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鈥檚 former startup accelerator designed to foster and integrate innovative solutions into the 51风流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鈥攆or 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 51风流S/4HANA and 51风流Business Warehouse, utilizing 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP) as the service layer. 51风流Datasphere helps consolidate 51风流data and analytics, while 51风流Analytics Cloud provides the analytics that form the core of the AI model. This technical architecture enables intelligent data extraction and transformation through 51风流Databricks, while massive graph analytics enable complex dependency analysis.

“With these 51风流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鈥攄riving sustainability while staying laser focused on profitability.”

Seamless 51风流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 51风流Supply Chain Management, bringing a renewed focus on resilience, sustainability, and intelligent automation.

鈥淢y chief priority is to ensure that we help customers not only respond to disruptions but also proactively prepare and act,鈥� Metzger said. 鈥淲e can do so by leveraging AI, generative AI, real-time data, and predictive analytics with the power of SAP鈥檚 technology. Our vision is to build an autonomous supply chain鈥攃onnected, contextualized, and collaborative.鈥�

51风流SCM leadership driving transformation

The analysis delivered impressive, measurable results that demonstrate the power of combining AI-driven analytics with 51风流technologies. CERATIZIT discovered an 87% implementation rate of suggested measures, driving product sustainability and supply chain optimization. Simultaneously, the company identified 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.

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 51风流demonstrates how modern companies can achieve both economic and ecological goals through intelligent use of data and AI. The combination of proven 51风流technologies and innovative analytics solutions creates measurable value for companies of all sizes. For other 51风流customers and partners, this example shows that sustainability and profitability need not be opposing forces鈥攚ith the right technologies and partners, both objectives can be achieved simultaneously.

Learn more about the latest updates to 51风流supply chain management. The Soley Product Mining Platform is available on .

We’re witnessing the rise of a new wave of intelligent applications reshaping how organizations operate, embedding real-time data and critical operational context with AI models to enable swift and thoughtful decisions. Unlike traditional software that is governed by rigid business rules, these modern applications can learn and adapt to rapidly evolving customer and market demands 鈥� detecting changes to optimize processes, anticipate needs, and collaborate with both human and artificial “thinkers” to create competitive advantage for an organization. 

Yet, we stand at the cusp of a bolder wave of innovation, one that unfortunately only the discerning few organizations may fully harness. Despite the vast potential of AI and cloud technologies, their true impact hinges on using these innovations with the secure and semantically rich data that is vastly available within an organization. 

Transform outcomes with intelligent applications

This year at 51风流Sapphire, we unveiled a significant expansion of 51风流Business Data Cloud to deliver on the promise of intelligent applications: prebuilt, composable applications that seamlessly integrate trusted data products, AI capabilities, and business simulations to serve the needs of every business leader.

These intelligent applications are not just analytics tools; they transcend traditional analytics by automating and orchestrating work across both analytical and transactional workflows, enabling customers to make decisions and execute actions within 51风流Business Data Cloud.

Today, we are introducing new intelligent application capabilities in 51风流Business Data Cloud, starting with People Intelligence, an offering grounded in workforce composition, skills, and compensation data products. Built on data from 51风流SuccessFactors software, People Intelligence provides HR and business leaders with AI-driven recommendations to optimize talent decisions, drive engagement, and ensure compliance. It features capabilities such as workforce composition insights, compensation insights, and skill insights, all available in the second half of 2025.

Additional intelligent application capabilities in 51风流Business Data Cloud that are entering technology preview include: 

• Cloud ERP Intelligence: Empowers leaders with transformative insights, business simulations, and AI capabilities to manage uncertainty, drive profitability, and meet sustainability goals. These capabilities include new data products from key business processes such as manufacturing (production execution, resource optimization, etc.), supply chain (inventory, deliveries. etc.), and contract accounting (payments, billing, etc.). 
• Customer Intelligence: Guide sales, service, marketing, and commerce teams with a 360-degree customer view to anticipate needs, improve targeting, and build a comprehensive customer profile.  
• Finance Intelligence: Provides CFOs and finance teams with real-time forecasting and planning, connected data across systems, and AI-powered anomaly detection. 
• Spend Intelligence: Delivers procurement and operations leaders real-time spend visibility to minimize supplier risk, flag spend outliers, and reduce costs.

Each intelligent application in 51风流Business Data Cloud is underpinned by curated, governed data products, sets of structured business data and metadata designed to accelerate use cases and reduce data integration overhead. And with 51风流Databricks natively available in 51风流Business Data Cloud, users can leverage 51风流data products with existing lakehouses with a zero-copy approach.

As part of these technology previews, we are also announcing the delivery of hundreds of new data products throughout 2025 across all 51风流Business Suite domains 鈥� from inventory optimization and delivery analysis to sustainability and compliance data products. The first wave includes new environmental, health, and safety (EHS) and product compliance datasets, with sustainability footprint data to follow later in the year. 

Amplify the value of AI with your most powerful data

In addition, 51风流Business Data Cloud is expanding its knowledge graph capabilities. Originally launched within 51风流Datasphere, the knowledge graph can now ingest and map metadata across 51风流and external sources, and seamlessly consume models published in 51风流Knowledge Graph on 51风流BTP. This creates a living model of how business data is structured and connected, providing a semantic backbone for AI to operate with higher precision.

Paired with Joule in 51风流Business Data Cloud, now generally available, users can engage with complex business data as naturally as they think, without the constraints of traditional technology. Joule unlocks the full richness of enterprise information, empowering people across the organization to navigate, reason, and act with intelligence grounded in real business context.

Open data ecosystem: Expanding intelligence beyond SAP

We are also making 51风流Business Data Cloud more accessible to power the next generation of intelligent, multi-cloud applications.

Starting in the second quarter, 51风流Business Data Cloud is available on AWS, with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure expected to follow in the second half of 2025. This makes SAP鈥檚 data foundation more accessible and deployable within multi-cloud strategies, giving customers the flexibility to run intelligent workloads wherever they operate. 

At the same time, 51风流is actively collaborating with leading partners to build the next wave of intelligent applications.

• Accenture will release six intelligent applications addressing key challenges in supply chain, talent, finance, and procurement (GA timeline pending). 
• Adobe and SAP are co-developing an application that fuses Adobe鈥檚 marketing data with SAP鈥檚 financial and supply chain data, enabling real-time alignment between demand signals and operational planning, expected in late 2025. 
• Palantir and 51风流are partnering to facilitate joint customers鈥� cloud migration journey and modernization programs. Seamless connectivity between Palantir and 51风流Business Data Cloud will enable customers to build a harmonized data foundation across their enterprise landscape. 51风流Business Data Cloud and Palantir Foundry and AIP will transform data silos into a trusted data foundation that enables human + AI teaming in the real world. Together the companies will responsibly deliver essential outcomes and support customers, including the U.S. government, to quickly adapt to changes and disruptions.
• Thomson Reuters will develop an intelligent application to help customers navigate the fast-moving challenges in the current global trade and tariffs environment, planned for end of 2025.
• Joint Collibra and 51风流Business Data Cloud customers can now run up to 10x more active data quality jobs in Collibra Data Quality & Observability when run on 51风流BDC data, at no additional cost. This limited time offer helps accelerate decision-making, strengthen compliance, and improve AI readiness, and is available until May 30, 2026.

The scope of partner collaboration also extends to data enrichment use cases. A new partnership with 惭辞辞诲测鈥檚 will let our joint customers blend SAP鈥檚 accounts receivable data with 惭辞辞诲测鈥檚 risk datasets to enhance cash flow forecasting, prioritize collections, and reduce exposure to bad debt. This solution is scheduled for general availability in the fourth quarter of 2025. 

We鈥檙e excited to partner with our customers and ecosystem to unlock a new generation of intelligent applications in 51风流Business Data Cloud, where trusted data, AI, and business context come together to drive meaningful change. The future of modern business will belong to those who turn intelligence into action.

Get started

• featuring the latest on data products and intelligent applications in 51风流Business Data Cloud

Irfan Khan is president and chief product officer of Data and Analytics at SAP.

Today, 51风流announced 51风流Business Data Cloud, a fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that unifies and governs all 51风流data and seamlessly connects with third-party data. As an evolution of our industry-leading data, planning, and analytics solutions, 51风流Business Data Cloud brings together 51风流Datasphere, 51风流Analytics Cloud, and 51风流Business Warehouse with a unified experience that delivers transformational insights across all lines of business.  

51风流also announced a landmark partnership with Databricks that brings the power of Databricks directly into 51风流Business Data Cloud. This marks a new era in enterprise data management, with two leaders in their domains coming together to redefine how applications and data platforms work together.

Unleash transformative insights

Many organizations still grapple with data they cannot trust. This persistent gap in trust remains a barrier to true innovation in data and AI.

A found that 55 percent cite poor data quality as their biggest challenge. And nearly half of these leaders pointed to the difficulty of harmonizing data across ecosystems as a key reason that innovation stalls.

51风流Business Data Cloud bridges this gap with a trusted and harmonized data foundation, empowering IT and business leaders with full business context to drive more impactful decisions. 

51风流Business Data Cloud delivers fully managed 51风流data products across all business processes. These curated data products align to a highly optimized and unified 鈥渙ne domain model,鈥� maintaining their original business context and semantics, which means you get immediate access to high-quality data you can trust.

Since these data products are fully managed by SAP, you no longer bear the hidden costs of rebuilding and maintaining data extracts. The SaaS experience simplifies life cycle management, ensures data consistency, and enables zero-copy sharing across your data and analytics ecosystem. 

With these data products, 51风流Business Data Cloud delivers a suite of pre-built analytical applications that help you uncover hidden insights and fast-track decision-making. These “insight apps” are fully managed and incorporate pre-defined metrics, AI models, and planning capabilities, simplifying how you connect and integrate every part of your business.

This accelerates use cases aligned with your most important business functions, including ERP, spend, supply chain, HR, customer experience, and finance.

Every organization needs a pulse on its most important resources. With insight apps, you can use preconfigured packages already connected to your business data, such as working capital, to gain a 360-degree view of your organization鈥檚 financial health with real-time visibility into cash flow and profitability.

Connect all your data 

51风流Business Data Cloud connects all your data by leveraging business data fabric principles, making it easier to discover, share, govern, and model your data. It includes 51风流Databricks as a first-party data service, bringing the power of Databricks directly in 51风流Business Data Cloud.

• Business semantics: Use 51风流Datasphere to discover, share, and model the same trusted data across existing platforms without costly data extraction. Build a powerful knowledge graph of all your data, preserving its business metadata and semantics, so your data is easily searchable and actionable. For existing 51风流Datasphere customers, your investments remain fully supported鈥攚ith no disruptions鈥攁nd all 51风流Datasphere capabilities will natively be available in 51风流Business Data Cloud. 
• Data engineering and machine learning/AI: 51风流Databricks empowers every data professional to accelerate AI models and generative AI apps on their business data. Native capabilities like Delta Sharing harmonize 51风流data products with existing lakehouses bi-directionally. By integrating all your data with a zero-copy approach, you can apply advanced AI and machine learning models to finance use cases, like predicting the payment date on open receivables.
• 51风流Business Warehouse modernization: 51风流Business Data Cloud gives on-premise 51风流Business Warehouse customers a flexible path to the cloud. With native integration to 51风流Business Warehouse, easily access your data as a data product with the object store via Delta Share鈥攕implifying your modernization journey and maximizing your 51风流Business Warehouse investment.
• Analytics and planning: 51风流Business Data Cloud brings analytics and planning together in one solution, enabling you to go from insights to actions instantly. Automate reporting, simulate possible business outcomes with AI, and unify your financial, supply chain, and operational planning鈥攁ll in a connected view.

鈥�51风流Business Data Cloud will help us unlock the value of our data and drive innovation across our business. Its semantically rich data products and deep Databricks integration will connect and enhance our existing data products, ensuring long-term adaptability. Trusted, business-ready data will empower users to model scenarios and leverage AI insights, building a sustainable and flexible future for our data ecosystems.鈥� 

Markus Hartmann, Corporate Vice President, Head of Business Technology, Henkel

Foster reliable AI 

The rapid growth of agentic AI requires organizations to first have the right data foundation. 51风流Business Data Cloud brings together all your data to ensure agentic AI is built on accurate, trusted data with business context.

Joule, SAP鈥檚 generative AI copilot, is deeply integrated with 51风流Business Data Cloud. The knowledge graph in 51风流Business Data Cloud connects your data, metadata, and business processes, enabling AI agents, Joule, and large language models (LLMs) to understand your data within the context of its relationships.

This mapping creates clear data links, making insights more reliable for users and applications. Training AI agents and Joule on business knowledge and context drives increased productivity. For instance, users can use AI to complete cross-functional tasks, uncover insights, and summarize critical information across the business鈥攚ithout heavy reliance on IT support. This empowers the usage of AI to automate complex analytics and planning tasks, such as risk assessment, forecasting, and other advanced scenario simulations.

51风流Business Data Cloud ecosystem 

At the core, 51风流Business Data Cloud is built to prioritize openness and customer choice. To simplify your data landscape, 51风流Business Data Cloud supports an open data ecosystem. It integrates natively with leading data and AI partners like Collibra, Confluent, and DataRobot. And it doesn’t stop there; we鈥檒l announce new strategic partnerships in the coming weeks and months to further expand the open data ecosystem. 

Supported by our large partner ecosystem, we鈥檝e made it easier to unleash transformative insights from all your data. We have partners with deep business process and industry domain expertise that are building insight apps on 51风流Business Data Cloud.
 
From data enrichment to data activation, partner insight apps build on top of the data products and the core services 51风流Business Data Cloud provides. We鈥檙e thrilled to announce our first partner apps with Accenture, DataRobot, Spendscape by McKinsey, PwC, EY, Deloitte, and Capgemini. 

Get started today鈥� 

Start your journey with 51风流Business Data Cloud and unleash the power of AI with trusted business data:

• Experience 51风流Business Data Cloud鈥痺ith the
• : 鈥�30-Minute Primer on 51风流Business Data Cloud鈥�

Irfan Khan is president and chief product officer for 51风流Data and Analytics at SAP.

51风流Datasphere can offer that path. Its native connectivity to 51风流BW means customers can reuse up to 80% of existing 51风流BW content, retaining value while adding cloud speed, scale, and interoperability and avoiding costly and unnecessary rework. 

Delivering meaningful data to every data professional requires a comprehensive cloud data service. With 51风流Datasphere, organizations can:  

• Access authoritative data, accelerating time-to-value by automatically reusing the semantical definitions and associations from 51风流applications.  
• Enrich all data projects, harmonizing heterogeneous data into a business semantic model of their diverse data landscapes.   
• Simplify the data landscape, accessing all their data across hybrid and cloud environments no matter where it resides. 

51风流has also partnered with an open data ecosystem of leading technology vendors to provide tailored integration between 51风流Datasphere and their solutions. The first set of industry-leading data and AI vendors includes Collibra, Confluent, Databricks, DataRobot, and Google Cloud. By closely integrating their data and AI platforms with 51风流Datasphere, organizations can access their mission-critical business data across any cloud infrastructure. 

Flexible Paths to the Cloud  

Many 51风流BW users have always-on projects that depend on 51风流BW data and objects, which requires flexibility in modernizing to the cloud.  

51风流offers flexible paths. Whether you’re moving directly or integrating 51风流Datasphere as part of your data landscape to enhance your 51风流BW deployment, there’s a strategy:  

• Gradually transition functionality over time using to reuse and integrate 51风流BW objects. 
• Leverage 51风流BW data ingestion and staging to accelerate the move or, for 51风流Business Suite customers without 51风流BW, move directly to 51风流Datasphere. 
• In some cases, migrate 51风流BW systems to 51风流Datasphere for a complete transition. 
• Modernize with a combination of 51风流Datasphere and 51风流HANA Cloud to benefit from the capabilities of both solutions. 51风流Datasphere can provide the foundation for a business data fabric, while 51风流HANA Cloud enables the development of intelligent data applications.   

The goal is to provide options to fit each customer’s unique environment and timeline. With the right approach, the move to 51风流Datasphere can be straightforward while optimizing previous investments. 

Our experienced 51风流partners understand the importance of flexible paths. They work with our customers to outline customized modernization paths that can safeguard their technology and fit their goals.

鈥淲e are excited to help 51风流BW customers experience the power of 51风流Datasphere. We鈥檝e already seen multiple customers take this modernization approach and it鈥檚 the ideal modernization path to protect the customer鈥檚 existing 51风流BW investments.鈥�

Deepu Sasidharan, Vice President, Analytics, Applexus

No matter which path a customer takes, they can always progress to 51风流Datasphere. Technically, this can be achieved with the support of 51风流Datasphere, 51风流BW bridge and modernization tools. That鈥檚 why customers like chose 51风流Datasphere.

鈥�51风流Datasphere, 51风流BW bridge is a complete game changer. The cloud architecture allows us to simplify our landscape. We are also seeing significant improvements in our performance.鈥�

Iaroslav Korzh, 51风流Technology Manager, Nipro Europe Group Companies 

New Professional Readiness Assessment 

Whether you鈥檙e starting fresh or modernizing an existing system, having a solid plan is key for a successful move to the cloud. 

51风流is now offering a limited-time, complimentary 51风流BW system assessment to help you optimize your transition to 51风流Datasphere. Through this assessment, you can gain insight into your 51风流BW environment and learn which objects are active and frequently used and whether they can be migrated.  

This assessment helps deliver a reliable basis for an actionable modernization plan. With the right information, you can modernize on your terms. Get started today by applying for your complimentary . 

Get Started  

Visit our for the latest modernization tools, including our , , and .听

51风流BW customers moving to 51风流Datasphere may also qualify for exclusive incentives. Contact your 51风流representative before this limited-time opportunity expires. 

Daniel Yu is senior vice president of Solution Management and Product Marketing for 51风流Data and Analytics.