Manufacturing systems weren’t built for flexibility. They were built to last. MES, ERP, QA, maintenance logs, part libraries, inventory files, scanned PDFs from 2007—everything has a purpose, and almost none of it was designed to talk to each other.
Still, that hasn’t stopped consultants from telling you to centralize. Rip it out. Rebuild it. Push everything into a shiny vector database and wrap a chatbot around it. But to get there, you’ll need months of ETL, schema unification, pipeline testing, and governance meetings. And at the end? You get to find out if it even works.
The worst part? If it doesn’t work, you can’t just Ctrl+Z (as wonderful as that would be). You’ve spent the budget, disrupted your infrastructure, broken a few things you didn’t mean to, and added complexity that will haunt your next five upgrades.
Skip the Migration
SWIRL searches what you already have.
No data movement. No duplication. No reformatting. Just answers, pulled live from wherever your data lives.
SWIRL requires Zero ETL. It connects to all your systems—MES, SharePoint, Jira, file shares, ERPs, maintenance logs, email archives—and searches across them in place. You don’t need to remodel your stack. You don’t have to rewrite your integrations. You don’t “clean” your data first. You install it. You try it. It works.
And if it doesn’t? You haven’t burned anything down.
Not a New Architecture But a New Way Through
Technical debt in manufacturing is deep. Not because the systems are bad—but because they’re critical. Change the wrong schema, and your QA checks fail. Swap in a new database, and the scheduling tool grinds to a halt. Build a new pipeline, and it breaks the thing the guy who left six months ago forgot to document.
That’s the real risk with centralization. It’s not the approach, it’s the rewiring. Every change ripples out. Every ‘improvement’ carries the risk of breaking something downstream. And when the next big platform shows up, you get to do it all again.
SWIRL leaves your wiring alone. It finds the data where it lives. It works with what’s already there. Nothing breaks. Everything stays intact. You just get smarter access.
Knowledge Shouldn’t Retire
Factories lose knowledge faster than they lose parts. The guy who knew how to fix pressure fault 0X91 retired last quarter. The notes he wrote? Scattered across a Jira ticket, a PDF checklist, and a dusty folder in SharePoint.
With SWIRL, a technician types the fault code. The agent retrieves the logs, the SOPs, and the fix notes. All in one answer. No hunting. No guessing. No risk of pulling the wrong version from the wrong decade.
It’s not just search. It’s recall. And it keeps tribal knowledge alive long after the expert clocks out.
Version Control Shouldn’t Depend on Muscle Memory
An engineer asks, where’s the latest CAD drawing for pump model Z? The answer should not be, “ask Cathy.” Or, “try the third folder in the second shared drive.”
SWIRL finds the latest version, from the right system, with the timestamp, the author, and the change log. It pulls from cloud storage, PLM, versioned SharePoint folders—whatever you use. No manual sorting. No version confusion. No costly mistake from referencing the wrong spec.
Compliance Doesn’t Care About Your Folder Structure
Quality data lives in one system. Safety data in another. Maintenance records in yet another. None of them speak the same language, and none of them were designed to surface patterns across systems.
SWIRL connects them without centralizing. It lets agents search across QA flags, incident logs, inspection reports, and trend data. It reveals when the same issue keeps cropping up. It surfaces red flags before they become compliance failures.
Your auditors don’t want excuses. They want clarity. SWIRL delivers it.
Procurement Shouldn’t Be Inbox Archaeology
Supplier contracts are scattered. Pricing terms live in buried emails. Service level clauses are in scanned PDFs. And when procurement needs to confirm whether a vendor is within terms, they get to start the scavenger hunt from scratch.
SWIRL short-circuits the chase. Ask: what are the payment terms in our agreement with supplier X? The agent finds the clause. Highlights it. Links to the email thread with the approval. Done.
The More Systems You Have, The Better SWIRL Gets
Most platforms struggle with scale. SWIRL thrives on it. The more fragmented your data, the more valuable agentic search becomes.
If all you’ve got is one database, SWIRL won’t impress you. But if your knowledge is dispersed, your documentation is tribal, your systems are diverse, and your engineers are tired of digging—SWIRL turns that mess into something usable.
Try It Without Changing a Thing
No massive deployment. No multi-million-dollar commitment. No bet-the-architecture risk.
Install SWIRL. Point it at your systems. Ask a real question. Watch the agent find what you need.
And if it doesn’t? Turn it off. Nothing’s broken. Nothing’s lost.
But when it works? You just unlocked the knowledge trapped across every machine, every folder, every log file you’ve ever stored—and made it searchable. Actionable. Alive.
To find out more, download our white papers, request a demo, or take SWIRL for a test drive.