We’ve just received the great news that Zalando has been selected as a Finalist for the 2016 SAP HANA Innovation Award! With over 100 entries this year, we have been picked among the top three in the Process Simplifier category. This is truly an honour, as being a Finalist shows that Zalando is recognised as being a world class innovator.

We’re creating the foundation for digital transformation moving forward, and you can be part of the journey. While the judges have determined 80% of the vote, the rest is up to you! Public voting has just kicked off and we need your support to come out on top. Here’s how you can make a difference:

Register and vote for Zalando here for your chance to win a sizable donation to charity – only votes on Finalist entries count and you can vote once per category. Public voting closing on April 21st, 2016, so after you vote, why not Tweet about it?

Use the hashtag #HANAStory to broadcast your vote for Zalando. We’ll be doing it too! Be sure to follow us on Twitter as well: @Zalando and @ZalandoTech.

Need some background on how we’ve become a Finalist?

With Zalando transforming itself into a platform, we had to prepare our systems for even more mass data processing and high performance. In June 2015 we started to think about SAP HANA and the required Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) migration to HANA to link with a long-term Smart Data Strategy. We decided to set up a proof of concept for ERP on HANA with two objectives:

1. To find out which FI-CA operations run faster and - more importantly - which operations might slow down
2. To obtain an understanding of the entire migration process and all additional activities required

Regarding the performance of different business transactions, we found several customer-specific enhancements which ruined the program run on HANA. Furthermore, we discovered some SAP FI-CA standard functionality which didn’t perform as expected. We fixed our customer-specific programs and SAP provided us with eight new notes in total for FI-CA, which then tuned the standard functions.

After one test migration we could migrate ERP on HANA successfully by the end of November 2015, becoming the first SAP FI-CA customer worldwide.

So what are you waiting for? VOTE NOW!

We're hiring! Do you like working in an ever evolving organization such as Zalando? Consider joining our teams as a Software Engineer!