The documentation exists. Can anyone find it.
In most machine-building companies the technical documentation is not missing. It is spread across PDM systems, project drives, mailboxes and external service providers, and it has grown over decades. A ten-year retention period outlasts both staff changes and system migrations. Findable means: for a specific question, you can say within a reasonable time which file, which page and which section holds the answer.
This page continues the checklist. There you noted what is required and where it sits. This is about the cases where the second column stayed empty.
Why complete archives still fail
A body of documents does not become unmanageable because the work was sloppy. It becomes unmanageable because it grew over decades, survived several system migrations, and was maintained by people who now work elsewhere.
Three questions decide whether an archive holds up. Which standards are cited, in which version? Where is the rationale for a chosen protective measure? And how did we assess a comparable hazard on an earlier machine? All three can be answered by someone who knows the documents. None can be answered by a file search, because the answer is not in the filename. It is on page 14 of a specification.
An answer with its source, not a hit list
A full-text search returns files. An answer returns the sentence that answers the question, together with the place it comes from. The difference is not convenience, it is provability: what you produce to an authority is the source reference, not the search term.
KoAssist answers questions put to your own archive and backs every statement with file, page and section. This is what that looks like:
Which version of which standard does our risk assessment cite for the guard enclosure?
The risk assessment references DIN EN ISO 12100:2010 for the methodology and DIN EN ISO 14120:2016 for the requirements on fixed guards. The choice of enclosure is justified in the specification.
Example with invented file names. The structure of the answer matches the product.
A source reference, not a verdict
There is one thing KoAssist explicitly does not do: judge whether you meet a requirement. The system never states that you are compliant. It states that something on this point was found in file X on page Y, and leaves the judgement to you and your specialists.
That distinction is not caution, it is liability. A statement of conformity is an assurance with legal consequences. A source reference is evidence. We supply evidence.
For the same reason KoAssist does not provide the content of standards. Checking which versions your documents cite needs numbers, versions and status, not full texts.
See it with your own documentation.
In a demo we put the questions to your archive, not to our sample data. Thirty minutes, no obligation.