SAP AG announced the launch of its new SAP Scouting solution, an enterprise offering designed to enable sports franchises to improve their ability to identify and acquire on-field talent. The announcement was made at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
SAP developed the solution in partnership with the National Football League’s (NFL) San Francisco 49ers during preparation for the 2013 NFL Draft. The SAP Scouting solution was designed to bring together the power of cloud and in-memory technologies to help teams take a major step forward in incorporating the use of technology to help drive key player personnel decisions. With the solution, sports teams will be able to improve their scouting and player evaluation processes.
“SAP is committed to delivering world-class solutions that help teams improve on-field performance and enhance the fan experience,” said Vishal Sikka, SAP AG Executive Board member. “By partnering with the San Francisco 49ers, true visionaries in the sports industry, we’ve been able to develop a groundbreaking solution based on the SAP HANA platform that will help them drive a competitive edge.”
Key features of the SAP Scouting solution include:
- The ability for scouts, executives, coaches and trainers to access and enter player evaluations with a modern, easy-to-use application powered by the SAP HANA platform, SAP’s in-memory computing platform.
- Create a complete and unified picture of each prospect by bringing together information from qualitative evaluations with quantitative information from scouting databases and other sources.
- Compare prospects in real time and benchmark them against professionals at their position.
- Collaborate to develop a draft-day strategy with an interactive draft board.
According to SAP, these capabilities will empower teams to transform the scouting and player evaluation processes, making them more efficient so that they can execute faster, smarter and simpler as they prepare for draft day. By creating a persistent, player-centric data model, teams will also be able to create a strong foundation for the application of more advanced analytics for roster optimization in the future.
“We continue to work in partnership with SAP in an effort to develop a comprehensive, state of the art solution for our scouting department,” said Trent Baalke, San Francisco 49ers General Manager. “It is being designed to collect, manage and view every aspect our scouting department utilizes to evaluate a prospect’s current and projected level of performance. While the development is ongoing, the solution is already helping us analyze testing and performance data at a level previously unavailable to our department.”
CLO Inside Track: If there’s a business need – no matter how far afield that need seems to be from the realms of technology, sooner or later somebody will come up with an app for that. And in the case of SAP’s cloud-based scouting solution, this app can serve up mountains of data on prospective players, synthesize it into a clear format and deliver it to mobile devices. The jury is still out on whether the scouting solution is a killer app, but more complete data and stronger qualitative analysis is always a valuable commodity in professional sports franchises.
(For additional information contact: SAP, 925-336-6203, www.sap.com; http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sap-scouting-solution-enables-sports-franchises-to-draft-players-more-efficiently-194186141.html.)
Recent Comments