How Festo Accelerated its Clean Core Journey by 2 Years with Nova

With more than 30,000 custom objects, Festo is using Nova to understand its SAP landscape, accelerate development, and rethink how IT and business teams improve processes together.

When Festo began planning its Clean Core journey, getting SAP ready for a move to the private cloud by 2030 already felt ambitious. Years of complex code modifications stood between the team and that goal.

Then its developers started working with Nova.

“When we started planning the clean core, our initial idea was to get SAP ready to move to the SAP private cloud by 2030, which felt challenging due to complex code modifications. When we noticed how fast we can change and refactor things with Nova, we decided to bring this deadline forward to the end of 2028.”

— Jörn Weigle, CIO of Festo

As its SAP team began delivering results, Festo saw an opportunity to accelerate its modernization program—and to reconsider how work moves between IT and the business.

Understanding Processes Inside Decades of Customization

Festo is a global leader in industrial automation and technical education. Its SAP environment reflects decades of work adapting enterprise software to the needs of the business.

Moving toward Clean Core requires understanding what those customizations do, how they relate to one another, and which business processes depend on them. That understanding also matters beyond the migration. As experienced employees leave, Festo needs to preserve the knowledge required to maintain and improve those processes.

Nova is helping the team make that knowledge explicit.

“Nova is very good at documenting complex processes and having relational knowledge of what we have coded in our systems - we're talking about more than 30,000 custom objects and more than 10 million lines of code.”

— Jörn Weigle, CIO of Festo

For Weigle, the value lies in connecting the code to the processes it supports. “We're very fast now in documenting complex processes where we know that our brain drain in the near and midterm future is high,” he says. Clear documentation is a foundation for fast modernization.

Amplifying Experts Within Weeks

Weigle had seen firsthand how previous programs required substantial adoption effort. Nova followed a different pattern.

“Getting people onto Nova was a very different experience from the past. With our global programs, it was always a huge effort to bring everyone onto a new system or process. With Nova, our very experienced developers made very fast operational use of the platform, and there have been results delivered within one or two weeks.”

— Jörn Weigle, CIO of Festo

Festo added Nova to its SAP teams to help analyze the existing estate and support development and refactoring. The team could also bring its own coding standards into the platform.

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

Those early results made the platform’s usefulness visible to colleagues. Weigle describes employees asking Nova users to help them prompt the platform so they, too, could complete tasks faster. Adoption was beginning to spread.

Expert Amplification changed the modernization plan

Festo’s team measured that it is more than five times as productive on average across SAP tasks with Nova.

For a program as complex as SAP modernization, development speed is one part of a larger planning challenge. Leaders also need to understand the effort involved, anticipate cost, and assess risk. Weigle says Nova has improved how Festo approaches all three.

“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. Our own team estimates they are more than 5x more productive on average across all tasks.”

— Jörn Weigle, CIO of Festo

Seeing how quickly the team could refactor its systems led Festo to bring its private-cloud readiness target forward from 2030 to 2028. The revised target reflects Festo’s confidence in what its team can accomplish with Nova.

Value Across the Business Lifecycle

As Nova gained traction within IT, interest began extending to the people who understand Festo’s business processes in depth.

“People outside IT started recognizing Nova as a platform where, with process and system understanding, they can enhance processes themselves. Black-belt functional experts in departments like supply chain and sales have started requesting Nova seats to improve applications they created in the past.”

— Jörn Weigle, CIO of Festo

These requests point toward a broader role for functional expertise in ERP development. People familiar with a process can contribute that understanding directly as they work with IT on improvements.

Weigle describes a shared workflow in which IT and functional departments jointly decide on SAP solution designs, enter rapid coding cycles, and perform quality assurance, testing, and security checks within a single integrated platform.

That closer collaboration puts more emphasis on defining the right solution: understanding the business requirement, deciding how it should fit into the architecture, and iterating together.

Building toward a different IT operating model

Festo now uses Nova as a central development platform, planning to connect more of the application lifecycle around it. Nova can be used to triage incoming demand, fully code solutions, test them, and provide ongoing change impact analysis.

Weigle describes the goal as “a real lifecycle management application,” with work flowing from Festo’s demand system into Nova and through subsequent development and revision.

That vision also changes where he expects IT teams to focus their attention.

“[Nova] changes our future IT operating model with the business. Focus shifts heavily toward process understanding and architectural design—deciding what needs to be coded and what does not.”

— Jörn Weigle, CIO of Festo

Festo’s experience began with a demanding modernization target and a heavily customized SAP estate. Early, valuable results led Festo to bring its private-cloud readiness target forward from 2030 to the end of 2028. Now, as functional experts request access and Festo builds toward broader lifecycle integration, Nova is becoming part of a larger change in how its teams understand processes, design solutions, and maintain the systems the business depends on.