PwC South Africa has taken top honours at the African SAP User Group’s (AFSUG) inaugural SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) Hackathon finale, which took place live at the recent SAPHILA 2025 conference, AFSUG’s premier SAP user conference for Africa.

The AFSUG SAP BTP Hackathon invited AFSUG members - including customers, partners or joint teams - to submit creative, impactful use cases or projects using SAP BTP components such as SAP Build, SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Integration Suite and ABAP Cloud.

After an intensive eight-week development sprint, three teams, who were shortlisted from an original 18 entrants, were invited to present their real-world, use case-based business solutions at the event. These included: PwC South Africa; Bell Equipment, a manufacturer and distributor of heavy equipment for sectors including mining, construction and agriculture; and the Debswana Diamond Company, one of the world’s foremost diamond producers by value and volume. Each team showcased the solutions they had explored, designed and built using SAP BTP.

In a closely contested finale, the SAPHILA audience voted live to award the PwC South Africa AI-driven legal document solution first place.

PwC South Africa simplifies legal document processing and understanding with AI

PwC’s winning solution is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed to streamline the understanding and processing of legal documents. It aims to address common challenges such as unexpected charges, misleading billing, difficulties in cancelling contracts and the complexity of legal language.

Citing consumer experience statistics during the presentation, the PwC team noted that 91 percent of consumers have signed contracts without reading them

Key features of the PwC solution:

The solution included document scanning and summarisation, an interactive Q&A module and translation capabilities into the user’s native language. The solution also incorporated a knowledge base of related services and policies to improve user awareness and drive upselling opportunities.

From a technical perspective, the solution uses SAP AI Core, SAP Build Apps, Cloud Application Programming model (CAP) and the SAP HANA Vector engine to leverage SAP’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach, enabling smart prompt engineering, document embedding and contextual queries.

Future use cases for the proof-of-concept could include seamless onboarding of new employees, allowing them to familiarise themselves with company policies in an interactive way; insight into customers’ understanding of the organisation’s services; and AI-assistance on scope validation and obligations of contracts and statements of work.

Debswana solution tackles overtime risk and streamlines HR processes

As the runner up, the Debswana Diamond Company team presented a compelling use case focused on overtime management and compliance, a critical concern for the organisation, given that overtime affects approximately 80 percent of its workforce of over 4,400 employees.

The team highlighted how ineffective overtime management could not only inflate operational costs, but also compromise employee well-being, with issues such as fatigue and insufficient take-home pay linked directly to unscheduled or poorly managed overtime.

The current overtime process at Debswana is manual and paper-based, managed through spreadsheets and reliant on negative time-tracking, a method that depends heavily on manager and employee inputs for both planning and capture. This creates risks in governance, data accuracy and training effectiveness, especially given that the process mainly affects frontline mining staff.

To address these challenges, the Debswana team developed an AI-powered overtime assistant using SAP BTP services. The application enables managers to plan overtime more efficiently by inputting a simple command, prompting the system to generate a historical-data-informed overtime schedule. The AI evaluates employee work histories to avoid overloading those who have already clocked high overtime hours, improving safety and fairness issues.

Bell Equipment streamlines shipment tracking process with automation

In third place, Bell Equipment addressed a critical logistics challenge: accurately matching inbound shipments with their expected delivery dates, essential information for effective planning of customer part deliveries and meeting demand forecasts.

Previously, capturing sea freight shipment data was a manual, time-consuming task, and any changes to estimated delivery dates would not be reflected in the system, introducing significant business risk. In some cases, the company had to resort to costly air freight to meet customer commitments.

To overcome this, the Bell Equipment team designed an intelligently automated solution that could create inbound delivery records and maintain accurate estimated times of arrival (ETAs). This would allow the company’s materials planning system to proactively flag potential stock shortages and enable early intervention to mitigate risk.

The solution leverages SAP Build Process Automation for bot and workflow automation, and SAP Cloud Application Programming (CAP) for the development of the application interface. Key functionalities include scheduled, fully automated execution without manual intervention; a bot that monitors a designated Outlook inbox for incoming shipment documents such as waybills and freight invoices; the automatic download and storage of these documents, triggering document classification and data extraction processes.

Using optical character recognition (OCR), the system identifies and classifies different types of documents. Each document type is then processed through a tailored automation pipeline. Following this step, the solution cross-checks the extracted information against existing records. If a corresponding shipment already exists, it is updated; if not, a new record is created.

Participating with passion and purpose

Olaf Winkler, BTP product management at SAP, reflected on the core objectives of the hackathon initiative and the journey that brought customers and partners together to explore the full capabilities of the SAP BTP.

"The main objective was to ensure strong collaboration between SAP and participating customers, and to provide our local BTP customers with a practical opportunity to explore the platform," said Winkler. "We wanted customers to truly understand what SAP BTP can offer and to begin building real solutions on the platform."

The initiative began with an ideation phase in the previous year, followed by an onboarding programme to ensure all participants had a clear understanding of the available tools and services. A team of 10 SAP coaches supported the journey, helping participants shape their use cases and align their work with key SAP BTP components.

“We had 18 amazing teams enter the hackathon, each of them using SAP BTP to develop impressive, real-world solutions. A key criterion in evaluating these was the innovative use of less commonly used BTP services, such as artificial intelligence, to demonstrate what’s possible on the platform.”

Product managers from SAP participated in the judging process, providing a global perspective and ensuring technical and business relevance in the final selection.

Winkler also acknowledged the effort and creativity of all participating teams. “The quality of the solutions presented was outstanding, not only from the finalists seen on stage, but from all 18 teams. The decisions weren’t easy, and we had several close calls between second and third place, and even between first and second.”

Says Amanda Gibbs, AFSUG CEO: “Firstly, AFSUG would like to congratulate the PwC South Africa team for winning our first SAP BTP hackathon - your energy and ideas were truly inspiring. Secondly, a heartfelt thank you to all the teams involved for their significant time investment and commitment. It is inspiring to witness what can be achieved in just eight weeks using SAP BTP; we’ve seen incredible progress and innovation.

“It has also been a real privilege to work alongside the incredible SAP team from Germany and our dedicated local SAP South Africa team, and AFSUG extends its gratitude for the many hours of input, guidance and unwavering support given to our local participants.”