How Festo significantly accelerated its journey to Clean Core with Nova

Festo is a global leader in industrial automation and technical education, running one of the most sophisticated SAP landscapes in the manufacturing sector. Decades of that success left the same mark it leaves on most long-standing SAP customers: layers of custom ABAP that made every S/4HANA question — how long, how much, how risky — hard to answer with confidence.

The challenge

Festo's move toward Clean Core meant untangling years of custom code, separating the logic that still drives the business from the code that no longer earns its keep. Done by hand, that analysis is slow, and the estimates it produces are only as good as the tribal knowledge behind them. The team needed a way to see the whole landscape clearly before committing to a migration plan.

The solution

Festo added Nova's agentic AI platform to its SAP teams. Nova analyzes the existing estate, reconstructs the business-relevant logic, flags redundant customizations, and helps rebuild only the differentiating logic in a Clean Core-compliant way. Because Festo could upload its own code guidelines, the platform generated code that already matched the way Festo works.

Compared to other solutions, Nova Intelligence lets you work more autonomously and more quickly. For example, we uploaded our own code guidelines, and the platform applied them when generating code.

The results

With Nova in the loop, Festo's team estimates it is more than 5x more productive on average across all SAP tasks. Just as importantly, the big three questions about any SAP program — how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how much risk it carries — became far easier to answer. That combination of speed and clarity is accelerating Festo's journey to Clean Core.