A procedure in 40 seconds instead of 18 minutes – a knowledge assistant for production engineers

Over fifteen years, the industrial components manufacturer accumulated around 4,500 documents: quality procedures, workstation instructions, process sheets, customer specifications and audit reports. The documentation was spread across several repositories and folders maintained by different departments.

Production engineers regularly struggled to establish which version of a procedure was current and often had to ask colleagues for help. Measurements showed that a single search took 18 minutes on average – with eight queries a day, almost two and a half hours of an engineer's time.

Two earlier attempts to organise the documentation were halted midway, as each department followed its own naming conventions. Management needed a solution that would deliver results without a months-long reorganisation of the archive.

Together with the quality department, we identified 1,200 documents of key importance to day-to-day work – current procedures, instructions and customer specifications. The remainder were added in a second phase. A central principle was to leave all documents in their existing locations, so that the rollout required no change to the team's habits.

The assistant is available in Microsoft Teams. An engineer asks a question in plain language – for example, about the dimensional tolerance for a specific product – and receives an answer together with a link to the source document. Each user can access only the documents permitted by their role.

For two weeks, a group of twelve engineers tested the solution while we steadily improved the quality of its answers. Once accuracy exceeded 91%, the assistant was made available to the entire plant, a process that took five days.

Six weeks after launch, engineers reclaim two hours a day on average. Questions that previously required a colleague's help are answered in 40 seconds, and the quality department has recorded 80% fewer requests for the location of procedures.

The assistant also helped identify documents in need of updating, as different versions of the same procedures had coexisted in the archive. The company received a structured list of priorities based on employees' actual needs.

A quality audit conducted three months after rollout cited the solution as good practice. Management plans to apply the same approach to the sales department and the quotation archive.