Technical Documentation with AI: Why Machinery Makers Get the Fastest Payback Here

The operating manual comes last. The machine is assembled, the acceptance test is scheduled, and now a design engineer, under time pressure, writes down what he has built over the past four months. This is one of the most common reasons for late deliveries that we see, and one of the least visible, because it never appears as the cause in any report.

In our survey with 14 responses, documentation was named as the biggest time waster far more often than anything else. But respondents rarely meant the manual. They meant the requirements specification and the jungle of regulations, in other words the documents that are written before the machine exists and the ones that prove it is allowed to exist. That is requirements work, and in most companies it is done by the same two or three people who are also supposed to be designing.

Where the time goes

In the reference company with a hundred employees, the five technical documentation activities take up 87 hours a week, more than any other group in the library. The largest single item is searching, not writing: the answers are buried in drawings, old projects and people’s heads, and searching means asking around.

Five applications, costed

Operating manual from CAD and bill of materials

The chapter structure and standard texts are generated from the design data, and the technician adds what is specific to the machine. This is the application with the shortest payback in the entire library, and it takes effect exactly where deliveries start to slip.

In the model company: 16 hours a week, 35 percent of which can be automated, €21,420 a year. Setup €3,500, running costs €300 a month, payback after 2.4 months. Implementation: builds on the shared knowledge platform, 3 to 6 weeks. Tools: Quanos SCHEMA ST4, Claude, Microsoft 365 Copilot. Data protection: not critical, internal data with no personal data involved.

Making technical knowledge searchable

An assistant that answers questions from the entire document base, always citing its sources. This application pays for the knowledge platform on which eleven further applications in the library build. That is why its setup costs are higher, and that is why every application that follows gets cheaper.

In the model company: 45 hours a week, 30 percent of which can be automated, €51,638 a year. Setup €21,500, running costs €1,595 a month, payback after 7.9 months. Implementation: builds on the shared knowledge platform, 3 to 6 weeks. Tools: Azure AI Search, Glean, Onyx, Amazon Q, FORGE Document Intelligence (our own product). Data protection: not critical, internal data with no personal data involved.

Drafting requirements and functional specifications

A structured draft is produced from meeting notes and previous projects. Requirements that are written down incompletely become expensive to fill in later, and that is the core finding of the survey. A licence, no interface, payback in just over three months.

In the model company: 12 hours a week, 40 percent of which can be automated, €18,360 a year. Setup €4,000, running costs €225 a month, payback after 3.1 months. Implementation: licence and training, no infrastructure of your own, 2 to 4 weeks. Tools: Claude, ChatGPT Enterprise, Jama Connect. Data protection: not critical, internal data with no personal data involved.

Checking against standards and directives

Whether a design meets every requirement of the Machinery Directive and the relevant standards is often known to only one person in the company. The tool checks the documents against the catalogue of standards and lists any evidence that is still missing. The result always needs a specialist review, and responsibility for conformity stays with people. Since 12 September 2026, the EU Data Act has also required that users of connected machines newly placed on the market can access the machine data, which is one more thing to prove. And from 20 January 2027, the Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 applies in place of the Machinery Directive.

In the model company: 6 hours a week, 30 percent of which can be automated, €6,885 a year. Setup €3,500, running costs €255 a month, payback after 11.0 months. Implementation: builds on the shared knowledge platform, 3 to 6 weeks. Tools: Claude, Perinorm, Azure AI Search, ComplAInow (our own product). Data protection: needs review, settle the data processing agreement and deletion policy in advance.

Translating technical documents

Translations are sent out, take weeks and come back with the wrong technical terminology. With a well-maintained company glossary, the tool does the translation, and external work is reduced to proofreading. This is the highest savings rate in the group.

In the model company: 8 hours a week, 60 percent of which can be automated, €14,040 a year. Setup €4,000, running costs €135 a month, payback after 3.9 months. Implementation: licence and training, no infrastructure of your own, 2 to 4 weeks. Tools: DeepL Pro, Trados, Across. Data protection: not critical, internal data with no personal data involved.

Where to start

Start with the requirements specification and translation. Both are pure licence applications, paid off in under four months and with no interface. Then build the knowledge platform through searchable documentation, because it pays for the infrastructure that service, quality and production will build on later. The operating manual from CAD and bill of materials sits on top of it, the application with the shortest payback in the whole library, and it is the reason not to put the platform off until later. Checking against standards comes last. Its value lies in the gaps in evidence it helps you avoid, and those do not appear in any calculation of hours.

Application	Hours per week	Savings per year	Setup	Payback
Operating manual from CAD and bill of materials	16	€21,420	€3,500	2.4 months
Drafting requirements and functional specifications	12	€18,360	€4,000	3.1 months
Translating technical documents	8	€14,040	€4,000	3.9 months
Making technical knowledge searchable	45	€51,638	€21,500	7.9 months
Checking against standards and directives	6	€6,885	€3,500	11.0 months

How the figures are calculated

All figures come from the calculation model of the use case library, not from the survey. A reference company with 100 employees, 45 productive weeks a year, fully loaded costs of €65 an hour for commercial staff and €85 for technical staff, licences at €45 per user a month. Only saved working time is counted against the full costs, and the savings rates are deliberately set at the lower end of what is known from projects and studies. No quality gains, no avoided cost of errors, no effect on lead times. Replace the assumptions with your own figures, and the model calculation becomes your calculation.

Further reading

The full calculation for all thirty applications is in the Use Case Library for Machinery Manufacturing, and the managing directors’ answers are in the survey results (in German).

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