Inform Online 2022 – How MBDA unlocks hidden knowledge and expertise to stay ahead of the pack

How MBDA Preserves Critical Knowledge to Power Innovation

Like many long-standing organizations, MBDA has built decades of expertise across its people, projects, and data. But as experienced pioneers retire and innovation cycles accelerate, a critical question emerges: How do you preserve vital digital knowledge—and make it instantly accessible to the next generation without compromising security?

In this Inform Online 2022 session, Philippe Weissen, Group Head of IS Enterprise Services & Support at MBDA, presents how Sinequa’s AI-powered search platform addresses that challenge in practice enabling MBDA to unlock unstructured data at scale, improve decision speed and accuracy across engineering and program teams, and support digital transformation in an environment where security, compliance, and classification controls are non-negotiable.

What We Covered in This Session

• Unlocking unstructured data at scale across a complex defense environment at Scale:

MBDA’s engineering knowledge is predominantly unstructured, design documents, test reports, program records, correspondence, technical analyses, distributed across multiple systems, multiple sites, and multiple national divisions. The session explains how Sinequa’s AI-powered search indexes and understands this content at scale, enabling engineers and program managers to retrieve relevant knowledge from across the full MBDA data environment through a single, secure entry point.

• Faster, more accurate decisions across engineering and program teams:

Speed and accuracy of decision-making are direct operational outcomes of knowledge accessibility. When engineers can retrieve the right technical precedent, the right design decision record, or the right expert contact quickly rather than spending hours navigating disconnected systems or relying on personal networks, the time from question to decision compresses measurably. The session covers how Sinequa’s unified, trusted view of enterprise data delivers this improvement across MBDA’s multi-national teams.

• Secure digital transformation with security-first, user-centric design:

For MBDA, digital transformation is not an option that can proceed without security. The session addresses how Sinequa’s platform integrates with MBDA’s existing security architecture, inheriting classification controls, enforcing access at the document level, and delivering the user-centric experience that drives adoption without requiring engineers to compromise on the security posture that defense operations demand.

The MBDA Knowledge Challenge: Why AI-Powered Search Is Mission-Critical in Defense

The knowledge management problem in a complex defense organization like MBDA is unlike most enterprise knowledge challenges. It is not simply a matter of connecting SharePoint to a search interface. The knowledge MBDA needs to preserve and surface is:

• Technically specialized and deeply contextual. Missile system engineering expertise in propulsion, guidance, seekers, structures, software, integration, and test,  is highly domain-specific. Finding the right document is not enough. Finding the right expert, the right design decision record, the right test result from a program conducted ten years ago that requires search that understands the technical vocabulary, the program context, and the relationships between engineering artifacts across systems.
• Distributed across six countries and multiple languages. MBDA operates national divisions in France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the US. Knowledge generated in one national division must be discoverable by engineers in another across language barriers, organizational boundaries, and different local data environments. Enterprise search at MBDA must be multilingual and multi-system by design.
• Subject to strict security and classification controls. Defense engineering data is not uniformly accessible. Classification levels, program compartmentalization, national security requirements, and export control regulations determine who can see what and a knowledge access system that fails to enforce these controls is not just inadequate. It is a security risk. Sinequa’s platform inherits and enforces source system access controls at the document level, ensuring that AI-powered search surfaces only what each user is authorized to access regardless of how the query is phrased or how many systems are connected.
• At risk of being lost as expert engineers retire. The institutional knowledge most at risk in any mature defense organization is not stored in any system. It lives in the expertise of senior engineers who have worked on programs for 20 or 30 years. The challenge is not just archiving their documents before they leave, it is making the knowledge they contributed across years of program work findable and usable by the next generation of engineers who need it to design the systems of the future.

About MBDA

MBDA is the world leader in complex weapon systems, a unique multi-national European group with 18,000 employees spanning France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the US. Established through the merging of Airbus, BAE Systems, and Leonardo’s missile activities, MBDA brings together state-of-the-art expertise in complex weapon systems, delivering decisive military capabilities to European nations and their allies around the world.