Festo, a German automation powerhouse with over 20,000 employees and €3.65 billion in revenue, is one of SAP's first 30 customers. SAP is the backbone of Festo's global operations—founder Hasso Plattner personally helped implement their R/1 system in the late 1970s. Today, 15,000+ users rely on it across manufacturing, logistics, finance, and sales, and a majority of their 550-person IT organization works within the SAP ecosystem. For nearly five decades, Festo has operated at the forefront of what's possible with SAP. Now, they’re entering a new era.
Over the last six months, Festo's SAP team has integrated Nova Intelligence’s AI platform into their daily workflows. The results have been significant: users are reporting blended 5X productivity gains across analysis, development, production operations, security, and more — translating directly into faster modernization and better economics for long-term SAP operations. For a team that prides itself on technical excellence, the ability to move this much faster is a game-changer.
"How we answer every one of the big three questions about our SAP program — how long will it take, how much will it cost, and how big is the risk — has improved significantly since adding Nova to our teams," said Jörn Weigle.
"Our own team estimates they are more than 5x more productive on average across all tasks. That level of capacity increase completely changes the game for our organization." — Jörn Weigle, Festo
Like many long-standing SAP customers, Festo has built a sophisticated, highly customized landscape over decades. These customizations are critical, but they need to be documented, modernized, and extended to stay competitive. With SAP's 2030 deadline to migrate legacy systems to S/4HANA Cloud, the pressure to reach a "Clean Core" is higher than ever. The team has to modernize faster while managing the risk of a global production environment that can never go down.
What Nova Does
Nova is an agentic AI platform for SAP. Unlike typical AI assistants, Nova's agents work alongside SAP teams to reason through complex systems and business processes, answer technical and functional questions instantly, and accelerate everything from code modernization to production issue resolution. Because Nova is built with a bottom-up approach, it doesn't just execute specific tasks or workflows; it adapts to the unique guidelines and custom logic that Festo has developed over 40 years to address a range of use cases. Nova is built for enterprise-grade deployments, secure by design and trusted in some of the world's most complex and critical SAP environments.
Real Results
Festo’s team has put Nova to work across the full lifecycle of their SAP operations. While the initial focus was on modernization, the team quickly discovered that Nova could solve much broader problems.
Festo's developers used Nova to tackle a sophisticated custom transaction that manages plan and production orders. This transaction included dozens of custom functions that were vital to the business but difficult to migrate. Using Nova, the team analyzed the legacy code and redesigned a set of core RAP business objects and services. This allowed Festo to create compact, role-specific Fiori apps that improved the user experience while drastically reducing code complexity.
The team also used Nova to document an intricate legacy program spanning tens of thousands of lines of logic used by supply chain planners. Capturing this kind of institutional knowledge usually requires weeks of time from senior developers. Nova's documentation engine captured the business logic and design at a level that astonished the team, achieving 95% accuracy in hours. The result isn't just faster documentation — it's institutional knowledge made accessible across the whole team. Developers get clarity on complex legacy logic; business stakeholders get visibility into the processes they depend on. Both sides now have the same source of truth.
“The speed was impressive. The quality was what convinced me." — Thomas Tuscher, Head of Information Management Digital Supply Chain, Festo
As Nova became part of the daily routine, new "golden nugget" use cases emerged:
Beyond Speed: Building a More Resilient SAP Organization
SAP expertise built over decades often lives in the heads of a handful of senior developers — and when someone leaves, that knowledge walks out the door with them. Nova changes that. Critical business logic is captured and made accessible to the whole team, reducing dependency on any single contributor and giving leadership the confidence to keep evolving their systems. Every gain in modernization speed, documentation quality, and debugging efficiency translates directly into lower transformation cost, lower operational risk, and a structurally better cost profile for running SAP long-term — turning decades of custom code from a growing maintenance burden into a transparent, controllable asset.
For a company whose bionic robots make headlines worldwide, operating on the cutting edge is nothing new. With Nova, Festo's SAP team is proving that even the most complex and critical enterprise systems can move at the speed of modern AI.
Festo SE & Co. KG is a global leader in automation technology, serving 300,000 customers across 176 countries. Headquartered in Esslingen am Neckar, Germany, Festo has been an SAP customer since the R/1 era in the 1970s.
Nova Intelligence is an agentic AI platform for SAP, founded by a team including the co-inventor of SAP HANA and a researcher from Google DeepMind, and backed by SAP's venture arm. Nova helps enterprises understand, modernize, and build on their SAP landscapes — accelerating productivity, lowering total cost of ownership, and maximizing the ROI of their SAP investment. Learn more at novaintelligence.com.