Overview

ABB Group is a Swedish-Swiss technology company, that operates in the fields of electrification and automation. The company was formed in 1988 from the merger of two electrical engineering companies, ASEA of Sweden and Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC) of Switzerland.

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

ABB’s ERP transformation programs faced challenges with siloed teams, lack of standardization in requirements and code generation, and heavy manual effort across the SDLC. This led to rework, inconsistent quality, increasing technical debt, and slower time-to-delivery across global initiatives. SAP application development at ABB was characterized by manual, fragmented, and effort-intensive processes spanning the entire lifecycle—from requirements analysis to production deployment—resulting in extended development cycles, higher error rates, inconsistent documentation, and heavy reliance on individual expertise.

The Solution

ABB partnered with TCS to identify SDLC bottlenecks and deployed iR2D, an Agentic AI-powered platform, to embed intelligence across requirements, design, development, and testing. The solution was selected for its ability to leverage existing ABB code assets, ensure context-aware automation. To address these challenges, ABB implemented TCS’s iR2D (Intelligent Requirements to Deployment), a human-in-the-loop agentic AI solution that leverages specialized agents to automate and augment critical development activities, including user story generation, design documentation, code generation, and test case creation. As part of its evolution, iR2D 2.0 is set to expand capabilities to include code reverse engineering, test data generation, and configuration automation.

The results

Before iR2D, ERP delivery was manual, fragmented, and dependent on individual expertise. After deployment, ABB transitioned to an AI-assisted, platform-driven model with automated artifact generation, faster cycle times, and improved consistency. This shift enables scalable, repeatable, and high-quality ERP transformation across geographies. This transformation has significantly shifted the human–AI effort distribution—from approximately 90% human and 10% tooling in the earlier manual model, to around 60% human and 40% AI in the current state, with a target of 40% human and 60% AI under iR2D 2.0, emphasizing an automation-led, human-governed approach.

Metrics

• Efficiency: 30–35% improvement in SDLC productivity • Accuracy: ~70% average AI accuracy (up to 80–90% for some agents) • Adoption: 100+ users actively piloting the platform • Quality: Reduced rework and improved consistency via standardized outputs • Technical Debt: Reduced through reuse of existing solutions and guided enhancements ABB has realized substantial business benefits, including 30–50% faster delivery cycles through parallelized and automated processes, 80% improved quality due to standardized outputs and reduced manual errors, 35% enhanced productivity across developers, architects, and testers, and greater consistency in documentation and code quality across teams.

The Technology

• iR2D (Intelligent Requirement-to-Deployment) – Agentic AI platform • SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) • AI/LLM models with enterprise knowledge grounding

Disruptive Factor

Implementing AI-driven code generation raised concerns around accuracy and technical debt, which ABB mitigated by grounding AI models in its own code base and maintaining human validation loops. iR2D disrupts traditional ERP delivery by shifting from effort-heavy services to an AI-powered, software-led model. It challenges the status quo by embedding intelligence across the SDLC, enabling real-time decision support and automation. Its ability to reduce technical debt while accelerating delivery sets it apart from conventional GenAI tools.

Shining Moment

The most impactful achievement was successfully operationalizing Agentic AI at scale within a live enterprise ERP environment. Demonstrating iR2D jointly at SAP Sapphire with ABB validated its real-world applicability and positioned ABB as a frontrunner in AI-led ERP transformation. https://www.linkedin.com/events/fromrequirementtoreality-abb-sa7457662956819070976/