CERATIZIT & Soley Leverage SAP for Sustainable Product Portfolio Management

Pioneering Sustainable and Profitable Product Optimization

CERATIZIT Group, a leading manufacturer of hard material machining solutions, teamed up with Soley GmbH and SAP to revolutionize sustainable product portfolio management. Their collaboration earned them recognition as nominees for the 2025 SAP Innovation Awards and winners of the Supply & Demand Chain Executive award, underscoring a successful blend of sustainability and profitability.

The Challenge: Managing Complexity at Scale

CERATIZIT faced the intricate challenge of overseeing a vast product portfolio exceeding 65,000 items within its Cutting Tool Solutions division. Balancing economic viability with ecological responsibility required enhanced transparency into product performance, carbon emissions, and supplier impacts. Prior manual reporting processes limited timely strategic decision-making and hampered sustainability efforts.

Innovative AI-Powered Solution by Soley

Munich-based Soley GmbH introduced the Soley Product Mining Platform, an AI-driven solution fully integrated with SAP’s technology suite to address this complexity:

• AI Advisor: Delivers actionable recommendations, such as phasing out products with high carbon footprints yet low profitability.
• AI Assistant: Offers a user-friendly natural language interface, enabling effortless interaction without technical expertise.
• AI Detective: Illuminates hidden dependencies and strategic optimization opportunities across product configurations.

This platform harnesses data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Warehouse, with SAP BTP as a service layer and SAP Datasphere consolidating data. SAP Analytics Cloud drives AI models, aided by SAP Databricks and advanced graph analytics for dependency analysis.

Impactful Results & Business Benefits

By integrating CERATIZIT’s Product Carbon Footprint data with financial insights, the platform creates a comprehensive digital twin enabling full visibility into product environmental and economic metrics. Key outcomes recorded within nine months include:

• 87% adoption of AI-suggested sustainability measures.
• Over 30% reduction in end-of-life products with negative carbon impact.
• 100% transparency in sustainability across product hierarchies.
• A 10% increase in Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT).
• 75% improvement in delivery reliability and supply chain resilience.
• 40% reduction in inventory levels.
• Return on investment achieved in under 12 months.

Driving the Future of Sustainable Supply Chains

Dominik Metzger, President and Chief Product Officer of SAP Supply Chain Management, emphasizes AI and real-time analytics as central to building autonomous, resilient, and sustainable supply chains. This case demonstrates how enterprises can simultaneously advance ecological goals and financial performance with intelligent data usage.

Alexander Springer, CEO of Soley GmbH, highlights the strategic advantage gained by identifying critical products and proactively mitigating supply risks.

Conclusion: A Scalable Model for Sustainable Digital Transformation

The CERATIZIT-Soley-SAP initiative exemplifies how combining robust SAP technologies with cutting-edge AI analytics enables manufacturing companies to achieve sustainable growth without compromising profitability. This partnership sets a benchmark for industries aiming to integrate ESG factors into actionable business intelligence.

Additional Resources

• Soley Product Mining Platform on SAP Store
• Latest SAP Supply Chain Management Innovations
• Subscribe to SAP News for weekly updates on sustainable business technologies.

Tags: AI, Carbon Footprint, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, Sustainable Supply Chain, Product Portfolio Management

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