He joined SAP in April 1998 as a developer working with HR and Workforce Management software before moving on to the Business Process Renovation Team. One of his first challenges was to evaluate Smalltalk as a tool for rapid prototyping. Together with consultants from Georg Heeg eK, he has successfully completed two Smalltalk projects at SAP. At the end of these two projects, Ralf became the main SAP contact during Cincom Smalltalk’s VisualWorks-to-SAP integration project.