Dr. Paul Hofmann Vice President Research, SAP Labs, Palo Alto, CA

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.
 
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 and operates more than 150 production sites in Europe, Asia, Australia, North America, South America and Africa. BASF has customers in over 200 countries and supplies products to a wide variety of industries. The company employs more than 95,000 people and has sales of 53 billion Euros. Between 1990 and 2005, the company invested €5.6 billion in Asia, for example in sites near Nanjing and Shanghai, China.

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 was Researcher and Assistant Professor at top German and US Universities, like Northwestern University in Chicago, Evanston Illinois, USA and at Technical University in Munich, Germany. At Northwestern he did molecular simulations to explain molecular beam reactions. He used the Cray supercomputers extensively for this work and collaborated with John Popel (Nobel Prize laureate). At Munich Paul used Associative Memory Systems (AMS - Neuronal Networks) to predict chemical reactions in mass spectrographs. 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 completed 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.