We’re building Samrian because we spent too much time seeing manufacturing companies treat ISO 9001 as a paperwork exercise rather than a quality tool. Most quality managers spend their day feeding a 'compliance machine' manually cross-referencing floor logs against procedures just to survive the next audit.
We wanted to see if we could flip that incentive structure by making verification cheap. If a system can instantly tell you if a shop-floor record matches a work instruction, you can go back to improving the product instead of just fixing the paperwork.
Technically, we hit a wall early on. Standard RAG pipelines (OCR -> Text -> LLM) were useless for manufacturing. Schematics, complex tables, and handwritten notes just became noise when flattened into a text stream. We ended up moving to a multimodal retrieval approach (using ColPali) so the system 'sees' the page layout instead of just reading a bad transcript. We found this recovered about 70% of the accuracy we were losing to OCR.
We're still in the early stages and manufacturing is a notoriously difficult space to move, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has dealt with 'ceremonial' compliance or has thoughts on using vision models for RAG."
Abdulhafiz_F•1h ago
We wanted to see if we could flip that incentive structure by making verification cheap. If a system can instantly tell you if a shop-floor record matches a work instruction, you can go back to improving the product instead of just fixing the paperwork.
Technically, we hit a wall early on. Standard RAG pipelines (OCR -> Text -> LLM) were useless for manufacturing. Schematics, complex tables, and handwritten notes just became noise when flattened into a text stream. We ended up moving to a multimodal retrieval approach (using ColPali) so the system 'sees' the page layout instead of just reading a bad transcript. We found this recovered about 70% of the accuracy we were losing to OCR.
I wrote a more technical deep-dive on that retrieval problem here: http://samrian.com/blog/hardest-part-of-ai-isnt-the-ai
We're still in the early stages and manufacturing is a notoriously difficult space to move, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has dealt with 'ceremonial' compliance or has thoughts on using vision models for RAG."