Soley GmbH and its customer CERATIZIT Group, nominees for this year’s SAP Innovation Awards and winners of the Supply & Demand Chain Executive award earlier this year alongside SAP, have demonstrated a groundbreaking approach to sustainable product portfolio optimization.

Through their innovative implementation of Soley’s Product Mining Platform with SAP’s supply chain management technologies, they prove that sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand.

The challenge: managing complex product portfolios at scale

CERATIZIT Group, a leading provider of hard material solutions for machining and wear protection, faced a challenge common to many modern manufacturing companies: managing a complex product portfolio with over 65,000 products. The company’s Cutting Tool Solutions division needed a solution to balance economic and ecological objectives while maintaining competitive advantage.

Klaus Lupfer, product lifecycle manager at CERATIZIT Deutschland GmbH, explains the company’s motivation: “In addition to the economic perspective on the product portfolio, the ecological aspect was equally important when partnering with Soley. As a company committed to sustainability for years, we are especially excited about the opportunities that the expansion of product carbon footprint data offers.”

The challenge was not just the product portfolio’s size but also the lack of transparency regarding product performance and sustainability metrics. Employees spent considerable time compiling reports rather than making strategic decisions, while limited insights into critical materials and suppliers prevented efficient phaseout of high-emission products.

AI-powered product portfolio analysis

Munich-based Soley GmbH, a past participant in the SAP.iO program, SAP’s former startup accelerator designed to foster and integrate innovative solutions into the SAP ecosystem, developed an innovative response to this challenge. The Soley Product Mining Platform, available as part of SAP’s extension and add-on solutions, transforms complex product data into actionable insights through three core, AI-driven innovations that enable faster, smarter, and more impactful business decisions.

• AI Advisor uses AI to recommend precise actions—for example, suggesting which products should be phased out to minimize carbon footprint without sacrificing margins.
• AI Assistant provides an intuitive, natural-language interface that allows users to effortlessly interact with Soley, without requiring deep technical expertise.
• AI Detective analyzes data to uncover hidden dependencies and reveal strategic opportunities, such as identifying which configuration options should be eliminated to optimize both profitability and sustainability.

The Soley Product Mining Platform draws data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Warehouse, utilizing SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) as the service layer. SAP Datasphere helps consolidate 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 through SAP Databricks, while massive graph analytics enable complex dependency analysis.

“With these SAP solutions, we’re delivering a true game changer for the sustainability of the high tech and manufacturing industries,” says Ephraim Triemer, shareholder and advisor of Enterprise Accounts at Soley. “For the first time, our customers can go beyond ESG reporting and take real action—driving sustainability while staying laser focused on profitability.”

Seamless SAP integration creates value

By combining CERATIZIT’s Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) data with financial metrics, the Soley Product Mining Platform creates a digital twin that uncovers opportunities, identifies risks, and analyzes product hierarchies, bills of materials, and carbon footprints. With AI-driven intelligence guidance, Soley developers ensure the platform’s capabilities enable decisions and outcomes that improve both profitability and environmental stewardship.

Earlier this year, Dominik Metzger was appointed as president and Chief Product Officer of SAP Supply Chain Management, bringing a renewed focus on resilience, sustainability, and intelligent automation.

“My chief priority is to ensure that we help customers not only respond to disruptions but also proactively prepare and act,” Metzger said. “We can do so by leveraging AI, generative AI, real-time data, and predictive analytics with the power of SAP’s technology. Our vision is to build an autonomous supply chain—connected, contextualized, and collaborative.”

SAP SCM leadership driving transformation

The implementation delivered impressive, measurable results that demonstrate the power of combining AI-driven analytics with SAP technologies. CERATIZIT achieved an 87% implementation rate of suggested measures, driving product sustainability and supply chain optimization. Simultaneously, the company realized a reduction of over 30% in end-of-life “ballast” products with negative carbon footprints while creating 100% transparency in sustainability data across all elements, product sets, and aggregation levels.

The business impact was equally impressive: CERATIZIT recorded a 10% increase in its Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) through optimized working capital, a 75% improvement in delivery reliability and resilience, and a 40% inventory reduction within nine months. Return on investment was achieved in less than 12 months.

Alexander Springer, CEO of Soley GmbH, explains the strategic significance: “If you know which products are the most critical to the overall success of your business, you can focus on safeguarding the value chain for those products, taking proactive steps to avoid any potential supply risks.”

A model for sustainable digital transformation

The successful partnership between CERATIZIT, Soley, and SAP demonstrates how modern companies can achieve both economic and ecological goals through intelligent use of data and AI. The combination of proven SAP technologies and innovative analytics solutions creates measurable value for companies of all sizes. For other SAP customers and partners, this example shows that sustainability and profitability need not be opposing forces—with the right technologies and partners, both objectives can be achieved simultaneously.

Learn more about the latest updates to SAP supply chain management. The Soley Product Mining Platform is available on SAP Store.

Business travel is up in the air. The toss-up between cost-savings, employee safety, and the value of in-person interaction is an ongoing boardroom debate. In the age of virtual calls, many employees are desperate to hit the road, while others prefer to conduct their business via digital channels.

Whichever side of the fence you fall on, business travel remains vital to build working relationships and drive growth. Yet, there are certain topics relating to company travel initiatives that don’t have full stakeholder agreement. To understand the perspectives, challenges, and opportunities, it’s vital that leaders know where the disconnects lie.

The seventh annual SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey asked 3,750 business travelers, 700 travel managers, and 600 chief financial officers (CFOs) about friction points in business travel. These are the main areas where we found some disagreement.

The need for business travel

The overwhelming majority (94%) of business travelers believe travel is helpful, if not essential, to success in their roles. Yet, 43% of CFOs say more than half of their company’s business travel could effectively be replaced by teleconferencing or other communication methods that don’t require travel. A third (33%) of travel managers view the tilt towards virtual meeting options as a direct threat to their company’s business travel.

Employee willingness to travel

There’s a disconnect over a perceived lack of enthusiasm to travel. Seventy percent of business travelers are very willing to travel over the next 12 months, marking an increase from 67% in 2023. Yet, this optimism is not universally shared within organizations. Thirty-five percent of travel managers view employees’ unwillingness as a potential threat to business travel and nearly half (45%) of CFOs believe employee reluctance or refusal to travel could negatively impact company health within the next year. While many employees are very willing to hit the road, concerns remain among CFOs and travel managers about whether travel enthusiasm is widespread enough to fully support business goals.

Changes in travel budgets

Each role has a different view on how travel budgets are evolving. Nearly half (48%) of business travelers are worried that their company’s travel budgets will remain stagnant or decrease this year. On the bright side, only 24% of CFOs and 22% of travel managers say budgets will be reduced or stay the same—suggesting a disconnect between employee fears and management’s financial outlook.

The roles that hold the most influence

There’s a perception gap over who influences business travel decision-making. Business travelers believe travel managers (37%) and CFOs (36%) have similar influence, significantly ahead of their own at 28%. However, travel managers are broadly aligned in feeling they (43%) have nearly the same amount of influence as CFOs (41%), compared to only 16% for business travelers. CFOs strongly disagree, with 69% believing they are the most influential decision-makers, significantly ahead of travel managers (21%) and travelers (9%).

The impact of budget limitations

Although they see travel as critical to their roles, two-thirds (66%) of business travelers say important trips have been curtailed due to costs. In alignment, 69% of travel managers believe their company travel budget fails to reflect the importance of business travel to their organization’s success. And whilst CFOs acknowledge the problem, there’s dissent in the ranks. Fifty-one percent of CFOs somewhat agree that budget limitations stop employees from traveling as much as they need to do their jobs well, while just 29% strongly agree.

How data can help to solve the business travel debate

These findings highlight the different perceptions between travelers, travel managers, and CFOs, for the first time in our SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey. To empower employees to develop professionally and create new opportunities on the road, it’s vital that every role in the organization aligns on common goals.

Bridging these gaps requires more than dialogue—it demands visibility. Organizations need a shared source of truth to understand behaviors, align priorities, and make informed decisions. Integrated travel and expense solutions offer companies the data and insights they need to steer their travel programs and budgets in a complex multi-stakeholder environment. SAP Concur solutions can help analyze employee spend, drive cost-savings, and ensure efficient business travel.

Explore more insights in the seventh annual SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey.

Charlie Sultan is president of Concur Travel at SAP Concur.

The SAP Concur Global Business Traveler Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research between April 30 and May 12, 2025, among 3,750 business travelers in 24 markets: U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Italy, Spain, ANZ (Australia, New Zealand), Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia), Japan, Korea, India, Mexico, Brazil, SEA (Singapore, Malaysia), South Africa, Portugal, Switzerland, and Austria.
The SAP Concur Global Travel Manager Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research between April 30 and May 12, 2025, among 700 travel managers, defined as those who direct or administer travel programs for businesses, across seven markets: Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, ANZ (Australia, New Zealand), UK, and U.S.
The SAP Concur Global CFO Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research between April 30 and May 12, 2025, among 600 CFOs across six markets: Germany, Canada, Japan, ANZ (Australia, New Zealand), UK, and U.S.