Automotive paint
The knowledge behind a perfect finish now outlives the people who carry it
A premium finish is layers of craft: pretreatment, e-coat, primer, basecoat, clearcoat, each with its own window. A paint operation gave the process behind the surface the same rigor as the surface, and paint shop process control became checkable.
The situation
The craft lives in people and scattered paper
The master retired
With him went what no document holds: the winter adjustment when humidity drops, which defect means silicone contamination and which means the flash off was cut short, the batch sequencing that kept purge waste down.
Nobody knows which copy is current
Supplier data sheets, process cards, control plans, work instructions, mixing room sheets, an operator's notebook, four year old training decks, laminated cards at the station, photographed whiteboards, lineup rules in one planner's spreadsheet. Some of it contradicts the rest.
A year before the booth trusts you
New people learn by asking around, and process engineers inherit steps nobody can explain anymore. The rework loop teaches expensively what the paper should have said.
The run
The run
One afternoon of pointing Cogeto at the shop's paper: data sheets, process cards through their revisions, control plans, work instructions, mixing sheets, supplier change notices and mail, training decks, maintenance logs, and the notebook pages and laminated cards as photographs.
- 1643 documents imported, including 151 photographed pages and cards
- 2Photographs read by local recognition inside the instance
- 3Facts anchored to paint system, layer, and revision, so two clearcoat systems with near identical sheets stay distinct
- 4Every claim verified against its own source sentence
- 5Overnight reconciliation: sheet against card, plan against instruction, deck against current practice
The findings
The findings
Four of the twenty four, plus what was rejected and what was superseded, as the product reports them.
The bake window conflict: a reformulation change notice moved the window, and never reached the process card.
The mixing ratio that drifted: the mixing room sheet still teaches the old ratio; the data sheet moved on two revisions ago.
Film build that means two different things depending on which document you trust, both still in circulation.
The retired master's one line, photographed, extracted, verified, and now a cited fact with provenance instead of a memory.
The grit sequence, resolved as supersession: the old training deck closed by the current instruction, chain intact.
What the system refused to store: extractions that failed verification, logged instead of believed.
Then you ask.
What is the bake window for the CC-240 clearcoat? 20 minutes at 140 degrees Celsius object temperature. Conflict: process card PC-31 r3 still shows 18 minutes at 150 degrees, the pre-reformulation window. Stands on: TDS CC-240 r7, Process card r3, Change notice CN-58.
When do we switch to the slower thinner? Above 70 percent relative humidity, add 5 percent slower thinner. Stands on: Photographed note, mixing room.
What it means for you
What it means for you
The new operator asks the corpus
And gets the answer with the exact sheet and revision cited, or honest silence instead of a guess. The lineup rules leave the planner's spreadsheet and become queryable facts.
Reformulations surface the same day
A supplier change notice is checked against every card and instruction the day it arrives, not after a rework spike in the light tunnel.
Audit prep becomes a report
Customer visits and audits start from a signed findings report over the paint documentation instead of a week of archaeology.
Capture the next master in time
What the next person to retire knows can be captured one photographed note at a time, verified, and kept with provenance.
Run it where your material lives
- Hosted in the EU: your single tenant instance, operated for you.
- Your cloud: deployed inside your own infrastructure.
- Fully offline: local models, no outbound connectivity, no telemetry.
First questions
Half our process knowledge is handwritten notes and laminated cards.
Photographs are read by local recognition inside the instance. Pages that cannot be read are labelled honestly and listed by name, never silently skipped.
Our documentation is in two languages across one shop.
Subjects resolve across languages, so a sheet in one language can contradict a card in the other. Quality is measured and published per language, so you see it before you commit.
Nothing may leave the plant network.
Cogeto runs fully offline with local models. There is exactly one egress point in the codebase, enforced in continuous integration, and the code is open so your team can verify it.
Our operators are not going to type documentation.
They do not have to. A photo or a forwarded mail is enough, and one line in chat becomes a verified fact with provenance.
More case studies
Start a pilot on your documents.
Send the process cards, data sheets, and instructions for one line or one paint system; we deliver the signed findings report showing where they disagree.