KION slashes total cost of SAP ownership and improves implementation quality worldwide with Nova

If you've shopped for anything online, your order was likely handled, at some point, in a warehouse equipped and automated by a KION system, and transported by one of the two million industrial trucks KION has put on the road around the world. SAP stands behind nearly every component of KION's operations, from connecting distribution centers, to servicing fleets, to configuring the logic that determines how pallets move.

The challenge

KION's SAP estate has taken on deep layers of custom code and configuration over years of serving a growing array of product lines and processes that span a 42,000-strong workforce and are deployed in over 100 countries. Collectively, they form a proliferating body of technical debt. That backbone is managed by a globally distributed team of experts, whose work does not always follow the same rules or leave behind the same documentation. The resulting inconsistencies further complicate the SAP landscape and drive up KION's total cost of SAP ownership and operation.

KION's S/4HANA system is a greenfield implementation: one central system for all subsidiaries worldwide, built on Clean Core principles, with the entire process landscape redesigned and documented as part of the business transformation. As in most greenfield programs, not everything could be rebuilt from scratch. At the request of the business, a number of custom developments were transferred from the old ECC system into S/4HANA, converted to run on S/4HANA rather than designed for it. Code like this works, but it neither performs as the new platform allows nor meets the Clean Core standard the system was built around. That doubles the onus on the SAP team: pay down that technical debt, and ensure none of it bleeds into what's new.

The solution: an agentic platform that closes the distance to Clean Core

KION runs its SAP work through the Nova Intelligence platform because Nova optimizes the landscape on two fronts: simplifying and dramatically accelerating existing implementations, and holding new development and processes to Clean Core standards. Together, they help KION unwind complexity in its legacy code and keep new development from building up complexity of its own.

Saber Lamine, an SAP Solution Architect, reports the efficiencies that he and other SAP experts at KION have measured from using Nova to understand their SAP estate, change it, and maintain higher standards for what will be built next.

Understand and research

The KION team uses Nova to locate and interpret relevant SAP context. Nova has shortened the average exercise of researching SAP artifacts and tables from 3+ hours to just over ten minutes. Insight gathering that once ran into weeks now takes hours. And in KION's operational workflows, time needed for root-cause analysis and issue resolution on production incidents has fallen from 2–3 hours to 15 minutes, a 90% reduction.

In the process, Nova also produces institutional memory. It reasons across SAP behaviour and custom code, and turns what it finds into business-logic diagrams and functional specifications, delivered in KION's own templates and ready for review. Knowledge that may have resided only with individual experts — the logic behind a custom transaction, or the reason a process was configured in a certain way — becomes shared documentation the team can work from.

Build and modernize

Nova has reduced average time spent on code refactoring and development by 80%. The KION team applies Nova across both — bringing long-standing production code up to current standards, optimizing reports, and fixing bugs. That includes the functionality transferred into S/4HANA from the old ECC system: code that runs on the new platform but was never built for it. It works, but it runs slowly, consumes more system resources than it should, and does not meet Clean Core standards. This is part of the code KION has been improving with Nova.

In one instance, a KION developer used Nova to analyze and optimize two Sales and Distribution reports. In addition to surfacing a series of enhancements, Nova also identified and implemented a fix for a significant bug in a CDS view, introduced by a different AI tool in an earlier release. When the developer released the modernized reports to production, application runtimes fell by 65% and 81%, and HANA CPU consumption by 85% — one of the most expensive line items in any SAP landscape.

Nova connects to our actual system and carries the work through to a tested, ready-to-transport result. It goes through the same review any developer's work would before it moves to production — the difference is how much of our experts' time it gives back. It doesn't feel like we're using agents, it feels like we've hired an entire additional team of capable colleagues. — Saber Lamine, SAP Solution Architect

Build new, Clean Core by design

KION runs fit-to-standard assessments with Nova for every new requirement, testing whether SAP's delivered functionality already fulfills it before any custom implementation is approved. Where custom development is unavoidable, Nova builds it Clean Core-compliant and documents the design decision as it goes. This is how new development on the S/4HANA system is meant to be built: with specifications, code and documentation that are consistent from day one, instead of being reconstructed years later.

Govern and derisk

For work that must still be custom built, Nova adapts to a company's rules and workflows. This allows KION to embed into Nova its own change management practices, naming conventions, development guidelines, and documentation requirements. Nova's output is compliant by default, and when it creates or changes any object, it follows KION's governance by design.

These built-in guardrails matter for an organization of 80 SAP experts, whose working practices are shaped by different projects and inevitably diverge. By encoding Clean Core rules once and tailoring Nova to KION's environment, that inconsistency no longer reaches the output: everyone is guided toward implementation that is secure by design, well-documented, and audit-ready. KION is taking this a step further, rolling out a Nova-powered quality gate that reviews every change before its transport is released to the quality system — nothing moves downstream until it meets the standard, and what does move is Clean Core-aligned. That gate applies across both legacy and new code, so one definition of the standard governs everything KION ships.

Nova Intelligence: higher SAP team performance at lower TCO

At KION, Nova covers both situations that matter once a company runs on S/4HANA: old functionality carried over from ECC, and new development on Clean Core principles. In both, it does the same three things: it makes the code understood, brings it up to standard, and governs what is built next.

Nova does double duty at KION. It hands time and capacity back to its SAP team by delivering 86% average time savings across tasks ranging from creating specs and conducting research to writing code and analyzing incidents. And because KION's Clean Core guidelines live in the Nova platform, every requirement Nova meets with standard functionality, and every governance protocol it enforces, translates into technical debt that never enters KION's SAP estate.

Together, the two compound: KION achieves more with the same team, and less of what it builds turns into tomorrow's maintenance. Enhancing and governing operations with Nova is key to reducing what it costs to keep KION's €11 billion business running on SAP.