 Dr. Paul Hofmann is Vice President Research at SAP Labs at Palo Alto. SAP is the world’s largest business software company. Before joining SAP Research Paul worked for the SAP Corporate Venturing Group. Paul joined SAP 2001 as Director Global Strategic Supply Chain Management Initiative EMEA. His pre-sales team designed and rolled out the SCM Value Based Selling Approach for EMEA and supported many crucial Supply Chain sales for SAP in EMEA (LEGO, Benteler, etc.).Prior to joining SAP, he was Senior Plant Manager at BASF’s Global Catalysts Business Unit in Ludwigshafen, Germany. BASF is the largest chemical company in the world. The BASF Group comprises more than 160 subsidiaries and joint ventures. It operates more than 150 production sites in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Africa. After joining BASF 1989 Paul headed the development of object-oriented production planning and scheduling software for BASF’s plants in the IT division of BASF. In collaboration with OO veterans like Bertrand Meyer and Edward V. Berard he and his team designed a Computer Integrated Manufacturing System for BASF. He led the team that implemented the OO design in C++ and Small Talk; one of the first big object oriented software projects in German industry. Later Paul became product manager and oversaw the ramp up and change management for his SW in the BASF plants where it was implemented. Paul led the implementation of SAP R/3 for BASF Chemicals Division.Paul was Researcher and Assistant Professor at top German and US Universities, like Northwestern University in Evanston/Chicago, Illinois, USA and at Technical University in Munich, Germany. He was a visiting scientist at MIT and gave lectures at UC Santa Cruz, HPI Postdam, Dresden Technical University and Joanneum Graz. At Northwestern he did molecular simulations to explain molecular beam reactions. He used the Cray supercomputers extensively for this work and collaborated with Sir John Pople (Nobel Prize laureate). At Munich Paul used Associative Memory Systems -AMS- (Neuronal Networks) to predict chemical reactions in mass spectrometers. The AMS was implemented in one of the first commercially available Unix machines in Germany (CADMUS). Paul studied Chemistry and Physics at the University of Vienna, Austria. He received a Bachelor in biotechnology and a master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Vienna. He did his Ph.D.in Physics at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. At Darmstadt he wrote SW for the design of molecules (drugs) using computer graphics. He was part of a team that developed SW for Silicon Graphics MOLCAD. His thesis is on non-linear quantum dynamics and chaos theory. He is the author of numerous publications and books, including a book on SCM and environmental information systems as well as Performance Management and Productivity of Supply Chains. Paul was visiting scientist at Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at MIT, Cambridge, MA in Spring 2009 |