Accelerated actions
Less search effort, faster decisions in daily work
SoftwareOne case study
Knowledge on Demand: Maxon combines process reliability and efficiency with an AI assistant
Where engineering excellence meets global collaboration, knowledge becomes a critical resource. Maxon International Ltd. operates worldwide, developing high-precision electric drive systems. It’s an environment where technical excellence and reliability are lived every day. What matters is that information is available quickly and accessed in the right context. Maxon has focused its efforts on modernizing access to internal processes and support information — without compromising on security, governance, or quality.
Security and Compliance
Governance and permission concepts are integrated from the start
Scalable foundation
Automatic knowledge base updates lay the foundation for rollout and further use cases.
- Client
- maxon international ltd.
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Platform
- Microsoft Azure
- Services
- Data & AI Services, GenAI “Chat with your data” (RAG) prototype
- Country
- Switzerland
Combining speed with trust: maxon’s path to controlled AI-driven knowledge access
Maxon wanted to make knowledge available where decisions are made: in the flow of work. Process documentation, rules, and work instructions would no longer be stored “somewhere.” They would be quickly and clearly accessible to employees worldwide in the right context. This knowledge access would form the basis for consistent action, high quality, and scalability. To achieve this objective, the company began its next stage of development: dialogue-based access to internal knowledge that leverages modern AI with control over content and access.
It was an ambitious and challenging project. Parts of the knowledge base were stored in a legacy application that managed content but made access difficult. This extended search time, slowed further by follow-up questions and media breaks.
The new solution had to meet two requirements: speed and trust. Maxon wanted fast, helpful answers — but only from approved sources with consistent access control. And there needed to be a mechanism that reliably accounted for changes to documents and rules. Governance, security, and approval processes were not “downstream checks” but integral from the outset, and closely coordinated with the responsible stakeholders.
An assistant built on Azure that enables “Chat with Your Data”
Maxon established a clear goal: make knowledge available at the point of decision, directly in the flow of work, while maintaining security and governance. Together with SoftwareOne, maxon realized this goal by enabling “Chat with Your Data.” This specialized AI assistant uses only approved internal content to answer natural-language questions. Starting with a prototype that structurally opens up central knowledge sources around the maxon Process Framework, making them accessible through dialogue.
The solution’s impact stems from a clear value mechanism. Secure authentication via Entra ID ensures that employees access only the information they are authorized to see. Trust and compliance are built in from the start. An intelligent search powered by Azure AI Search and Azure OpenAI delivers fast, context-aware answers. Users do not need to know specific documents or storage structures. Document-based answers further increase transparency and traceability, clearly derived from texts, tables, or images. To keep knowledge reliable in everyday use, automated synchronization keeps the knowledge base up to date, ensuring the assistant continuously works with the latest content.
As a strategic partner, SoftwareOne supported maxon with architecture, technology, and the project approach. In an agile setup with regular feedback cycles, the team progressively developed, enhanced, and evaluated the solution against answer quality and response time. The result is not only a working prototype, but future-ready knowledge access. This demonstrates how AI can sustainably transform the use of internal company knowledge.
We didn’t just want another system, but an access path that lowers barriers. The chatbot was meant to show how quickly knowledge becomes available when it is made accessible in dialogue form — and at the same time, we wanted to gain hands-on experience with new Azure technologies.
maxon international ltd.
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Scalable AI access to corporate knowledge as a foundation for tomorrow
The maxon knowledge sharing project produced a prototype that makes dialogue-based knowledge access immediately tangible. Instead of searching relying on a hard-to-use legacy interface, employees can now ask questions and receive context-aware answers from relevant, indexed documents. The solution helps maxon make process information faster and easier to use. It also simplifies the application of rules.
The project has helped maxon establish the key prerequisites for later scaling. End-to-end security and permission logic ensure that information is available only in authorized contexts. An automated update mechanism additionally ensures that changes to the document base are reliably reflected in the knowledge base. This strengthens trust and reduces operational maintenance efforts, since currency no longer depends on manual processes. User-based filtering also significantly increased the relevance of results and cut irrelevant hits by 60-70%.
The initiative has also brought important organizational clarity. Through iterative alignment with governance stakeholders, requirements for AI solutions to be sustainably viable in a professional environment were sharpened. The prototype also produced a robust delivery model that maxon can use as a basis for further AI initiatives and additional use cases.
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