GISCON: Finding Project Knowledge Across Departments in Special-Purpose Machine Building
GISCON builds special-purpose machines with every discipline in-house. That is exactly why project knowledge ends up spread across many departments. How the team now finds it in one place.
GISCON is a special-purpose machine builder that keeps every discipline in-house. That means project knowledge ends up spread across design, manufacturing, electrical engineering and service. With KoAssist, the team finds information on a project in one place across departments, instead of searching each department separately. Every answer points to the file and the page.
A machine builder that does everything in-house
GISCON builds special-purpose machines and keeps every discipline in-house for it: design, manufacturing, electrical engineering, commissioning, service. That is the strength of the company. It is also exactly why the knowledge for a project is never fully in one place.
In special-purpose machine building, every machine is a one-off. There is no series whose documentation you set up once and then reuse. Every order produces its own set of documents, and those documents stay where they were created.
Where knowledge gets stuck in everyday work
The question is rarely "does this information exist." It is almost always "who has it, and when does that person have time."
Someone in commissioning who needs to know why an assembly was designed a certain way three years ago ends up with design engineering. Someone in service with a question about an inspection record ends up with whoever created it. Each of these routes works, but each one costs two people's time instead of one, and each one depends on the person being asked still being with the company.
What changes with KoAssist
KoAssist draws on the existing project documentation across departments and answers questions from it. What matters is not how the answer is phrased, but its evidence: every statement comes with a reference to the file and the page it came from.
That shifts how people search. Instead of working out which department might have produced a document, you ask the question and get the source. Departmental responsibilities do not change; only the detour through them disappears for pure look-up questions.
The documents did not need to be sorted beforehand. A cleanup effort ahead of the rollout would have been a project in its own right and would have pushed the benefit back by months.
We don't see AI as a replacement for engineers, but as an amplifier. With Soneo AI's engineering assistant, we're making decades of know-how available to the next generation, faster and directly usable.
Dragan Jenic, CEO, GISCON
A collaboration that shapes the product
GISCON has been with KoAssist from the start. The ongoing exchange is where the requirements come from that you cannot invent at a desk: which file formats actually occur, what messily grown file shares actually look like, what question a design engineer actually asks and how they phrase it.
This feedback loop is why KoAssist today sits closer to everyday work in mechanical engineering than to a generic document search.
Related topics
How distributed design knowledge affects onboarding new hires is covered in the article on Knowledge Management and Onboarding in Engineering. For how KoAssist technically gets from a question to an evidenced answer, see How it works.
FAQ
Why is project knowledge especially scattered in special-purpose machine building?
Because every machine is a one-off. There is no series with documentation you can simply reuse. Every project produces its own quotation documents, design data, electrical planning, production documents, inspection records and service documentation, and these pieces stay with the department that created them.
What kind of questions does the team ask KoAssist?
Typically follow-up questions about a specific project: which design was chosen, which component is installed, what was documented at acceptance. In other words, questions where you would otherwise know who to ask, and then wait until that person has time.
Does the documentation have to be cleaned up first?
No. KoAssist works with the documents as they are. A cleanup effort beforehand would be a project in its own right and would push the benefit back by months.
How does the team make sure an answer is correct?
Every answer points to the file and the page it came from. The original source can be opened with one click and read in context. Without that evidence, an answer would not be usable in a technical environment.
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