Alleima introduce AI solution within its R&D division
For over a hundred years, Alleima has been conducting its own research and collecting information in almost 60,000 reports. Invaluable knowledge, but difficult to overview. Together with KPMG, Alleima has now developed a generative AI solution, Alleima Guru, which makes searching through the material easier and more efficient to manage.
Alleima, a global manufacturer of high value-added products in advanced stainless steels and special alloys as well as industrial heating, has long been exploring how generative AI can be used to make operations smarter, better, and more efficient. The products that are manufactured are often used in very tough environments, which means that there are very high demands on the company’s research and development to develop the best solutions for its customers. Today, Alleima has around 900 active recipes for various alloys and approximately 250 employees work in research and development around the world, with the majority in Sandviken.
Over the years, the company has collected approximately 60,000 research reports in its archive. Soon, these reports will live in a smart, digital system, which means that research work can be done more efficient in the future. Potentially, the time required for the work could be halved.
“Many times it can be challenging for researchers to find documents with facts about what was done in the past. With Alleima Guru, it will be easier and faster to get access to previous research. They can now use th time that is saved, to even better tackle challenges that our customers face and how we at Alleima can contribute to them. The aim is also to identify discrepancies in the conclusions of previous years, in order to obtain an even better basis for today’s development projects,” says Tom Eriksson, Executive Vice President and head of strategic research at Alleima.
“At Alleima we explore all the technologies that can make us a smarter, better, and more efficient company. Alleima Guru is the first project where we use generative AI, but we have already identified several other areas where we can develop new solutions. I hope that we will be able to deliver even more business value and refined information as we scale it up, says Mathias Johansson,” CIO at Alleima.
“The work with Alleima Guru is really a close collaboration, where we had a strong ‘we-feeling’ throughout the process. It is interesting to see how much value we at KPMG can create, when we get close to our clients’ operations. In this project, we connect our technical ability with Alleima’s product development, which creates the conditions for developing valuable solutions that are well adapted to the business,” says Matilda Johansson, Technology Transformation Lead at KPMG.
In a first step, around 4,000 of the documents have been made searchable and the rest of the implementation will take place step by step. There are plans to develop the concept further in order to improve processes in other parts of the company such as purchasing, HR, finance, or production. Alleima Guru is built on a closed private platform with the same information and security classification as the existing system environment, which gives control over the information and how it is used by the algorithm.
