15,000 New Recipes a Year: Putting Decades of R&D Documentation to Work

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Insight stage - Hal KEnglish

Zentis develops between 10,000 and 15,000 new recipes every year for customers across Europe and the US. Behind each one sit briefings, trial documentation, specifications and presentations, spread across a DMS, an MES, SharePoint, shared drives, and two languages. Finding what the company already knew was the original problem, years before the current AI debate started.

In this session, Bastian Maiworm walks through what Zentis built together with amber, and in which order. It started as an enterprise search across the R&D systems of the German team, with access rights tested in detail, because recipes are trade secrets. AI assistants and agents came later. Today they are used more than the search itself: an agent that answers the 40 to 50 question customer certification questionnaires that used to travel through five departments, and the "digital grandpa", built on the recorded handover sessions of a department head who retired.

The talk covers what worked, what took longer than expected, why the company started with a small core team instead of a full rollout, and what it takes to run this on servers in Germany and Europe.