KNAPP: Redefining warehouse operations and making specialist knowledge available to diverse workers with AI
Shifting from reactive to proactive operations
KNAPP, an SAP partner since 2012 with deep expertise in the SAP Extended Warehouse Management application, has spent more than 70 years making complexity simple for customers. With SAP Business AI Platform, the intralogistics automation leader is now taking that mission into a new era defined by intelligent, AI-enabled warehouse operations.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial manufacturing | Hart bei Graz, Austria | 9,000+ employees |
fall in issue resolution time, from several hours to minutes.
drop in time to develop training materials and documentation.
Senior SAP EWM Solution Consultant, KNAPP AG
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial manufacturing | Hart bei Graz, Austria | 9,000+ employees |
fall in issue resolution time, from several hours to minutes.
drop in time to develop training materials and documentation.
Senior SAP EWM Solution Consultant, KNAPP AG
Transforming expertise from a bottleneck to a benefit
KNAPP AG was founded in 1952 with a pioneering mindset and technical expertise combined with the courage to tread new paths. Since those early years, it has become a top-tier global intralogistics automation provider that is active in more than 50 locations worldwide across sectors including healthcare, fashion, retail, food retail, industry and manufacturing, and wholesale.
Today, KNAPP must negotiate supply chains that are more complex than ever before. In the many sectors it serves, operations run on tight cutoff times and demanding delivery schedules. When something goes wrong inside a warehouse, the pressure to resolve it quickly is immediate and significant. A blocked or delayed delivery affects not only an internal process but also a customer expecting to receive that product on time.
At KNAPP’s customers, resolving these issues depended heavily on a small number of highly skilled experts. Not every warehouse manager or floor employee had the knowledge to diagnose and resolve a delivery blockage. When an issue arose, it triggered a time-consuming process of long checklists, extensive user guides, and a reliance on specialist knowledge.
Training new staff to handle these situations would take days, sometimes weeks. Documentation was extensive and difficult to maintain. And as warehouses became more automated and volumes grew, the gap between the complexity of the operation and the capacity of the people managing it continued to widen.
KNAPP recognized that a new approach was needed. It wanted to make that specialist knowledge accessible to anyone on the warehouse floor, regardless of their level of expertise.
Building an AI delivery pilot with integrated solutions
KNAPP’s journey toward AI began roughly two years ago in conversation with SAP experts. With more than 120 projects involving the SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) application behind it, KNAPP had a clear understanding of where customers struggled most and where AI could make the greatest difference. The result was the development of an AI delivery pilot built within the SAP software ecosystem on SAP Business AI Platform.
The pilot brings together several SAP solutions working in concert. SAP EWM serves as the operational backbone, providing real-time data and APIs through a cloud connector to the Joule solution. SAP AI Core infrastructure handles model execution, while the Joule Studio solution provides intelligence, skills, and AI agents. Meanwhile, the SAP Build Process Automation solution ties these elements together, triggering a comprehensive process when needed.
At the heart of the solution is a conversational chat interface, built in Joule Studio, that diverse warehouse managers and floor employees can use regardless of their level of technical expertise. Rather than working through long checklists or waiting for a specialist to become available, a user simply opens the chat interface and asks a question. They receive a structured, clear overview of warehouse or delivery status, irregularities, and errors, as well as a guided path to resolving not just the issue but also its root cause. This distinction between addressing the immediate issue and identifying the cause is central to the AI agent’s design.
Surface-level issue detection is only part of the story. The AI agent goes deeper, guiding the user through the steps needed to understand why a problem occurred so that it can be properly and permanently resolved.
Throughout the development process, KNAPP was careful to ensure that humans remained central to the operation. The AI agent is designed to support and guide warehouse teams, not to replace their judgment. Human confirmation remains part of the process, with the AI agent empowering users to make informed decisions rather than acting entirely autonomously.
Enabling faster resolution, broader capabilities, and leaner operations
The impact of the AI delivery pilot is already visible at KNAPP’s first pilot customers. Issues that previously took several hours to resolve, such as a blocked delivery, system error, or process disruption, can now be addressed within minutes. Warehouse managers and floor employees who previously lacked the specialist knowledge to diagnose these issues can now interact directly with the AI agent. This helps them get a clear picture of the situation and take the right steps to resolve the issue without having to wait for an expert to become available.
Moreover, the volume of documentation and training materials that warehouse operations previously required has decreased significantly. Preparing end users and warehouse managers once took days or even weeks. With AI, KNAPP can now complete that same preparation within hours. The knowledge that was once concentrated in a small group of specialists is now accessible to the workforce at large through an intuitive interface that requires minimal training to use.
For KNAPP’s customers, this represents a meaningful shift in how their operations run. The dependence on individual expertise has been reduced; operations are more resilient; and the most experienced staff have begun to shift their focus from reactive firefighting toward more-strategic, forward-looking work.
Senior SAP EWM Solution Consultant, KNAPP AG
Moving from reactive operations to preventing issues before they happen
For KNAPP, the AI delivery pilot is just the beginning. The company sees the current solution as the first step in a longer journey toward fully assisted, intelligent warehouse operations. In this future, automation, human expertise, and AI work together smoothly, and the focus shifts from reacting to problems to predicting and preventing them before they occur.
KNAPP is also looking beyond the warehouse itself. As a significant user of SAP software across its internal operations, the company sees considerable potential in what Joule Studio and the broader SAP software ecosystem can continue to offer as new capabilities emerge.
KNAPP understands that technology alone is not enough. Change management and preparing people for what is coming and bringing the organization along on the journey are just as important as the solution itself. But for other logistics and warehouse operations companies still exploring where AI fits in, KNAPP’s message is grounded in experience: The technology is ready, and the time to act is now.