Cover story, special supplement on transformation, delivered with Manager Magazin in cooperation with E3 Magazine, November 2026, pp. 10–21.
By Prof. Dr. Alexander Zeier, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, Nova Intelligence.

Read online at E3 Magazine: English · Deutsch · Español · Français

About the report

The report examines how agentic AI changes the cost, time and risk of modernizing and operating SAP systems, and why modernizing these systems and building a company’s own AI platform are the same investment. It describes the two established routes to S/4HANA, brownfield and greenfield, and a new modernization method pioneered by Nova, known as Cleanfield.

Three routes to S/4HANA with Nova: brownfield, Cleanfield, greenfield
Three routes to S/4HANA with Nova: brownfield, Cleanfield and greenfield. Graphic from the article (in German).

Results reported in the article

  • Festo: productivity of the SAP teams across all tasks increased more than fivefold.
  • KION Group: SAP experts save on average 86 percent of their working time across all measured tasks; an already optimized business-critical application now runs 400 percent faster.
  • Haas Automation: around 80 percent of customer incidents are diagnosed and resolved directly by the platform.
  • ZEISS: deploys Nova across its entire SAP program and combines brownfield and greenfield with one platform.
  • Fresenius: a DAX-listed healthcare group, is driving a multiyear corporate transformation to standardize processes, reduce the complexity of legacy systems in its IT landscape, and move to SAP S/4HANA. Nova Intelligence supports aspects of the transformation through its AI platform.
Capacity: 80 percent maintenance today, 84 percent innovation with Nova
Capacity: 80 percent maintenance today, 84 percent innovation with Nova. Graphic from the article (in German).
Time-to-market: five months today, two weeks with Nova
Time-to-market: a change that used to take five months reaches production in around two weeks. Graphic from the article (in German).

Original publication

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Note: The author is co-founder and Chief Scientist of Nova Intelligence, whose platform is the subject of this report. Customer results are as reported in the article and approved by the companies named.