BITZER plays a vital role in everyday life—delivering safety, health, and comfort around the globe.
Its advanced refrigeration, air conditioning, and heat pump technologies keep supermarket shelves, hotel rooms, and hospital operating theaters at the right temperatures, whatever the ambient temperature is. Its compressors are essential for storing medicines, preserving perishable goods in shipping containers, and processing frozen foods. And if that isn’t impressive enough, its technology keeps ice hockey players gliding across the ice and breweries fermenting yeast for your beer.
The company is a longstanding RISE with SAP customer and, like SAP, is constantly innovating its products to stay ahead. Christian Stenzel, vice president of Organization and IT at BITZER, has a clear vision for an SAP strategy that prioritizes integration and rapid adoption of AI: “Optimizing business processes is as important as product innovation at BITZER.”
The SAP Research and Innovation team is equally committed to keeping SAP ahead by exploring new technologies and one team is currently dedicated to Project Embodied AI. Embodied AI combines artificial intelligence with a physical form, such as robots, that can perceive and act in the real world. Embodied AI agents take this a step further: extending the impact of SAP Business AI into physical operations by making robots cognitive.
To explore potential use cases where cognitive robots could bring value, the Project Embodied AI team invited a select group of forward-thinking leaders and innovation professionals from SAP customers to join its Physical AI and Cognitive Robots Exploration Council. And BITZER was one of them.
“Demand-driven production is key in our business,” said BITZER’s Stenzel, who immediately saw the potential value in using robots to meet demand fluctuations.
Running on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, already in place, BITZER already had the ideal software landscape to serve as a proof-of-concept test ground.
Before deployment, NEURA’s 4NE1, one of Europe’s most advanced humanoid robots, was virtually trained for the pick-task use case on NVIDIA Isaac Sim software.
Watch the video: SAP x NEURA x BITZER
A new benchmark for intelligent automation
This proof of concept for Project Embodied AI sets a new benchmark for intelligent automation in warehouses, Stenzel said. The results highlight:
- Seamless integration: SAP EWM connected directly with physical warehouse operations, no costly middleware required.
- True autonomy: Robots performed pick-tasks independently, demonstrating advanced task-level autonomy.
- Agility and flexibility: Robots could enable demand-driven production, operating 24/7 to meet shifting needs.
- Reliable processes: Orders of materials were automatically created, demonstrating how operational mistakes could be minimized.
A decisive step forward
Dr. Lukasz Ostrowski, head of Embodied AI and Robotics at SAP, heralded this proof-of-concept as a decisive step forward: “The proof of concept at BITZER is great first step for experiencing firsthand how the impact of SAP Business AI can be extended into physical operations. Further proofs of concept are planned as Project Embodied AI continues to assess the business value of embodied AI for customers.”
