How Haas Automation safeguards and streamlines factory-critical operations with Nova Intelligence

Haas Automation is one of the world’s leading CNC machinery manufacturers. Its over one-million-square-foot California facility – the largest of its kind in the United States – houses the vast majority of the company’s production operations. As a company founded with a ‘machinist-first’ mentality, Haas holds these operations to the same precision to which it builds its machines. With all of that production concentrated under one roof, the workflows and specialized knowledge that keep the facility running to such exacting standards carry enormous weight.

The challenge

Like many large manufacturers, Haas runs its supply chains, materials, and order operations in an SAP environment that has been shaped over decades to the business’ specific needs. With this depth of customization comes increasing structural pressures: mission-critical logic is embedded in bespoke configurations, and operational and SAP know-how is concentrated among a small group of individuals. Furthermore, requests for process changes, enhancements, and analysis often land on those same desks, frequently outstripping the team’s bandwidth to keep pace.

The solution: an agentic AI solution across the full SAP lifecycle

Haas adopted Nova Intelligence in early 2026 to relieve this double-sided squeeze – making key SAP skillsets more broadly accessible, and giving back capacity to an over-stretched team. As an agentic AI platform for enterprise systems, Nova is capable not only of answering questions, but also of investigating and reasoning across live SAP landscapes and autonomously executing work through to resolution.

A production partner for operations and functional teams

Every week, Haas runs a MRP process that drives material and production planning for the entire facility, with immediate and significant impact on the company’s inventory and finances. When circumstances forced an unexpected rerun on short notice, and the person responsible for its orchestration could not be reached, Craig Leonard, Haas’ CTO, called on the Nova Intelligence platform to diagnose the underlying cause and outline the steps to unblock it.

Haas deploys Nova live across development, QA, and production. With a real-time connection to Haas’ SAP system, Nova traced and reconstructed the planning run end-to-end, identified the culprit – a batch scheduling conflict – and provided clear directions on how to implement the process correctly. Acting on Nova’s guidance, Craig carried out the rerun himself. With only a tight window for the job to finish between midnight and 4am to spare the factory from disruptions, Craig checked in on progress at 2am, and found the work already complete, well ahead of schedule.

Craig recognized the potential to extend a one-time fix into a repeatable solution. He used Nova to capture the MRP run as a Business Process Procedure, a step-by-step playbook others on Haas’ operations team can follow. Nova helped commit to record the institutional knowledge behind the run, which was once the domain of a few experts, turning it from a dependency to an asset.

This reflects a much broader, cross-functional value Nova offers the Haas team. Its SAP environment holds decades of accumulated logic. With Nova, documentation is both a core feature and a natural byproduct – as it’s used to trace a process, diagnose an issue, or build something new, Nova surfaces and records what it maps out: procedures, troubleshooting paths, and business reasoning buried in custom ABAP.

“I don't know how I survived without Nova. I've had two careers, one before Nova and one after Nova.” - Justin Zimmerman, SAP Manager

A force multiplier for developers, functional analysts, and business users

For a team that has more work than hours, Nova acts less like software and more like an extra set of hands to address and move its backlog of business process optimizations. Prior to Nova, handling order and delivery issues meant manually working through customer and partner emails. Now, these emails pass straight to Nova, which traces root causes, proposes fixes, and walks through implementation step by step, live system changes included.

These benefits have also become apparent in development. Haas has used Nova to build net-new applications, including an iPad-to-SAP interface, generating the documentation and code, and to map a Zoom API architecture into its SAP configuration. On one program, Nova produced a comprehensive specification and working solution code in five minutes, which Haas put into production within the hour – compressing what would previously have taken an analyst and a developer a day and a half.

The effect reaches even some of the team’s most specialized disciplines, such as security and GRC. When Haas’ security lead needed to locate every hard-coded security role across its landscape – a foundational task for an ongoing role-naming project - Nova identified every instance in only three and a half minutes, automating what would otherwise have been an extensive, painstaking search in a fraction of the time.

The impact

Nova Intelligence has changed how work flows across Haas' development, support, and operations teams.

• Business continuity is at less risk from key-person exposure. Factory-critical processes that once depended on a few experts’ availability can now be understood, run, and documented by the broader team, and each task run on Nova becomes reusable institutional knowledge. With this, Nova becomes more than a platform that maintains key processes – it enables the team to optimize them as well.
• Documentation writes itself as work happens. Nova produces always-current context – specs, flowcharts, and process procedures – as a natural byproduct of daily use.
• A lean team can better meet business demand. By absorbing the bulk of development, analysis, and reporting work, Nova frees a team to focus on business requests that may otherwise have gone unmet.

Nova Intelligence: the agentic platform that compounds in value

"Did you ask Nova?" has become vernacular at Haas across business and IT teams. In a matter of months, working with Nova has become second nature to some of Haas’ most critical teams. It resolves a majority of incidents on its own, safeguards factory-critical processes, and gives a lean team capacity to meet the demands of a growing business.

This momentum continues to build. Haas has already roughly doubled its Nova user base, with close to a threefold increase planned in the next phase, and is developing formal enablement to match, including an LMS course for both technical and non-technical users, integrated into its existing SAP qualifications and training-reporting systems.

What makes the case for Nova is the breadth of its wins and the compounding nature of the value it brings to Haas: every process it documents, every issue it untangles, and every new application it helps launch creates knowledge a broader team can reuse, and each new use case widens what Nova can take on next.