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How Alstom Keeps Big Projects on Track with Sinequa

A global leader in the transportation sector, Alstom offers its diverse customers the broadest portfolio in the industry, including high-speed trains, metros, monorails, trams, turnkey systems, services, infrastructure, signaling, and digital mobility.

Challenges

Alstom’s projects are massive in scale and can often take decades to complete. It takes a large and diverse cast to support these achievements: Over 74,000 employees working at 105 operations in 70 countries and a supply chain that includes 40 tier-one companies. These professionals use hundreds of applications, such as OpenText/Documentum, SAP, IBM Notes, SharePoint, and Microsoft Office, and generate loads of documents and data stored in many different places. With all of these disparate content sources, Alstom employees were spending as much time looking for relevant information as they were using it to drive the business forward.

Solutions

Alstom has been a customer since 2017. Sinequa was initially deployed as a generic horizontal enterprise search to empower employees to access information from their AMS — Alstom Management System — the backbone of the company’s policies and documents.

They have since added several business-specific insight applications at the heart of their digital transformation, such as parts finder, parts costing, contract management, and engineering portal. The ability to customize Insight applications to the needs expressed by business users is seen as a key differentiator by Alstom.

With Sinequa, Alstom has integrated structured (extracts from PLM/ERP) and unstructured data from SharePoint, OpenText/Documentum, and CSVs.

Results

Indexing content from these systems and securely sharing the information and insights with a large employee base in both generalist and functional roles has generated a significant return on investment for Alstom.

How Alstom Keeps Big Projects on Track with Sinequa

The business impact associated with these results has been impressive. Examples include:

  • In product engineering and design, Alstom reduces mistakes and eliminates redundant parts manufacturing by surfacing information using Sinequa from all parts data within the company and the supply chain. For designers and engineers dealing with some 3 million parts, eliminating redundant parts manufacturing and reducing errors has generated an estimated savings of $40 million.
  • Because RFP and sales information were not accessible, and people did not share information across countries, sales proposals were recreated thousands of times. Using Sinequa to find information to automate the proposal generation process efficiently allows Alstom to
    acquire new business faster. Faster proposal creation times within the sales organization yield an estimated savings of $6 million.
  • For legal personnel and contract administrators, optimized access to claims and contracts information reduces the time spent gathering and interpreting data by 5-10%.
Sinequa’s Intelligent Search platform’s in-depth analysis provides Alstom’s employees with a thorough understanding of unstructured data, including the text from complex technical and normative documents. This allows greater efficiency and real-time savings for Alstom’s data scientists.

Tristan Le Masne Vice President, Internal Audit & Internal Control at Alstom