Summary

Charlie is a novel start-up that is spun out of Cambridge University Research in partnership with Siemens and Airbus. It works to support knowledge-dependent sectors that have trouble using and exploiting their organisational know-how. Ideal for organisations with a senior workforce facing simultaneous retirements the software is designed to capture project stories focusing on contextualising tacit knowledge. Using this project data the smart software uses artificial intelligence to analyse the points of importance the team is working on and execute automatic searches of previous projects to find relevant information. This information is provided to the user making it significantly faster and easier to reuse knowledge. 

Introduction 

Reusing knowledge and experience can make or break an engineering organisation. However, much of this value has not been captured and so this value is kept within the minds of experienced senior engineers.

Imminent retirements and a skills gap mean that knowledge will likely be lost unless better support is developed. Previous research developed in partnership with UK industry such as Airbus and Siemens, has spent years understanding these challenges and developing this software support system, called Charlie to create an AI assistant that automatically manages engineering activity to make engineering tasks faster and easier.

Customer problem

Engineers spend a large amount of their time each day making documentation and searching for information. From communications, documentation and admin, there’s actually little time for engineering. The accumulating information will continue to increase in coming years, worsening existing problems and inefficiencies.

Better support for engineers is possible - Charlie is a system which automatically captures, structures, and saves the activity from each engineer, presenting it for review for team progress and updates. The system uses the live data from the user to automatically search, find, and present related useful data. This helps engineers to reuse accumulated decades of knowledge to quickly, all while collecting large quantities of data for analysis and insights.

The target market is UK based SME and international teams because they rely upon remote communication and coordination of digital resources. Ideally targeting companies with a senior workforce or those in an experience dependent industry - as these are vulnerable areas of concern for many engineering organisations. Many are keen to find solutions before their senior workforce retire, while others are managing the fallout from recent retirements. Lost knowledge which was costly and difficult to acquire can hamper innovation and make engineering firms vulnerable to their competitors.

Audience

The target audience are engineering organisations whose value lies in the collective tacit knowledge of the experienced individuals. Those who work with complex interdisciplinary systems where information exchange is key for supporting design decisions. Particularly line managers in combination with procurement teams who are keen to be the first to access new innovations.

Competitive Advantage

The issues Charlie tackles - knowledge loss and information overload - are mostly manageable now, but will become significantly more difficult in the coming years. Many engineering organisations are struggling presently.

Having novel and in-depth industrially based research means that these issues are well understood providing a good advantage over other organisations trying to solve these issues. Being a small company also means that pivoting is easier and can be more adaptable and faster with development than a larger organisation.


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