Engineering knowledge is multimodal, spanning long PDFs, diagrams, spreadsheets, and revision-specific procedures. These formats break under naive search and are difficult to analyze. A table cell, for example, loses meaning without its header, and a diagram is meaningless without the relationships it depicts and the surrounding context in which it was placed.
Engineers need exact, auditable answers grounded in the correct product, revision, units, and test conditions, not just a relevant passage.
Vectara's Managed Agent for Engineering Knowledge Search (EKS) understands this structure and context, making the knowledge contained within this multimodal data retrievable via detailed, generated descriptions. This addresses the structural-loss problem that flattens engineering documents into undifferentiated and uncorrelated text. Metadata filters scope results by product and revision, ensuring applications always operate on relevant data with the correct context. Citation-backed generation closes the loop, giving engineers a verifiable, traceable path back to the answer’s source.
Taken together, Vectara EKS extraction, structured retrieval, and grounded generation transform engineering search from one lookup step in a problem-solving workflow into a transparent, one-stop solution.
Data sources
10 Vectara corpora, one per kind of record. In a working plant this data is typically spread across the systems named on each card. The Design Engineer can search 6 of the 10.
- Bill of material
All four bills of material ‒ engineering, manufacturing, service and maintenance ‒ plus the part master and a precomputed where-used record for every consumed part.
- Engineering change
Change requests, notices, deviations, product change notices and end-of-life notices, with their affected-item lists and a revision timeline per part.
- Product document
Product and application specifications, instruction sheets, qualification test reports, material declarations, design FMEAs, and the drawings.
- Process document
Routings, process flow diagrams, control plans, process FMEAs, setup sheets, work instructions, PPAP packages, packaging specifications, and the process capability rollups.
- Quality record
Nonconformance reports, corrective actions, supplier corrective actions, eight-discipline reports, internal audit reports and deviation requests, plus the quality rollups that carry the nonconformance counts per part and per quarter.
- Service document
Service manuals, field service bulletins, field return records, the spare kit catalogue and tool repair manuals.
Vectara Advantage
Vectara is driving measurable results across enterprise deployments, exemplified by these metrics reported by a Top 10 global technology company:
- $1M
Cost reduction due to efficiency gains
- 30%
Increase in bug detection
- 15x
Improvement in engineer productivity
Vectara Engineering Knowledge Search Managed Agent
Vectara powers an AI assistant that gives VLSI engineers answers and guidance drawn from previously siloed engineering data, supporting them across design, development, verification, and support.
Ingest Pipelines
Vectara accesses knowledge wherever it lives: email and Google Chat spaces containing thousands of threads of tribal product knowledge, Box and Google Drive files with vendor documentation and spec sheets, and Google Sites and wikis capturing design artifacts and test plans throughout development.
Agentic Reasoning
Vectara's orchestrator agent classifies each request, generates multiple semantically meaningful angles, and runs subagents in parallel to gather substantiating context. It reasons over intermediate outputs to determine if more work is needed, then synthesizes a final response once the user's intent is fully satisfied.
User Interface
Vectara’s chat-based interface enables engineers to choose between "Quick Mode" for simpler queries and the highly popular "Deep Thinking Mode" for more complex queries and harder problems.
This works surprisingly well… it’s catching bugs we never would have found.
About Vectara
Organizations across industries, including semiconductor manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, and legal, rely on Vectara to accelerate troubleshooting, streamline compliance, and turn siloed technical and business data into faster, more confident decisions.
