Design Delight Studio

CERATIZIT & Soley Harness SAP Technology for Sustainable Product Portfolio Management

Date: October 21, 2025
Author: Jeanette Rohr

Overview

CERATIZIT Group, a leader in hard material solutions, in partnership with Soley GmbH, has pioneered an AI-driven sustainable product portfolio management system powered by SAP technologies. Their collaboration demonstrates that sustainability and profitability can be simultaneously optimized in complex manufacturing environments.

The Challenge: Managing Complexity & Sustainability

CERATIZIT’s Cutting Tool Solutions division manages an extensive portfolio exceeding 65,000 products. The company needed a way to integrate ecological considerations—especially product carbon footprints—alongside economic performance to maintain market competitiveness. Limited transparency and manual reporting efforts impaired strategic decision-making regarding product sustainability and supplier selection.

Innovative AI Solutions from Soley

Soley’s Product Mining Platform, integrated within SAP’s ecosystem, utilizes artificial intelligence to convert vast product data into actionable insights. Its three AI components include:

• AI Advisor: Recommends precise actions like phasing out high-emission products without hurting margins.
• AI Assistant: Provides a user-friendly, natural-language interface requiring no technical expertise.
• AI Detective: Reveals hidden dependencies and identifies opportunities to improve profitability and sustainability.

The platform pulls data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Warehouse, leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), SAP Datasphere, Databricks, and SAP Analytics Cloud to enable complex analytics and real-time insights.

Impact and Results

• Sustainability gains: Over 30% reduction in end-of-life products with negative carbon footprints; 100% transparency in product sustainability data.
• Operational improvements: 87% adoption rate of suggested AI-driven measures.
• Business benefits: 10% increase in EBIT through optimized working capital, 75% boost in delivery reliability, and 40% inventory reduction within nine months.
• ROI: Achieved in less than one year, reflecting rapid value creation.

Leadership and Vision

Dominik Metzger, President & Chief Product Officer at SAP Supply Chain Management, emphasizes leveraging AI, generative AI, real-time data, and predictive analytics to build autonomous, resilient, and sustainable supply chains. Soley’s CEO Alexander Springer highlights the strategic advantage of focusing on critical products to mitigate supply risks and safeguard value chains.

Significance for Industry

This collaboration sets a benchmark for sustainable digital transformation in high-tech and manufacturing sectors. It illustrates how combining SAP’s proven platforms with AI innovations can create measurable economic and ecological value. The CERATIZIT-Soley-SAP model affirms that sustainability aligns with profitability when supported by intelligent, data-driven tools.

Additional Resources

• Soley Product Mining Platform on SAP Store
• Latest SAP Supply Chain Management Updates
• Subscribe to SAP Newsletter for weekly insights

Tags: AI, Carbon footprint, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Business Warehouse, SAP BTP, SAP Databricks, SAP Innovation Awards, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Supply Chain Management, Customer story

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