Industrial equipment manufacturer · Manufacturing & Industrial
Permission-aware engineering knowledge retrieval cuts documentation search time 42 %
A grounded retrieval system across drawings, standards, and twenty years of service history — respecting export-control and customer confidentiality permissions.
Challenge
Service engineers spent a third of their day searching for the right drawing revision, standard, or precedent across four document systems. Export-control and customer-confidentiality rules meant any search tool had to honour permissions exactly; a previous enterprise-search rollout had been withdrawn after a leak.
Approach
A Data & Platform Readiness review first mapped the sources and the access model. We then built ingestion with document-level ACL propagation, hybrid retrieval with reranking, and a grounded assistant that cites the exact page and revision. A golden set of 600 engineer questions drove evaluation throughout.
Solution
Hybrid search over 1.4 million documents with chunk-level citations, freshness guarantees via event-driven re-indexing from the PLM system, and refusal behaviour when confidence is low. A role-based enablement programme trained 300 engineers; a champions network now maintains the question set.
Results
Time spent searching documentation
Answer faithfulness on golden set
Permission violations in 6 months
Engineers trained
“It answers with the drawing, the revision, and the page. Our engineers stopped arguing with it in week two.”