Knowledge Instead of Guesswork: How Müller-BBM Finds Expertise Faster with AI

Müller-BBM Industry Solutions GmbH is an internationally active engineering consultancy with twelve offices in Germany and a subsidiary in Austria. For more than 60 years, the company has provided independent consulting, measurements, and expert reports in areas such as building physics, environmental engineering, acoustics, audiovisual system planning, and fire protection. This generates massive amounts of data every day – from detailed measurement reports and technical analyses to expert opinions – most of it in Word or PDF format. 

The challenge: these documents, totaling around 1.3 petabytes, often exist as sketches, free text, or tables – stored decentrally across many locations and systems. 

Compounding the issue was a historically grown IT landscape: each subsidiary maintained its own Microsoft 365 and Azure environment, including separate identity and access management systems. This fragmentation resulted in highly complex permission structures, made knowledge much harder to access, and significantly increased the internal effort required for research. 

The objective was clear: a cross-company solution that systematically unlocks content, respects access rights, and delivers relevant information quickly, securely, and in context. 

The project was deliberately launched in phases, starting with three pilot subsidiaries. Together with TIMETOACT GROUP, relevant use cases were identified – for example, documenting acoustic measurement data or evaluating emissions-related reports. 

First, the project team analyzed existing data sources, identified and indexed relevant documents. Then came the integration of a semantic search that takes into account existing identity and access management systems – ensuring that employees can only access content they are authorized to see. 

The enterprise search solution combines traditional keyword search with semantic analysis. It can search both structured and unstructured data, recognize contextual relationships, and deliver precise, subject-specific results – even for complex queries. 

A particularly innovative feature: the platform can generate direct text answers from long documents – sometimes hundreds of pages – on demand. This eliminates time-consuming reading and allows experts to focus their valuable time on problem-solving rather than searching. 

The new platform brings tangible improvements to everyday work: 

• Reduced search times: Information that once required extensive research is now available within seconds. 

• Reusable knowledge: Existing reports and measurements can be systematically reused as a solid foundation for new projects – improving both efficiency and quality. 

• Centralized knowledge transfer: The platform strengthens cross-location collaboration and creates a shared knowledge base across disciplines. 

• Scalable design: The solution is deliberately built to be rolled out to additional legal entities – while maintaining high security standards. 

• Foundation for future technologies: The semantic search lays the groundwork for automated processes, digital assistants, and advanced AI-based evaluations. 

The new search solution is more than a tool: it is a catalyst for efficient work, smarter decisions, and future-ready processes. Müller-BBM is harnessing the power of its data –not just for documentation, but as a driver of value creation. 

With its AI-powered enterprise search, the company has taken a major step toward “Authentic AI” and laid the foundation for intelligent, networked knowledge management – a true leap forward in innovation for this long-established engineering group.