How an 85-Person Machine Builder Cut Document Search Time from Hours to Minutes

The Situation

A Swiss manufacturer of precision industrial equipment employs 85 people across production, maintenance, engineering, and sales. Over two decades of operation, the company had accumulated a substantial document library: maintenance manuals for dozens of machine variants, ISO quality procedures in multiple revisions, supplier specifications, customer project files, and internal engineering notes.

All of it lived across a mix of shared network drives, a legacy document management system, and individual desktop folders. There was no consistent naming convention. Manuals existed in three or four versions with no clear indication of which was current. Engineers who had been with the company for years knew where things were. Newer staff — and anyone from a different department — often did not.

The Trigger

During a scheduled maintenance window on a critical production line, a technician needed the correct calibration procedure for a specific spindle assembly — a task that should have taken under an hour. Three and a half hours later, after working through outdated manuals and calling two colleagues, he found it in a subfolder that had not been touched in four years.

The production schedule slipped. The operations manager flagged the incident. It turned out this was not an isolated case — a quick internal review found that documentation search delays were a regular, untracked source of lost time across the maintenance and engineering teams.

The managing director set a clear objective: the right document had to be findable in under five minutes, by anyone, without needing to know where it was stored.

The Challenges

The Solution

KADARAG was deployed on an existing server in the company's own infrastructure. The full document library — 18,000 files across manuals, procedures, specifications, and project folders — was indexed over a single weekend without interrupting normal operations.

Maintenance technicians now open a simple chat interface and ask questions in plain language: "What is the lubrication interval for the Z-axis bearing on the MX-400 series?" or "Show me the current calibration procedure for spindle type 7." The system retrieves the answer from the actual document and shows the exact source, including version and file location.

Engineers use it to cross-reference customer project requirements against internal specifications. The sales team uses it to quickly answer technical queries without escalating to engineering. Access controls ensure that each department sees only the documents relevant to their role.

The Results