Assistant
How Alstom Keeps Big Manufacturing Projects on Track with Sinequa
Alstom manages projects that take decades to complete across 74,000 employees, 105 operations, and 70 countries. Here’s how they keep them on track.
Rail infrastructure projects are among the most complex undertakings in global manufacturing. Thousands of stakeholders. Millions of parts. Contracts spanning continents and decades. Hundreds of systems — OpenText/Documentum, SAP, IBM Notes, SharePoint — none of them talking to each other.
Alstom’s employees were spending as much time looking for relevant information as they were using it to drive the business forward. Sinequa Engineers were specifying parts that already existed. Sales teams were rebuilding proposals that had been written before. Legal teams were manually hunting through contracts that should have been instantly retrievable.
Sinequa changed that. For designers and engineers managing some 3 million parts, eliminating redundant parts manufacturing and reducing errors generated an estimated savings of $40 million. Faster proposal creation times within the sales organization yielded an estimated $6 million in savings. Sinequa Contract and legal teams reduced time spent on data gathering by 5–10%.
Tristan Le Masne, Vice President Internal Audit & Internal Control at Alstom: “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.”
In this video, you’ll see:
- How Alstom unified structured PLM/ERP data with unstructured documents across SharePoint, OpenText/Documentum, and more into a single searchable environment
- How role-specific applications — parts finder, contract management, engineering portal — were built on a single search infrastructure
- How intelligent search connects the right people, documents, and prior decisions across a globally distributed project team
Who this is for: Project operations leaders, engineering IT directors, and digital transformation executives at complex, multi-site manufacturing organizations managing large-scale infrastructure or product programs.
Watch the video
From Project Intelligence to Agentic AI in Manufacturing
Alstom’s deployment of Sinequa — connecting 74,000 employees across 105 operations to a unified, intelligent knowledge layer — is now the foundation for a broader AI transformation across complex manufacturing. The ability to instantly surface the right engineering document, prior contract, or relevant parts specification across millions of assets is what makes the next generation of AI capability reliable enough to act on in a project-critical environment.
Global manufacturing leaders like Alstom are now exploring agentic AI systems that can proactively monitor project documentation for emerging risks, automatically surface relevant prior proposals when a new tender is opened, and alert engineers to related parts specifications before redundant design work begins. These capabilities are only trustworthy when the underlying knowledge layer is complete, connected, and accurate — which is precisely what Sinequa’s intelligent search platform provides.
For manufacturing organizations running complex, multi-site, multi-decade programs, the message is clear: the information infrastructure that keeps big projects on track today is the same infrastructure that makes AI-augmented project execution possible tomorrow.
Frequently Asked Questions
Alstom deployed Sinequa’s intelligent search platform to connect all its project knowledge — engineering documents, parts specifications, contracts, RFPs, and operational data — from systems including OpenText/Documentum, SAP, IBM Notes, and SharePoint into a single searchable layer accessible to 74,000 employees across 70 countries. Role-specific applications built on top of the platform — including a parts finder, contract management tool, and engineering portal — give each team the targeted interface they need without requiring them to navigate multiple disconnected systems. The result: an estimated $40M saved by eliminating redundant parts manufacturing and $6M from automating proposal generation.
For Alstom, the documented ROI of Sinequa’s intelligent search platform includes an estimated $40 million in savings from eliminating redundant parts specification and manufacturing errors across 3 million managed parts, $6 million in savings from automating the sales proposal generation process, and a 5–10% reduction in time spent by legal and contract teams gathering and interpreting contract data. These outcomes reflect a consistent pattern across complex manufacturing: the cost of employees searching for — or recreating — information that already exists is measurable, significant, and directly addressable through a unified intelligent search layer.
In large, geographically distributed manufacturing organizations, project knowledge is scattered across dozens of systems, repositories, and countries — with no single interface connecting it all. Intelligent search solves this by indexing all content sources simultaneously and delivering relevant information to any team member, in any location, through a single interface. For Alstom, this means an engineer in France can find a prior parts specification created in Germany, a sales team in the UK can access a proposal built in another region, and a project manager can identify the right internal expert based on their documented contributions — without making a single phone call or filing a manual information request.
Sinequa connects to the full technology stack typically found in large manufacturing organizations, including PLM systems (Siemens Teamcenter, PTC Windchill), ERP systems (SAP), document management platforms (OpenText/Documentum), collaboration tools (SharePoint, IBM Notes), MES and MRO systems, and over 200 additional enterprise applications. For Alstom specifically, the platform integrates structured data from PLM and ERP systems with unstructured content from SharePoint, OpenText/Documentum, and CSVs — creating a unified knowledge environment without disrupting or replacing any existing system.
In large manufacturing projects — particularly multi-year, multi-site programs like those Alstom manages in railway infrastructure — the cost of poor information access compounds over time. Engineers who can’t find existing parts specifications create new ones unnecessarily. Sales teams who can’t access prior proposals rebuild them from scratch, thousands of times. Contract managers who can’t quickly retrieve claims history spend hours on manual data gathering instead of resolving issues. Each of these inefficiencies is small in isolation but significant at scale: across 3 million parts and 74,000 employees, the aggregate cost runs to tens of millions of dollars. Intelligent search eliminates these costs by making all prior knowledge instantly findable by anyone who needs it.
Share
