Company Announcements

KION Teams with NVIDIA and Accenture to Optimize Supply Chains with AI-Powered Robots and Digital Twins

• The three companies jointly showcase warehouse of the future at CES 2025
• Rob Smith, CEO of KION GROUP AG: “We’re leveraging physical AI—making supply chains smarter, faster, and ready for the future.”
• Building physical AI-powered digital twins used to improve productivity and functional design of warehouses with NVIDIA software

Frankfurt am Main and Las Vegas, January 7, 2025 – KION Group (ETR: KGX), the Supply Chain Solutions Company, is working with Accenture (NYSE: ACN) to optimize supply chains using NVIDIA’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) advanced AI and simulation technologies. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the three companies are showcasing¹ how clients can both define ideal set-ups for new warehouses and continuously enhance existing facilities with Mega, an NVIDIA Omniverse blueprint for large-scale industrial digital twins. This includes a digital twin powered by physical AI – AI models that embody principles and qualities of the physical world – to improve the performance of intelligent warehouses that operate with automated forklifts, smart cameras and the latest automation and robotics solutions.

“At KION, we leverage AI-driven solutions as an integral part of our strategy to optimize our customers’ supply chains and increase their productivity,” said Rob Smith, CEO of KION GROUP AG. “With NVIDIA’s AI leadership and Accenture’s expertise in digital technologies, we are reinventing warehouse automation. Bringing these strong partners together, we are creating a vision for future warehouses that are part of a smart agile system, evolve with the world around them, and can handle nearly any supply chain challenge. This collaboration underscores our commitment to innovation and pushing the boundaries of industrial automation to usher in a new era of supply chain efficiency.”

“Modernizing supply chains to make them more resilient and agile, with real-time flexibility, is the next digital frontier,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture. “This collaboration with our long-term client KION and partner NVIDIA will break exciting new ground in not only reinventing the warehouse, but also in raising their performance standards with technology, data and AI, helping our clients operate autonomous, safe supply chains that better serve their customers and consumers, enhance productivity and efficiency and create new value.”

“Future warehouses will function like massive autonomous robots, orchestrating fleets of robots within them,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “By integrating Omniverse and Mega into their solutions, KION and Accenture can dramatically accelerate the development of industrial AI and autonomy for the world’s distribution and logistics ecosystem.”

Taking Advantage of Digital Twins to Plan Warehouses and Train Robots

Today’s warehouses and fulfillment centers combine workers, autonomous vehicles, and fully automated systems. Managing these complex environments requires a delicate balance of precision and adaptability—a challenge compounded by fluctuating demand and shifting inventory needs.

Using NVIDIA Omniverse and Mega, KION will be able to provide digital twins of warehouses that allows facility operators to design the most efficient and safe warehouse configuration without interrupting operations for testing. This includes optimizing the number of robots, workers, and automation equipment. The digital twin provides a testing ground for all aspects of warehouse operations, including facility layouts, the behavior of robot fleets, and the optimal number of workers and intelligent vehicles.

The digital twin doesn’t stop at simulating and testing configurations. It also trains the warehouse robots to handle changing conditions such as demand, inventory fluctuation and layout changes in the best possible way. Integrated with KION’s warehouse management software, the digital twin assigns tasks like moving goods from buffer zones to storage locations to virtual robots. Powered by advanced AI, the virtual robots plan, execute, and refine these tasks in a continuous loop, simulating and ultimately optimizing real-world operations with infinite scenarios. For the CES showcase, Accenture developed an interactive application that tracks how digital robot fleet and facility planning and testing enhances warehouse key performance indicators, such as throughput, task completion time, safety incidents and error rates.

As a next step, the partners are working to integrate the digital twin with a fine-tuned vision language model to capture real time insights from warehouses, reducing the risk of bottlenecks, accidents and other unforeseen events, pairing cameras, robots and NVIDIA NIM, a set of services for deployment of foundation models to edge devices in the warehouse. 

In essence, the warehouse of the future will create an environment where both human workers and machines can collaborate seamlessly and safely. It predicts, visualizes and adopts to potential issues and generates data-driven insights for operators. This ultimately helps clients design warehouses that are not only more efficient but also more resilient.

¹The AI and robotics-powered warehouse is showcased at CES at the Accenture Innovation Hub in Ballroom "F" of The Venetian Convention and Expo Center, 201 Sands Ave, Las Vegas. Please contact jennifer.francis@accenture.com to receive a demonstration.

  

The KION Group

The KION Group is one of the world’s leading providers of industrial trucks and supply chain solutions. Its full spectrum of services includes industrial trucks, such as forklift trucks and warehouse trucks, as well as integrated automation technologies and software solutions for the optimization of supply chains—including all related services. The KION Group’s solutions ensure the smooth flow of materials and information in customers’ warehouses, production plants, and distribution centers in over 100 countries.

The MDAX listed group is the largest manufacturer of industrial trucks in the EMEA region based on the number of units sold in 2022. Based on revenue for the year 2023, the KION Group is the leading overseas manufacturer in China, and including domestic manufacturers, the third-largest supplier there. The KION Group is also one of the world’s leading warehouse automation providers, based on 2023 revenue.

At the end of 2023, more than 1.8 million industrial trucks of the KION Group were in use by customers from all manner of sectors and of varying sizes on six continents. The group currently has more than 42,000 employees and generated revenue of approx. € 11.4 billion in the 2023 financial year.

You can access up-to-date image material for the KION Group via our image database https://kion-mediacenter.canto.global/v/MediaCenter/ as well as on our respective brands’ websites.

 

Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with 799,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at accenture.com.

 

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Disclaimer 

This release and the information contained herein are for information purposes only and do not constitute a prospectus or an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities in the United States or in any other jurisdiction.

This release contains forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Future results could differ significantly from the results that are currently expected due to various risk factors and uncertainties such as changes in economic or industry-specific conditions, changes in the market environment or political situation, changes in domestic or international legislation, interest rate or exchange rate fluctuations, legal disputes and investigations, and the availability of financial resources. We do not assume any responsibility for updating the forward-looking statements in this release.

  

Further information for media representatives

Dr. Christopher Spies
Director Group Communications
Cell +49 151 14 06 52 27
christopher.spies@kiongroup.com

 

Jens Derksen

Accenture Global Media Relations
Cell +49 175 5761393
jens.derksen@accenture.com

 

Further Information for Investors

Raj Junginger
Senior Manager Investor Relations
Phone +49 (0)69 201 107 942
raj.junginger@kiongroup.com

 

Website: www.kiongroup.com/media

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