SAP University Competence Center (UCC)

Technical University of Munich | Department of Informatics | Chair for Information Systems

Contact Person: Dr. Holger Wittges

Overview

The SAP University Competence Center (UCC) at Technical University of Munich (TUM) is an established Education as a Service (EaaS) provider that offers enterprise systems and technology platforms as a service for teaching, research and co-innovation within the SAP University Alliances (UA) program, SAP Next-Gen program and the SAP Young Thinkers (YT) initiative. Above that, it covers educational aspects such as providing ready to use teaching data and curricula for these software and platform service (as shown in Figure 1).

The SAP UCC at TUM provides various educational services for teaching, researching and co-innovating in the context of SAP solutions. These educational services represent complex bundles of hardware, software, services, teaching data and material.

The SAP UCC at TUM provides more than 50 educational services bundles, such as access to an in-memory database for teaching analytics and application development, or an SAP S/4HANA client for teaching integrated business processes in the era of the digital transformation.

All educational services are operated on a common IT-infrastructure and come with a set of services such as technical and application support as well as community management for the lecturers all over the world. The educational services mainly differ on the software layer (e.g. in products such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP and SAP HANA), and in teaching data and materials for these software solutions. 

Structure and Research

The SAP University Competence Center is a research cluster at the Chair of Information Systems (I17), Department of Informatics. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Helmut Krcmar, one of the leading professors in economics and information systems research, is the academic director while Dr. Holger Wittges (Managing Director) is responsible for the operations and the personnel management at the SAP UCC at TUM. Currently, there are 13 staff members, spread across two groups (application and technical administration).

Most of the employees at the SAP UCC at TUM are also scientific research associates at TUM in an acquisition of the doctoral degree focusing on modern enterprise systems and their related technologies. The scientific work at the UCC covers three research areas: performance management work, enterprise systems education and IT service management. The research activities are embedded in the research strategy of the Chair of Information Systems under the supervision of Univ.-Prof. Dr. Helmut Krcmar.

One of the main purposes in its research activities is to develop innovative and competency-based curricula and teaching methods in the fields of Digital Transformation, Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0.

Value

  • By using the Education as a Service offering of the SAP UCC at TUM, educational institutions enhance their course offerings and portfolio by focusing on their core competencies without hosting and maintaining the entire hardware and software stack.
  • Students gain access to practice relevant enterprise software applications and their underlying technologies.
  • SAP makes its latest business software and platforms available for tomorrow’s IT specialists, users, and decision makers.
  • Our infrastructure and software partner IBM demonstrate the capabilities of their latest hardware technology and systems software.
  • Our research lab for SAP solutions and technologies transfers knowledge into research and practice by constantly publishing results.

Partners

The SAP UCC at TUM acts as an ecosystem and cooperates with different partners from industry and academia. Our software partner SAP, for example, provides the licenses for the offered software products. IBM acts as a hardware, software and service partner by offering servers, database management systems and software solutions for hosting, operations and maintenance. The system hosting is situated at the Department of Informatics at TUM supported by the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ).

The SAP UCC at TUM cooperates with the SAP University Competence Centers worldwide as well as with different faculties that are part of the SAP Universities Alliances / SAP Next-Gen program. The curricula are developed and offered in close cooperation with the different academic partners and SAP Universities Alliances / SAP Next-Gen. 

Services

The SAP UCC at TUM's service offering is a product-service-system (PSS) bundle and contains the following components:

  1. 24/7 operation and maintenance of the SAP solutions and landscapes
  2. Professional guidance for educators on how to deploy SAP software in their teaching
  3. Curricula design and development that can be directly applied for teaching or innovation enablement
  4. Technical and application support for SAP educational services
  5. Additional enablement services for individual projects (e.g. trainings)
  6. Ecosystem management for lecturers, researches and industry partners
  7. Train-the-trainer courses for lecturers, interested in teaching SAP solutions at their institutions
  8. Knowledge transfer to academia and industry partners via various publication outlets

Members

The SAP UCC at TUM interacts in general with three different target groups of members by offering services for teaching, research and co-innovation projects (with industry).

Services for teaching: The SAP UCC at TUM supports more than 340 academic institutions, more than 1,800 registered lecturers and approx. 54,000 students (each semester) in the EMEA (Europe/ Middle East/ Africa) region by offering educational services. Additionally, lecturers within the SAP UA / Next-Gen program can participate in train-the-trainer (TTT) courses, offered by the UCC solution experts. The service portfolio is offered to a variety of academic institutions such as universities, universities of applied sciences, colleges, vocational schools, and secondary schools/other schools.

Services for research: The SAP UCC at TUM also offers its services to research universities and other research institutions. In this context, the UCC acts as a partner in various research projects or as a supporting service provider by provisioning and supporting the IT infrastructure. Universities can conduct fundamental as well as practical research projects together with the UCC.

Services for co-innovation (with industry): To enable and support innovation not only in academia but also in industry, the UCC established an own structure, the Innovation Center (IC). The Innovation Center at SAP UCC at TUM offers enablement services, such as the sizing, hosting and support of SAP and non-SAP (3rd party) solutions. It also acts as a co-innovation partner by offering systems and expertise in SAP solutions and research.

Scientific Partners

Technische Universität München, Chair for Information Systems (Prof. Dr. H. Krcmar)

Business Partners

Additional Information

Webpages
SAP UCC TUM Homepage
SAP UCC TUM Portal 
University Alliances at SAP Community Network

Contact

Dr. Holger Wittges