Since the first documented hackathon in 1999 at OpenBSD, there have been thousands of ‘hack marathons’ organised with the objective of bringing like-minded individuals together in a collaborative but competitive environment, to solve a problem in a short space of time.
From one hackathon to another, they all seem to share the same competitive structure and time-frame limitation. So what made the SAP Hack2Build stand out from the hackathon crowd and go #beyond the standard objectives of your average-joe hack day, codefest or codeathon; and how did Team EPI-USE Labs contribute to this difference?
“Our #Hack2Build event for SAP African partners on the theme of SAP Build brought together eight SAP partner expert teams with our SAP technology and business experts,” said Hans-Joachim Odlozinski, Manager MEE & Africa Services, Global Operations, SAP Co-Innovation Labs at SAP.
This year’s challenge was to extend an SAP solution using SAP Build with low code or no code development, also incorporating SAP Build Process Automation, with the end goal being to:
Team EPI-USE Labs: Overview of #Hack2Build entry
Team EPI-USE Labs was made up of developers Liam Burgess, Luke Greyling, Ashton Flowerday, Idrian van der Wetshuizen and Jhani Coetzee, collaborating to develop ChatterBox in response to the following pain point:
A user's workflow is slowed down when having to write an OData query for SuccessFactors. They may have limited or no knowledge and therefore struggle to write the queries.
Despite not placing, Team EPI-USE Labs received the best peer voting results from the participants of the Hack2Build event. Better yet, ChatterBox is able to generate OData queries to varying levels of complexity, meaning that it only has room to grow with new models and services becoming available from Google and OpenAI as well as data we will fine-tune and train it on. The solution also ensured that no PII information from the SuccessFactors system goes through ChatGPT.
Team EPI-USE Labs: Challenges and learnings
Throughout the course of the competition, the EPI-USE Labs team had to learn new and intricate skills, as SAP Build is SAP’s low code – a no-code solution that the team had to master to deliver the frontend system for the project. “SAP Build is a fun and structured manner for building a pristine user interface,” says Liam.
As well as mastering the no-code solution, the team also had to overcome limitations with OpenAI and ChatGPT, with the context limit (number of words) allowed in a request to ChatGPT being the biggest challenge. This limit prevented the team from being able to give ChatGPT all the reference information it would need at one time, meaning that without more context, the AI was unable to give good quality OData queries.
The team researched context injection as the solution. Through the use of embeddings generation and a vector database, the context limit was overcome to allow ChatGPT to perform the OData query generation with greater success. Prompt engineering was also a vital factor, with the team learning many tricks to allow ChatGPT to better understand the prompt provided.
The week was full of learnings, including learning more about, and implementing, multiple hosting technologies provided by SAP:
A physical extension of this innovative way of thinking and working, along with the incorporation of these newly-learned skills in prototypes and projects, is that of the EPI-USE AppHaus Pretoria.
The EPI-USE AppHaus Pretoria is an innovation hub likely to become a destination of choice for EPI-USE professionals engaging with client end-users, UX developers and architects, where they can explore potential solutions to business and operational challenges, and find out more about embedding ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Architecture Thinking’ into their organizations’ processes.
Learn more about the EPI-USE AppHaus Pretoria here:
#SAP #Hack2Build #Hackathon #EPIUSELabs #CodeFest #OpenAI #ChatGPT
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