volunteers at SAP to turn together that idea into reality. The idea is simple and built on the SAP® Cloud Platform: SAP TIES – a platform to share and get inspired @SAP! Here is our success story video!

You might ask, why do we need SAP TIES? Here is how it all started.
Another day at work: sun shining, projects ongoing. All seemed fine. Yet, horrific news in the media projecting someone else’s tragic reality filled with hate and prejudice, fear and sadness. This opened our eyes to the privilege and comfort of being part of the SAP international community, where diversity is cherished, and differences tolerated. No matter what our social, political, or religious views, we come together every day and give our best for our company’s and our customer’s success. We created SAP TIES to serve as an example to bring people together and inspire others to follow.

With SAP TIES, we encourage a culture of learning and sharing without bias or boundaries, to help promote a multicultural understanding within and outside of SAP. The beauty of our platform: we welcome all employees worldwide and their children too. SAP TIES reaches everyone, even at home. Here are some of the things you can do on our platform:

• Match with others who share the same interests as you or your children, i.e., reading or handball, and expand your connections with exciting experiences
• Engage with people from all over the world, learn new languages and cultures, and chat about your favorite topics
• Share ideas and insights, ask for support or advice or simply inspire others through our engagement forum
• Your children can build their own international friends’ circle and chat with others in our SAP family
• Always stay informed on what is trending on TIES and never miss an important conversation thanks to our notification services
• .. and more to come!

It is an opportunity to truly connect with each other outside of business obligations. You can stay in touch, support, and be close to each other independent of any circumstances whether travelling, working from office or staying at home. SAP TIES is another beautiful showcase that PEOPLE experience truly matters at SAP.

Read the SAP TIES success story below and watch the experience, get inspired to try it out for yourself or your family.

An international journey through our children’s eyes

From Rosemarie Fuhr (Innovation Manager, Employee Experience Management Team in Germany) and Jennifer Fleury (VP Global Cloud Services in the USA)

We are two colleagues from SAP that connected our families and our children. The Fuhr family hosted the Fleury children for 10 days in Germany this past June. Matthew Fleury is 16 and in 11^th grade and Michael Fleury is 15 and in 10^th grade. The Fuhr family also had two boys. Paul who is 18 and in 13^th grade and Mathis who is 17 and in 12^th grade.
Even though we happened to be in the same organization at the time, we had never worked together but became friends and got to know each other because of SAP TIES.

Our families’ experience was beyond our expectations. One of the key insights all the boys took away from this experience was teenagers in the US and in Germany enjoy a lot of the same things. Coming to Germany, the Fleury boys expected there to be many cultural differences and not to be able to communicate with the family that well, but they learned that the Fuhr boys were very similar to them and spoke English very well. Since the

Fleury boys were completely immersed into the German culture living with the Fuhr family for 10 days, they were truly able to understand how teenagers lived. The Fleury boys enjoyed the food, the architecture, the sports and so much more.

This shared experience is one we will not forget. Open-mindedness and adaptability were key for our children.

The Fuhr family balanced activities well so the boys from the US could get a good feel of what teenagers in Germany did. They live in Sinsheim where the boys stayed, but they visited Mannheim and Heidelberg in Germany; as well as Strasbourg in France.
They enjoyed their local pool, visited lakes and played volleyball. They spent a day at the SAP campus in Walldorf where they met international colleagues and they were invited to join the world-most-famous SAP lunch. Matthew and Michael were able to meet many friends of Paul and Mathis over games and dinner. On one of their final days before they left, they also got to visit a German school and experience what it means to go to school in another country.

See a short video about their experience.

Over the course of the 10 days, all four boys experienced each other’s cultures by seeing it firsthand and for the German boys, they were able to have conversations with the US boys and learn more.
The last days of the visit went so quickly as the German boys went back to school and the US boys joined them for a day and then flew home.

With SAP TIES, we can open our SAP community to our children and allow them to take on their own intercultural experience: either while travelling abroad – once life returns to “usual” or by inspiring them to have a digital pen friendship based on similar interests. Also, we as SAP employees can grow own network, enjoy our amazing community and get socially engaged.

Got curious? As an SAP employee, you can join SAP TIES and invite your children to do so too! If you wish to introduce SAP TIES in your company, feel free to reach out to us: ties@sap.com. We are happy to connect!