RESOURCES · GUIDE
Capture maintenance knowledge before it walks out the door.
The know-how that keeps a line running is rarely written down where anyone can find it. It lives in one technician’s head, in PDFs scattered across SharePoint and a NAS in three languages, and in the free-text comments of your CMMS. Here is how to make it searchable without a two-year documentation project — and what to actually do before your most experienced people retire.
THE PROBLEM The knowledge that matters isn’t written down — it’s scattered.
Ask who knows how to restart line 3 after the recurring drive fault, and you get a name, not a document. Industrial knowledge management fails not because plants don’t document, but because the useful knowledge lives in three places that never talk to each other: the experience in a senior technician’s head, the machine documentation — manuals, schematics, SOPs — spread across drives and a NAS in several languages, and the real fix history buried in CMMS work-order comments. Each is a silo. None is searchable together.
- In people’s headsthe undocumented workaround, the “it’s always the same connector” intuition — lost the day they leave.
- In scattered documentstechnical documentation, procedures and schematics across SharePoint, Drive, OneDrive and NAS, often multilingual, rarely indexed together.
- In CMMS free textthe actual root cause and fix, typed into a work-order comment field no one can search across.
WHY PROJECTS FAIL Why the documentation project never catches up.
The reflex is to launch a knowledge-capture project: interview the experts, rewrite everything into a new system, tag it all. It stalls for three predictable reasons. It taxes the busiest people — asking a technician mid-shift to re-enter what they already know into yet another tool. It’s monolingual by default, while your real documents are in French, English, German and the vendor’s language. And it creates one more system to check, on top of the CMMS, the drives and the ERP — so people keep asking the person, not the platform.
THE APPROACH Capture in place. Don’t migrate.
AutomAssist connects to the sources the knowledge already lives in — your document stores, your CMMS, your ERP — with one AI agent per source, read-only. Each agent indexes its own content: the multilingual PDFs and schematics, the work-order history and its free-text fixes, the equipment hierarchy from the ERP. A Knowledge Graph then links them, so a fault on a machine connects to its manual, its past interventions, and the parts involved. The knowledge doesn’t move; it becomes queryable, in the asker’s language, traceable to the exact record it came from.
- 01Connect the document storesSharePoint, Google Drive, OneDrive, a NAS — technical documentation, SOPs and schematics are indexed with OCR and made searchable across languages, in place.
- 02Connect the CMMS historythe free-text fixes and root causes in past work orders become searchable and linked to the machine they belong to — the tribal fix, finally findable.
- 03Link it with the graphthe equipment hierarchy from ERP/MES ties documents, history and parts to each asset, so an answer arrives with its context, not as a lone file.
- 04Capture the tacit part deliberatelyfor the know-how that was never written, record the senior technician answering real questions against the connected data — turning “ask Marc” into an answer the graph keeps.
| AutomAssist — connect in place | Classic documentation project | |
|---|---|---|
| Where knowledge goes | Stays in its source, made queryable | Re-entered into a new system |
| Load on your experts | Answer questions; light | Re-write everything; heavy |
| Languages | Multilingual search out of the box | Usually one language |
| CMMS fix history | Searchable and linked to the asset | Left behind in free text |
| Time to first value | Days | Quarters |
| Result if a person leaves | Their recorded answers persist | Whatever they re-typed, if any |
The goal isn’t a prettier archive — it’s an answer at the moment of the fault.
WHAT “SEARCHABLE” MEANS HERE From “ask Marc” to a traceable answer.
Searchable doesn’t mean a better keyword box. It means a maintenance technician can ask, in plain language and in their own language, “how did we fix this fault on this machine last time?” — and get the past work-order fix, the linked procedure and the schematic together, each traceable to its source record. It means the equivalent of digital work instructions surfaced at the machine, from the documents you already have, instead of a binder no one opens. And it means an audit trail: every answer points back to where it came from.
FAQ What teams ask about knowledge capture.
- What is industrial knowledge management, really?
- It’s making the know-how needed to run and maintain equipment findable and reusable — across documents, maintenance history and people. The hard part is rarely writing new content; it’s connecting what already exists (technical documentation, CMMS records, ERP context) so a question returns a traceable answer.
- Do we have to migrate our documents into AutomAssist?
- No. AutomAssist connects to your document stores (SharePoint, Drive, OneDrive, NAS) and your CMMS in place, read-only, and indexes them — including OCR and multilingual content. The documents stay where they are; they just become searchable together.
- Our documentation is in several languages. Does that work?
- Yes — that’s a core reason to connect rather than migrate. Content is indexed across languages, so a technician can ask in their language and get an answer drawn from a manual written in another.
- How do we capture knowledge that was never written down?
- Deliberately, and lightly: record your most experienced people answering real questions against the connected data. Those answers are kept and linked in the Knowledge Graph, so the tacit fix survives the person who knew it.
- Can it produce digital work instructions?
- It surfaces the right procedure and history at the machine, from the documentation you already have — the practical equivalent of work instructions at the point of need, without re-authoring everything into a new format first.
Make your plant’s knowledge findable.
Bring one line and its documentation — we’ll show what becomes searchable once the documents and the CMMS history are connected.
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