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An AI knowledge base for factory quality teams
Short answer
An AI knowledge base in a quality department answers which drawing revision to open for a given order and shows the change record it follows from. The inspector no longer collects this from several people, and the decision to accept the product stays with those responsible. At Syntalith the app costs from €3,000 net. At 400 checks a month with 10 minutes of searching each, it pays back in 1.5 months.
How we workDetails ↓
- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- net per application, fixed price before contract
- from €3,000
- from signing the contract to acceptance
- 4–10 weeks
- free prototype on your documents
- €0
We belong to the OpenAI and Anthropic partner programmes and learn through their official courses. What this means ↓
Author: Syntalith · 3 min read
Statistics
Manufacturing and AI: statistics 2026
1.5 mo.
payback of a €3,000 app at 400 document revision checks a month: €2,327 of searching today, €355 with the app. Scenario.
20.0%
According to Eurostat (2025), 20.0% of EU companies with at least 10 employees used AI.
Source: Eurostat, 20% of EU enterprises use AI technologies (2025) ↗
53.6%
According to Eurostat (2023), 53.6% of EU manufacturing companies used ERP software.
50%
According to the European Commission (2026), half of EU SMEs and mid-caps name high investment costs as a barrier to AI.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 578 (2026) ↗
49%
According to Anthropic (2024), combining contextual embeddings with BM25 search cut failed retrievals by 49%, and by 67% with reranking.
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
Two drawings for the same product
The order names the approved drawing at revision 2. The library also holds an approved revision 3, but the change record says it applies only to later orders. The inspector wants to read the finish requirement from the document that covers their order.
Finding the newest file alone would lead to checking the product against the wrong requirement. The answer therefore has to follow from the order and the change record, because the date of the file in the library settles nothing here. The inspector reads the drawing named and checks the product by the plant's rules.
Where the answer lives today
Walk the path with the inspector. You may find that the order already leads to the approved drawing and the problem is a link that is hard to find. In its documentation of engineering versions in Dynamics 365, Microsoft describes documents assigned to product versions and their effective dates.
The order leads to the approved drawing
better access in the current system
no new app
Product versions kept in the ERP
configure engineering versions
configuration
Order in the ERP, file in the library, change in an email
an AI app that joins the sources
from €3,000
What a quality knowledge base costs and when it pays back
- Today
- 400 checks × 10 min = 66.7 h (€2,327)
- With the system, a person checks the output in 15% of the time
- €349
- Model, 1 call per case, Claude Sonnet 5.5
- €5.97
- Cost of one case
- €5.82 today, €0.89 with the system
- Saving
- €1,972 a month
Payback of €3,000
1.5 months
The volume, the time and the checking share are the scenario's assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat. Model: 6,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens per call at Anthropic's rates, converted at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
In a plant that records the link between revision and order differently, the answer has to use that record. That is why, before the quote, we walk through one real case with the quality department: where the inspector starts, which documents they open and whom they ask. The result shows whether better access in the current system is enough or several sources need joining.
When the documents leave a question open
- 01DescriptionThe assistant shows that the change record does not say which orders the new revision covers.
- 02QuestionThe inspector sends the designer a specific question with both drawings and the order.
- 03RecordThe explanation is filed with the order or the drawing.
- 04Next timeThe next inspector finds the decision together with the document.
The date a file was uploaded does not replace a decision on the scope of a change. Customer material may carry different access limits, so the assistant uses only documents the employee may read, and a search for a similar product does not reveal other customers' drawings. Sharing documents with recipients outside the plant is covered in the post about a quality document portal.
The first scope is one product family where the team often explains revision differences. Invite the person who maintains the documentation and an inspector who uses it every day to the assessment. The first checks whether the answer reflects the decisions, the second whether it leads to the requirement. The scope is described on the private ChatGPT for your company page, and we test the reading of drawings separately on the plant's own material.
Worked example · Scenario
How we count the payback: answers from company documents
We run the same count for your documents in the free analysis.
€3,723
a month for finding answers to 800 questions in documents
Payback: 1 mo.
Our assumptions are 8 minutes to find an answer in documents or ask a colleague, and checking in 15% of the old time. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. Model cost: Claude Sonnet 5.5, about 6,000 + 500 tokens per answer from documents, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
See the full calculation →
