Turning Knowledge into a Competitive Advantage

Client Overview

A German consultancy specializing in functional safety according to IEC 61508, ISO 26262, CENELEC EN 5012X and IEC 62304 approached ARCA with a recurring challenge. Over many years of project delivery, the company had accumulated a large volume of safety concepts, analyses, templates and compliance documents. Although the team possessed deep expertise, this knowledge lived in scattered folders, outdated versions and personal archives. With fewer than ten engineers, the company depended heavily on personal memory and manual guidance to complete documentation, onboard new hires and prepare training materials. Cloud-based tools were not an option due to strict confidentiality requirements and ISO 9001 compliance.

The Challenge

The core issue was not a lack of expertise, but the absence of a structured way to access it. Engineers often spent more time searching for the right reference than performing the actual technical work. Valuable past projects were difficult to locate, templates existed in multiple conflicting versions and onboarding relied almost entirely on senior staff walking newcomers through examples. Training preparation required assembling materials from scratch each time, further adding to internal workload. Without a secure way to apply AI, the company could not benefit from modern tooling despite clear opportunities for efficiency.

Our Approach

ARCA began with a focused assessment of the client’s documentation and knowledge workflows. Through interviews and process mapping, we identified where engineers lost time, how information flowed between staff and which parts of the safety lifecycle produced the highest friction. This analysis made it clear that the firm needed a single, authoritative system that organized past work, enabled rapid retrieval and supported drafting of new safety documentation.

To address this, ARCA designed a private, on-premise AI Knowledge Hub tailored to the client’s confidentiality constraints. The solution combined a structured ingestion pipeline, a semantic search layer and a lightweight self-hosted language model. All historical project documents were parsed and embedded locally, creating a searchable internal knowledge base that preserved context and relationships between artifacts. A FastAPI backend and a clean internal interface made the system easy to use, while a simple Docker-based deployment ensured that the small engineering team could operate it without overhead.

The system allowed engineers to retrieve relevant analyses, templates and reference concepts instantly, rather than digging through folders or asking colleagues for guidance. Compliance templates for safety reports could be pre-filled with context-appropriate material drawn from past projects. New project data could be added continuously through the ingestion pipeline, ensuring the Knowledge Hub grew alongside the company’s work.

Results

The impact was immediate and measurable across the organization. Time spent searching for information dropped by roughly 80%, as engineers no longer needed to navigate unstructured archives or interrupt colleagues for past examples. Onboarding, previously requiring around forty hours of manual explanation and document hunting, was reduced to approximately ten hours. With streamlined access to best-practice materials, engineers saved on average twenty hours per month on documentation tasks, allowing them to focus on analysis rather than re-creating work. Preparation of training materials became significantly faster—around 50% quicker—because instructors could assemble high-quality reference packages directly from the centralized knowledge base.

Beyond efficiency, the Knowledge Hub brought a new level of consistency and quality. Documents were based on unified, current templates, reducing the risk of outdated approaches. Senior engineers experienced fewer interruptions, and junior engineers benefited from broader exposure to past project examples. The company gained a single source of truth for its institutional knowledge, enabling smoother collaboration and higher confidence in the completeness of compliance deliverables.

Impact

For a small, highly specialized consultancy, the Knowledge Hub became a strategic asset. It preserved years of expertise in a reliable structure, strengthened the firm’s ability to deliver consistent and audit-ready documentation, and created a scalable foundation for future growth. Most importantly, it delivered these benefits without compromising the strict confidentiality required in functional safety. ARCA’s implementation demonstrated how thoughtfully deployed on-premise AI can meaningfully improve operations in regulated environments, even for small expert teams.