Manufacturing
Twenty years of email made searchable after a management buy-in
A Belgian manufacturer changed owners. Most of what the company knows sits with the founders and in their mailboxes, and a new ERP is on the way.
- Business
- A Belgian manufacturer, thirty years old
- Team
- 5 people
- Delivered
- A knowledge base in the company's own SharePoint
The situation
A Belgian manufacturer with a workshop for custom pieces and a catalogue of more than 200,000 standard items. New owners took over in a management buy-in. The founders stay on for a handover of about two years. Much of the company's knowledge is in their heads, their mailboxes and an old server, and the new owners are preparing a move to a new ERP.
Phase by phase
Phase 0 · Free demo
Demo on the owner's computer
One of the new owners got a demo on his own computer. The assistant searched the web and set up a basic knowledge base from public information about the company. He recorded a five-minute braindump, it was added to the knowledge base, and he decided to go ahead.
Phase 1 · Goal
Kick-off with the team
The rest of the team then joined a meeting about the assignment and the phases. The meeting covered many possible projects. One was shown live: the assistant turned a customer request into a PDF order automatically. The agreed goal was a knowledge base that helps with three things: handing over the founders' knowledge, moving to Odoo, and winning more sales by getting back in touch with past customers.
Phase 2 · AI readiness scan
IT landscape and business flows
A few meetings with the team, and questions to the company's software vendors. The result was a knowledge base with the technical architecture, 26 business flows from order to payment described at a high level, and a plan for the Connecting phase.
Phase 3 · Connecting
SharePoint, mailboxes and mail archive
The knowledge base runs in SharePoint in the company's own Microsoft 365 and is connected to every mailbox. The company's IT partner exported more than 100 GB of historical email, which was indexed as a searchable archive going back to 2000. Recorded meetings are added to the knowledge base automatically.
Onboarding
The team uses the knowledge base through the Claude desktop app on their own computers. Three people were onboarded one-to-one. The fourth is onboarding with the instructions stored in the knowledge base. The phase was signed off after onboarding.
Phase 4 · First project
Run by the teamFounder handover
The team runs the handover from the founder as recorded workshops and stores them in the knowledge base.
Projects run by the team
The team runs its own projects in the knowledge base: the ERP implementation, a rebrand and sales outreach. New automation ideas are ranked by value and effort. The first is a routine for supplier price updates.
Results
831,727
emails from the founders' mailboxes, 2000 to 2026, indexed and searchable
83
detailed example customer profiles built from those emails
26
business flows outlined at a high level ahead of the ERP move
3 + 1
people onboarded one-to-one, plus one onboarding from the instructions in the knowledge base
Sales data enriched by the team
The day after sign-off, the owner responsible for sales used the knowledge base to search the founders' mailboxes for customer contact details. He added them to 4,369 of the 5,568 customer accounts, sorted by most recent contact. The old system had no customer email addresses. He described it as surprisingly quick and a big time saver.
TrotStar's part ended after the Connecting phase. The team runs the knowledge base and the first project on its own.