Manufacturing · Caso de estudio
Instead of a 200-page handover binder, search 15 years of maintenance logs by equipment name
Lo que consiguesFrom 15 years of scanned handwritten maintenance logs and a weekly interview recording, a question like "booth 3 pressure hunting, past cases on humid days" comes back with what was done at the time and links to the log notes it came from.
2:12 a.m., and the pressure alarm goes off on paint booth 3. The on-call tech, three years in, pulls a binder out of the cabinet: 200 pages of the "knowledge transfer document" corporate ordered up last month. The table of contents has an entry for "Responding to paint equipment faults," but which of the 47 pages under it covers pressure hunting, he has no idea. So he calls the foreman — 30 years on the line, 18 months from retirement. The foreman, half asleep, says: "Humid tonight, right? Start by draining the trap upstream of the regulator."
The person at the center of this story is the production engineering manager at a parts manufacturer. He owns the paint line, and he has 18 months to take over the foreman's 30 years. What he has to work with: 15 years of scanned handwritten maintenance logs, an Excel export of MES comments, equipment manual PDFs, and an interview he records on the line once a week. What follows is how that material goes into Consilience, and what actually gets typed at 2 a.m. This is not a real customer story — it's a hypothetical scenario.
What he has
Most of this line's knowledge is already written down. It's just split across A4 scans, spreadsheet cells, manual PDFs, and the foreman's memory. Here's the inventory when the manager counts it up.
- 15 years of scanned handwritten maintenance logs — 180 PDFs, roughly 4,200 pages. Ballpoint handwriting mixed with abbreviations and sketches
- One Excel export of MES equipment comments — about 30,000 rows going back to 2018. Each cell holds a single line like "P-103 hunting again, drained trap"
- 22 equipment manual PDFs — paint booths, transfer pumps, regulators. Straight from the manufacturers
- Line interview recordings — a 40-minute m4a once a week. The foreman talking in front of the machine, captured as-is
- Three names for the same machine — the logs say "No. 3 Booth," the MES says "P-103," the manuals and work standards say "Paint-3"
How it works today
Corporate's instruction was "a 200-page knowledge transfer document." Which means the foreman opens Word after his shift and writes down 30 years in table-of-contents order. He's about halfway through, and those 200 pages are printed and sitting in a binder in the line office cabinet.
Nobody standing in front of an alarm at 2 a.m. reads 200 pages from the top. And even if you find "No. 3 Booth" in the contents, the 30,000 rows of MES comments filed under "P-103" over three years aren't tied to the same machine, so they never surface in a search at all. So the on-call tech calls. In 18 months there's nobody to pick up.
Ask the foreman and it takes three seconds. Look in the binder and I just don't find it.
How he sets it up
The setup costs the manager one day in the first week. After that, it's one recording a week and nothing else.
Building the paint line workspace
Load 15 years in one run
Open "Extract sources" from the left sidebar (
Cmd+Shift+I), drag in the folder of scanned logs, the MES spreadsheet, and the 22 manual PDFs, then press "Import". The handwritten scans go through OCR to get the letters out. Progress runs through five stages: "Reading your files" → "Getting to know your topics" → "Extracting the knowledge graph" → "Connecting related items" → "Organizing into themes". The "Getting to know your topics" stage picks up this line's vocabulary — hunting, trap drain, booth differential pressure — and extraction uses it from there on. The original PDFs stay exactly where they were, underattachments/.Confirm the three names as one machine
At "Connecting related items", a proposal comes up to merge "No. 3 Booth," "P-103," and "Paint-3" into one machine. Nothing is applied automatically. The manager has to confirm the three before any name returns the same material. If he confirms a wrong one, it can be undone.
The foreman just talks
Each week's 40-minute m4a from the line goes into the same "Extract sources" wizard. Audio is transcribed into a note, and that note runs the same five stages into the graph. The fixes and judgment calls the foreman spoke get attached to the machine, sourced to that interview note. Nowhere in this flow does the foreman write a Word document.
What he asks
"booth 3 pressure hunting, past cases on humid days"
→ Five cases come back as a list. Each one carries the symptom and
the fix from the time, plus a source note link (maintenance-log_2019-08-03).
"pull together the recurring symptoms and fixes for P-103"
→ Grouped into three symptoms: pressure hunting, nozzle clogging,
transfer pump pulsation noise. Under each, the fix and source note
links (maintenance-log_2021-05-14, MES comment).
Asking for "No. 3 Booth" returns the same answer.
"what's the current regulator replacement interval on booth 3"
→ Three months. The basis is what the foreman said in a 2023 interview note.
The 6-month interval from the 2016 log is shown alongside it as the old one.Two things have to be true for that answer to come back. First, the three names are confirmed as one machine, so the logs' "No. 3 Booth" and the MES's "P-103" pile up in the same place. Second, clicking the note link on the answer opens the note that came out of the 2019 ballpoint scan, so the on-call tech can check the original before he trusts the answer.
Until the manager confirms them, the old interval and the new one sit in their own notes as they are. Which of 6 months and 3 months is current only shows up in the answer after he checks both notes and resolves it.
What changes
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
| At 2 a.m. you hunt through a 200-page binder's contents, then call the foreman | Type the equipment name and past cases come back as a list, each with the log note it's based on |
| Search "No. 3 Booth" and the 30,000 rows of "P-103" comments in the MES don't come up | The three names are confirmed as one machine, so any of them returns the same answer |
| The foreman writes 30 years into Word after his shift | The foreman talks on the line; the weekly 40-minute recording becomes a note attached to the machine |
| 6 months from 2016 and 3 months from 2023 sit in separate documents, and the documents alone don't tell you which is current | The current interval comes first in the answer, and the old one is shown with the note it came from |
For 18 months, the manager's repeat work is dropping one recording a week into "Extract sources" and confirming the name merges and interval changes that come up. Setup cost one day in the first week; after that it's a few minutes a week.