KAESER KOMPRESSOREN: Accelerating tender qualification and sales productivity with industrial AI agents
KAESER KOMPRESSOREN SE develops compressed air systems that keep mission-critical operations running. Yet almost no two installations are identical and each tender can contain hundreds of pages of customer-specific requirements. Working with SAP to develop a Tender Analysis Agent and Product Design Assistant, KAESER is making its engineering expertise and knowledge from 50,000 customer solutions easier to apply at scale. Sales teams can understand tenders in minutes, find and adapt similar designs faster and deliver better customer solutions while remaining firmly in control.
The opportunity
Turning hundreds of tender pages into a competitive advantage
Compressed air often goes unnoticed, even as it keeps factories, hospitals and other mission-critical environments running. An interruption to the compressed-air supply can halt production or disrupt essential operations. Suddenly, compressed air becomes the most important thing in the room. That critical role is at the heart of KAESER’s business. Founded in 1919, the family-owned company has spent more than a century designing solutions around customer needs. Yet almost no two of its thousands of installed systems are identical.
Each must reflect specific technical requirements, operating conditions and energy-efficiency goals. The complexity begins with the tender. In KAESER’s configure-to-order business, customer requests can run to hundreds of pages. Manual analysis was time-consuming and error prone, putting sales and engineering teams under pressure to meet firm deadlines without compromising solution quality.
Scaling tender expertise beyond individual experience
The challenge went beyond reading each tender faster. Because manual analysis limited how many opportunities teams could evaluate consistently, KAESER needed greater transparency across the tender process. At the same time, interpreting requirements and shaping the right configuration depended heavily on individual experience.
Manual information gathering left sales and engineering teams with less time to evaluate options and refine the customer solution. KAESER wanted to make knowledge from its products, past projects and installed systems more readily available across sales and engineering, helping teams respond to more tenders on time while keeping experts responsible for the final recommendation.
The solution
Connecting tender intelligence with knowledge from 50,000 customer solutions
To analyse more tenders and apply its expertise more consistently, KAESER uses an agentic AI solution developed with SAP. Its Tender Analysis Agent and Product Design Assistant mark a step toward Autonomous Adaptive Production, connecting customer requirements with product configuration for customised orders.
The Tender Analysis Agent extracts requirements from tenders and RFQs, analyses terms and conditions and flags risks and deviations. It can turn hundreds of pages into an overview in minutes, helping sales decide how to proceed.
The Product Design Assistant then searches SAP Integrated Product Development and 50,000 customer solutions for similar designs that experts can reuse and adapt to new customer requirements. Sales experts assess and refine the proposed designs and remain responsible for the final solution.
Embedding AI in trusted, integrated business processes
KAESER turned to SAP because the relationship extends far beyond one AI project. Since signing with SAP in 1992, the company has built core enterprise processes on SAP solutions. Today, SAP Cloud ERP Private solutions provide an integrated foundation for processes across the business, making SAP a natural partner for embedding AI in sales and engineering workflows rather than deploying it as a disconnected tool.
KAESER co-innovated with SAP’s Forward Deployed Engineering team, with support from SAP Services, to shape the agents around real-world customer requirements and frontline decisions. The collaboration combines KAESER’s product and process expertise with SAP’s AI and engineering capabilities. By connecting trusted data, product knowledge and operational processes, it helps KAESER scale AI responsibly and advance toward a more adaptive value chain.
Keeping experts in control of every customer solution
KAESER views AI as an enabler of engineering expertise, not a replacement for it. The agents quickly collect and organise information that would be difficult for one person to find manually. Sales and engineering professionals remain in the loop to validate requirements, evaluate similar designs and adapt them to the customer’s situation.
This model makes specialist knowledge available more broadly without removing human accountability. Salespeople can draw on insights from past projects and installed systems without needing to know where every detail resides. KAESER’s experts set the direction, while AI helps them to execute the work. The result is a faster, more consistent process that still depends on human experience, customer understanding and expert judgement.
The result
Increasing tender capacity to compete for more business
Before AI, KAESER did not consistently analyse every tender and lacked a clear view of what happened to each opportunity. The Tender Analysis Agent changes that equation. It can turn hundreds of pages into a structured overview in a few minutes, helping sales teams understand customer requirements, evaluate the opportunity and decide how to proceed.
For KAESER’s CIO, Falko Lameter, the defining outcome is the ability to provide an answer for every tender on time. Faster qualification helps KAESER evaluate more opportunities, prepare responsive, high-quality quotations and give salespeople more time to refine recommendations and strengthen customer relationships. The shift turns tender analysis from a potential bottleneck into a source of sales capacity and competitive advantage.
Increasing sales capacity with the same team
The Product Design Assistant can assemble solution proposals, presentations and supporting information far faster than before. Lameter estimates that this contributes to at least 25% higher sales productivity, allowing sales experts to spend less time assembling information and more time improving the customer solution.
He also estimates that the connected capabilities increase tender throughput by 25% and tender win rate by 10%. This means greater capacity to evaluate and respond to opportunities, along with a stronger chance of converting qualified tenders into business. Together, these gains turn faster analysis and knowledge reuse into increased sales capacity and growth potential.
Building the foundation for more autonomous, adaptive operations
KAESER’s connected capabilities for tender analysis and product design offer an early example of Autonomous Adaptive Production in action. They bring together trusted data, AI, applications and integrated processes to help people understand requirements faster, reuse accumulated knowledge and make better-informed decisions while retaining control.
Looking ahead, KAESER plans to expand agents into additional processes, making trusted product and business context more readily available across the value chain. As these capabilities evolve, KAESER is advancing toward SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise vision, where people set the direction and AI increasingly helps coordinate and execute work. For KAESER, that future remains anchored in one outcome: delivering a better solution for every customer.