01
Index the artifacts that exist
Decades of logs, manuals, engineering notes, and incident reports — including scanned handwriting — cleaned, chunked, and indexed with the metadata that matters: machine, failure mode, date, author.
Precision-components manufacturer · Custom AI Systems
Thirty years of expertise, searchable by the night shift
With senior engineers approaching retirement, a manufacturer's deepest asset — three decades of maintenance logs, incident reports, and tribal knowledge — was about to walk out the door. We indexed it into a copilot technicians query in plain language, with citations to the original source.
- 30 yrs
- of documentation indexed
- -41%
- unplanned-downtime minutes
- 2×
- faster new-technician ramp
/ 01 — The problem
What was breaking.
Answers existed — in maintenance logs, annotated manuals, incident write-ups, and the heads of three engineers with 25+ years each — but finding them meant knowing who to ask, and the night shift couldn't ask anyone.
New technicians took over a year to become independently productive, mostly learning where knowledge lived.
/ 02 — The build
How we approached it.
02
Citations or it didn't happen
Every answer links to the source document and passage. Technicians trust the copilot because they can check it — and that trust is the entire adoption battle.
03
Evaluation by the veterans
The retiring engineers graded the system's answers on 200 real historical problems before launch — their sign-off was both the quality bar and the internal endorsement that drove adoption.
Timeline9 weeks from document audit to plant-wide rolloutStackClaudepgvectorPythonNext.jsSSO integration
/ 03 — The results
What changed.
- 68% of technician queries resolved without escalating to a senior engineer.
- Unplanned-downtime minutes fell 41% year-over-year, driven by faster diagnosis on recurring failure modes.
- New technicians reach independent productivity in roughly half the previous time.
- The knowledge survived the retirements. Two of the three veteran engineers now spend their remaining tenure improving answers instead of repeating them.
“We were about to lose thirty years of 'why line 3 drifts when it's humid.' Now the answer comes with the original engineer's notes attached — at 3am, without waking anyone.”
/ Free AI audit
Get results like these in your business.
Every engagement here started with the free audit. Sennova Labs maps your workflows, prices the waste, and shows you what to automate first.
Request a free AI audit
No obligation · Roadmap is yours to keep