How GISCON Finds Project Knowledge Across Departments in Special-Purpose Machine Building.

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.

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.

The feature behind this is the knowledge assistant.

How this knowledge becomes a companion for running projects is shown on the project memory page.