Soley and CERATIZIT, recognized together with SAP by Supply & Demand Chain Executive and nominated for the Innovation Awards, were able to achieve impressive sustainability results thanks to AI: an 87 percent realization rate in the implementation of proposed measures and a 10 percent increase in earnings before interest and taxes.
Soley GmbH and its customer, the CERATIZIT Group, received an award from the magazine together with SAP at the beginning of the year Supply & Demand Chain Executive. The companies that were also nominated for this year’s SAP Innovation Awards are pursuing a groundbreaking approach to the sustainable optimization of product portfolios. With their innovative implementation of the Soley Product Mining Platform and SAP technologies for Supply Chain Management (SCM), they demonstrated that sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand.
Managing complex product portfolios at scale
CERATIZIT Group, a leading provider of hard materials solutions for machining and wear protection, was faced with a difficult issue that many modern manufacturing companies know all too well: managing a complex product portfolio with over 65,000 products. The company’s cutting tools division needed a solution to achieve economic and environmental goals while maintaining competitive advantages.
Klaus Lupfer, Product Lifecycle Manager at CERATIZIT Deutschland GmbH, describes the company’s motivation: “When partnering with Soley, the economic perspective on the product portfolio was just as important to us as the ecological aspect. As a company that has been striving for sustainability for years, we are particularly pleased about the opportunities that the expansion of data on the CO₂ footprint of products offers us.”
A challenge was not only the size of the product portfolio, but also the lack of transparency regarding the key figures for product performance and sustainability. Employees spent a lot of time creating reports instead of making strategic decisions. In addition, a lack of insight into materials and suppliers made it difficult to efficiently outsource energy-intensive products.
AI-supported product portfolio analysis
Munich-based Soley GmbH, which took part in a former SAP.iO accelerator program for start-ups to promote and integrate innovative solutions into the SAP ecosystem, developed an innovative approach to address this issue. The Soley Product Mining Platform, available as part of SAP’s extension and add-on solutions, includes three innovative core capabilities based on artificial intelligence (AI) that enable faster, smarter and more informed business decisions to derive meaningful insights from complex product data:
- The AI Advisor uses generative AI to provide precise recommendations for action – for example, suggestions about which products should be removed from the range in order to minimize the carbon footprint without affecting margins.
- In addition, the AI Assistant provides an intuitive user interface that uses natural language and allows users without extensive technical knowledge to interact with Soley effortlessly.
- AI Detective also analyzes data to uncover hidden dependencies and identify strategic opportunities, such as which configuration options should be removed to improve both profitability and sustainability performance.
The Soley Product Mining Platform pulls data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Warehouse, using the SAP Business Technology Platform as a service layer. SAP Datasphere consolidates SAP data and analytics, while SAP Analytics Cloud provides the analytics that form the core of the AI model. This technical architecture enables intelligent data extraction and transformation via SAP Databricks, while extensive graph analysis allows complex dependency analysis.
“With these SAP solutions, we are setting new standards in terms of sustainability in the high-tech and manufacturing industries,” emphasizes Ephraim Triemer, partner and advisor for enterprise accounts at Soley. “For the first time, our customers can expand reporting beyond environmental, social and governance and take concrete action. They can drive greater sustainability while keeping an eye on profitability.”
Seamless SAP integration creates added value
By combining CERATIZIT product carbon footprint data with financial metrics, the Soley Product Mining Platform can create a digital twin that identifies opportunities, identifies risks, and analyzes product hierarchies, BOMs, and carbon footprint. And using AI, Soley’s developers ensure that the platform’s features enable decisions and outcomes that improve both profitability and environmental protection.
Dominik Metzger, who was named President and Chief Product Officer of SAP Supply Chain Management earlier this year, emphasizes how important it is for him to focus on resilience, sustainability and intelligent automation:
“My biggest concern is that we not only help customers deal with disruptions, but also enable them to plan and act proactively… We achieve this by combining AI, generative AI, real-time data and predictive analytics with the power of SAP technology. Our vision is to build an autonomous supply chain that is connected, contextual and enables collaboration.”
SAP SCM drives transformation
The analysis delivered impressive and measurable results and demonstrated the potential of AI-driven analytics in combination with SAP technologies. CERATIZIT notes a realization rate of 87 percent when implementing the proposed measures, which promotes sustainability in terms of products and further optimizes the supply chain. At the same time, the company achieved a reduction of over 30 percent in products with a negative carbon footprint that were no longer needed and created complete transparency in sustainability data across all elements, product groups and aggregation levels.
Alexander Springer, CEO of Soley GmbH, explains the strategic importance of this: “If you know which products are most important to the overall success of your company, you can focus on securing the value chain for these products and take proactive steps to avoid potential supply risks.”
A model for sustainable digital transformation
The successful partnership between CERATIZIT, Soley and SAP shows how modern companies can implement both economic and ecological goals through the intelligent use of data and AI. The combination of proven SAP technologies and innovative analysis solutions creates measurable added value for companies of all sizes. For other SAP customers and partners, this example demonstrates that sustainability and profitability do not have to be mutually exclusive; with the right technologies and partners, both goals can be achieved simultaneously.
Find out more from Dominik Metzger about the latest developments in SAP Supply Chain Management.
The Soley Product Mining Platform is available in the SAP Store at store.sap.com available.
