Flender China: Accelerating engineering excellence with Agentic AI
A sovereign agentic AI solution that accelerates engineering efficiency and drives value-driven innovation at scale, securely and responsibly.
At a glance
Outcomes
- An 83% reduction in design standard document and engineering drawing interpretation time, from approximately 30 minutes to 5 minutes
- A sixfold increase in engineering design processing capacity
- Annual savings of approximately 2,000 engineering hours
- 30-50% faster knowledge discovery and document retrieval
- Standardized cross-team collaboration and knowledge access
By applying sovereign, secure and compliant AI to complex engineering workflows, the project accelerates knowledge reuse and decision-making, helping shorten the path from design insight to market-ready innovation while demonstrating the replicability of manufacturing agents in complex knowledge management.
Guo Yan Ming
IT Head, Flender China
Client Challenge
Building an engineering knowledge management in a complex and highly regulated environment
As a global leader in industrial drive technology, Flender operates within a highly complex engineering environment governed by rigorous design standards and extensive technical documentation.
The company faced the following key challenges:
- Balancing the need for accurate interpretation of engineering documents with the high cost and complexity of on-premises AI deployment.
- Managing and connecting information across diverse formats, including documents, engineering drawings, and spreadsheets, etc., making knowledge retrieval and contextual analysis time-consuming.
- Overcoming fragmented knowledge repositories that limited enterprise-wide visibility and knowledge sharing.
- Enabling knowledge reuse and workflow collaboration across business functions to improve engineering efficiency and consistency.
Flender collaborated with Atos to develop a sovereign AI engineering assistant that transforms traditional labor-intensive and time-consuming design interpretation into an automated, scalable process, enabling a more intelligent, efficient, and future-ready engineering R&D operation.
Solution
An Atos solution: A sovereign agentic AI solution for engineering excellence
Atos China delivered a sovereign agentic AI solution combining retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), multimodal AI, and manufacturing domain expertise. Deployed in Flender’s secure on-premises environment, it enables intelligent interpretation and retrieval of engineering knowledge while ensuring data sovereignty, intellectual property protection, and a more efficient engineering experience.
- An intelligent engineering knowledge network, built by consolidating engineering standards, design documents, drawings, and technical knowledge into a unified, searchable repository tailored to the customer’s “design-to-order” business model.
- Accurate knowledge retrieval and contextual insights, enabled through semantic search, dynamic reasoning, and multimodal understanding, providing engineers with relevant answers and faster access to critical information.
- Data sovereignty and intellectual property protection with fully on-premises deployment, role-based access controls, and end-to-end data governance, keeping all sensitive engineering data under enterprise control.
- AI capabilities tailored to Flender’s engineering environment, improving the understanding of technical terminology, engineering context, and complex design-related queries.
- A scalable, future-ready foundation that supports future multi-agent collaboration, expanded enterprise AI use cases, and large-scale AI adoption across engineering operations.
Business Benefits
Delivering tangible business benefits
After rollout, the sovereign agentic AI engineering assistant delivered the following tangible results:
- An 83% reduction in design standard document and engineering drawing interpretation time, from approximately 30 minutes to 5 minutes
- A sixfold increase in engineering design processing capacity
- Annual savings of approximately 2,000 engineering hours
- 30-50% faster knowledge discovery and document retrieval
- Standardized cross-team collaboration and knowledge access
Why Atos
Atos delivered this solution through its Sovereign Agentic Studios, a proven framework for operationalizing enterprise AI securely and at scale. Unlike cloud-first AI approaches, Atos combines the following for a seamless approach and delivery:
- Deep manufacturing domain expertise, understanding Flender’s “design-to-order” workflows and technical vocabulary
- Sovereign-first architecture, fully on-premises deployment with zero data leaving customer infrastructure
- Multimodal AI capabilities, handling documents, drawings, and structured data simultaneously
- Enterprise governance, role-based access, audit trails, and IP protection by design
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