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How Siemens and Alstom Use Intelligent Search to Cut Costs and Accelerate Manufacturing
The manufacturing information problem — quantified
Only 17% of global manufacturers (Aberdeen Group) are fully satisfied with their ability to use operational data to optimize supply chain, service, and customer experience. The reason isn’t lack of data. It’s that critical knowledge — engineering specs, parts documentation, maintenance records, supplier data — lives in disconnected silos with no unified way to find it.
The cost is measurable. Two of Sinequa’s largest manufacturing customers have put a number on it:
Alstom — 74,000 employees, 3 million parts, projects across 70 countries — estimated $40M in savings from eliminating redundant parts manufacturing, plus $6M from automating proposal generation. Legal and contract teams cut data-gathering time by 5–10%.
Siemens — deployed Sinequa to power its Industry Online Support portal. Dr. Thomas Lackner, CTO Office, Corporate Technology: “Now our customers and employees find insight more efficiently — we’re 30% faster with Sinequa.”
What you’ll learn in this webinar:
- The ROI of a unified product information layer across PLM, ERP, and content systems (Siemens Teamcenter, SAP, OpenText/Documentum, SharePoint, and more)
- How Alstom built role-specific applications — parts finder, contract management, engineering portal — on a single search infrastructure
- The building blocks for modernizing manufacturing operations without replacing existing systems
- How to connect structured PLM/ERP data with unstructured technical documents at enterprise scale
Who this is for: VP Manufacturing Operations, Engineering IT Directors, PLM Platform Owners, Supply Chain Leaders, and digital transformation executives managing complex, multi-system manufacturing environments.
If your organization is managing tens of millions of engineering documents, parts specifications, maintenance records, and supplier data across disconnected systems — and your engineers, service technicians, and sales teams are spending significant time searching for information that should take seconds to find — this webinar is the most direct available evidence of what transformation looks like at Siemens and Alstom scale.
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Why Only 17% of Manufacturers Are Satisfied With Their Data
According to Aberdeen Group research, only 17% of global manufacturing companies are fully satisfied with their ability to use their operational data — including maintenance contracts, technician documents, engineering PDFs, and supply chain records — to optimize the supply chain, deliver service excellence, and improve the customer experience.
This isn’t a data volume problem. Manufacturing organizations have more operational data than ever before. It is a data accessibility and connectivity problem. Critical knowledge sits in disconnected silos: PLM systems holding product and engineering specifications, ERP systems managing procurement and inventory, SharePoint and Documentum repositories containing documentation and SOPs, field service databases tracking maintenance history, and external supplier systems holding component data. When no single interface connects all of these sources, employees spend time navigating between systems rather than using information to make decisions.
The result — documented across Sinequa’s manufacturing customer base — is that engineers duplicate work that has already been done, service technicians escalate problems that have already been solved, sales teams recreate proposals that already exist, and supply chain managers make decisions with incomplete visibility into the full information landscape.
Intelligent search solves this by doing what no individual system can do on its own: connecting every data source simultaneously, understanding the meaning and relationships within the content — not just matching keywords — and delivering the right information to the right employee at the point of need.
What This Webinar Covers
How Intelligent Search Empowers Manufacturers to Optimize Speed, Efficiency, and Spend is a practical, evidence-based session designed for manufacturing operations, IT, and digital transformation leaders. The session covers four core areas:
The ROI of a Unified Product Information Layer Manufacturing organizations operate with product and component knowledge distributed across Enterprise Content Management systems, PLM platforms (including Siemens Teamcenter, PTC Windchill, and others), ERP systems, and document repositories. When this content is unified into a single searchable layer — without replacing or disrupting existing systems — engineers and service technicians gain the ability to find what they need from a single interface. The webinar examines the business case for this investment, including how Alstom connected structured data from PLM and ERP systems with unstructured content from SharePoint, OpenText/Documentum, and CSVs to create a unified knowledge environment across 105 operations in 70 countries.
Building Blocks for Modernizing Manufacturing Operations The session covers the specific platform components required to deliver intelligent search at manufacturing scale: connectors to PLM, ERP, and content management systems; NLP-powered semantic analysis that understands technical and normative documents; secure, role-based access that respects existing system permissions; and low-code application development tools that allow business-specific applications — parts finder, parts costing, contract management, engineering portal — to be built rapidly on top of the core search infrastructure.
Technology That Minimizes Complexity and Enables Growth One of the most common concerns in manufacturing IT is integration complexity. The webinar addresses how Sinequa’s connector architecture — covering over 200 enterprise applications including Office 365, SharePoint, SAP, ServiceNow, Siemens Teamcenter, PDM, MES, and MRO systems — enables rapid deployment without disrupting existing infrastructure. The session also covers how Alstom’s initial deployment as a generic horizontal enterprise search evolved over time into a portfolio of business-specific applications at the heart of their digital transformation.
Siemens and Alstom: Named Customer Success Stories in Detail The webinar goes beyond the headline numbers to examine the operational specifics: how Siemens deployed Sinequa to serve both internal employees and external customers through a unified support portal; how Alstom’s parts finder application eliminates redundant parts specification across 3 million components; how Alstom’s contract management application reduces the time legal personnel spend interpreting contract data; and how Sinequa’s platform enables Alstom’s VP of Internal Audit to describe the outcome: “Sinequa’s Intelligent Search platform’s in-depth analysis provides Alstom’s employees with a thorough understanding of unstructured data, including the text coming from very complex technical and normative documents — allowing greater efficiency and real time savings for our data scientists.”
From Intelligent Search to Agentic AI in Manufacturing
The Siemens and Alstom deployments documented in this webinar represent the first generation of what is now becoming a much broader AI transformation in manufacturing. Both organizations built their intelligent search layer as the foundation for subsequent AI investments — a decision that is now proving strategically prescient.
Global manufacturing leaders including Airbus, Alstom, NASA, and Siemens are among the organizations now working with Sinequa on the next generation of capability: AI agents that can autonomously surface relevant engineering information, proactively alert engineers to related specifications when a new design is initiated, automatically cross-reference maintenance histories when a service request is filed, and generate draft proposals by pulling the most relevant prior RFP responses from across the organization.
CIMdata estimates that an AI-powered search solution for maintenance and support operations can improve customer productivity by 5–20%, improve internal productivity by 10–30%, optimize use of internal resources by 10–25%, and improve customer satisfaction by 5–10%. These outcomes are only achievable when the underlying search and retrieval infrastructure is complete, connected, and accurate — which is precisely what Sinequa’s intelligent search platform provides as the foundation.
For manufacturing organizations building an enterprise AI strategy, the message from Siemens, Alstom, and the broader Sinequa manufacturing customer base is consistent: the intelligent search layer is not a utility to be deployed later. It is the knowledge infrastructure that makes everything above it — generative AI, agentic AI, digital thread connectivity — trustworthy enough to act on.
Frequently Asked Questions
Alstom has estimated savings of approximately $40 million from eliminating redundant parts manufacturing and reducing engineering errors — achieved by giving designers and engineers connected access to information across 3 million parts. An additional estimated $6 million in savings came from automating the proposal generation process, replacing a situation where sales proposals were being recreated thousands of times because RFP and sales information was not accessible across countries. Legal and contract teams reduced time spent on data gathering and interpretation by 5–10%.
Siemens deployed Sinequa to power its Industry Online Support (SIOS) portal, enabling both internal employees and external customers to find technical information more efficiently. Dr. Thomas Lackner, CTO Office, Corporate Technology at Siemens, documented the outcome: the organization became 30% faster at information discovery. The deployment connects employees and customers to Siemens’ vast body of product knowledge, technical documentation, and support content through a single intelligent search interface.
Sinequa connects to the full range of PLM and manufacturing systems used in enterprise production environments, including Siemens Teamcenter, PTC Windchill, SAP ERP, ServiceNow, OpenText/Documentum, SharePoint, IBM Notes, MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems), MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) applications, and PDM (Product Data Management) systems — as well as over 200 additional enterprise applications. This connectivity allows manufacturers to create a unified, searchable knowledge layer across all engineering, operational, and business data without replacing or disrupting existing systems.
Aberdeen Group research found that only 17% of global manufacturing companies are fully satisfied with their ability to use their operational data — including maintenance contracts, technician documents, and PDFs — to optimize the supply chain, deliver service excellence, and improve customer experience. This low satisfaction rate reflects not a shortage of data but a fragmentation problem: the data exists but is distributed across disconnected systems with no unified way to search, connect, and act on it.
Intelligent search platforms like Sinequa integrate with PLM systems by indexing structured and unstructured content from PLM repositories — product specifications, engineering drawings, BOMs (Bills of Materials), change orders, test records, and compliance documentation — and combining it with data from ERP, document management, and other operational systems into a single searchable layer. Using NLP and semantic analysis, the platform understands technical engineering language and part relationships, enabling engineers to find relevant specifications, prior designs, and associated documentation across all systems simultaneously from one interface — without logging into each system separately.
Manufacturing organizations typically build role-specific applications on top of Sinequa’s core search infrastructure. Alstom’s implementations include a parts finder (for engineering teams managing 3 million parts), a parts costing application, a contract management application for legal and procurement teams, and an engineering portal. Siemens built a customer-facing support portal. Other common manufacturing applications include maintenance and repair information systems for field technicians, supply chain visibility dashboards, new product introduction (NPI) knowledge bases, and regulatory compliance document search.
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