Finding the right information used to be a project in itself.
An engineering consultancy accumulates knowledge the same way it accumulates documents: proposals, measurement reports, client analyses, internal policies, years of it. Getting a specific answer means digging through folders and old servers or finding the person who remembers. And in work such as government filings and expert testimony, a missing file or an answer that no one can trace to its source can hurt the firm’s reputation.
One engine, multiple uses.
Roberson and Associates, an engineering and management consulting firm that works in RF spectrum management for government and commercial clients, uses Franklin Discovery™ by entigenlogic® to find the right information without hours of searching. The firm loads its own documents by client or department, and anyone can ask a question in plain language and get the answer back from the record, with the document it came from. When it isn’t in the documents, the system says so.
Proposals and Solicitations
A solicitation specifies exactly what the key personnel must bring, and a resume that falls short on any requirement can cost points or knock the bid out. That review used to mean someone reading every resume against every requirement by hand, with gaps surfacing too late to fix. Roberson now scores each resume against the solicitation’s language. On a recent federal review engagement, the firm ran 25 resumes against it, showed each person where Franklin Discovery found a gap, and ran the updated resumes a second time before picking the eight who would do the work. That team then used Franklin Discovery for the reviews themselves.
Proposal documents get the same treatment. When the FCC issued a notice of proposed rulemaking on a new block of spectrum, a long document written in legalese, Dennis Roberson put his proposal team’s questions to Franklin Discovery and sent the answers, each one pulled from the notice, to the partner firms on the bid.
Research and Reporting
Much of what Roberson delivers is written: measurement reports and government filings built on years of prior material. When the final report on the National Radio Quiet Zone needed a background chapter, Paul Steinberg, formerly CTO of Motorola Solutions and now with the firm, wrote it himself with a couple of prompts, drawing on the firm’s earlier reports on the zone. It’s work he’d once have handed to someone else and waited for. This time the chapter was done, complete and built from the firm’s record, with no handoff.
Client Work
The consultants bring that same rigor to client engagements, helping clients work through VA affairs and paperwork-heavy matters where everything needed is buried in the client’s file. Each project runs in its own Franklin Discovery instance, and only people on that project can access it. Clients in this line of work care a great deal about who knows the details of their operation, and this keeps one client’s material away from another’s.
Running the firm
Roberson’s internal HR runs on a separate instance. Employees open the policies and benefits collection and ask questions they’d otherwise take to the HR manager, such as which medical plans they can choose from, and the answer comes back with the policy it came from.
“If the answer isn’t in our documents, Franklin Discovery says so. We used to dig through years of files to find the right information. Now it’s a couple of prompts, and we can defend what comes back. Each project is its own walled garden, so what a client tells us stays with the people working on it.” Dennis Roberson, President and CEO, Roberson and Associates
Roberson’s people now get the information they need by asking for it, and every answer comes with the supporting document. What a client shares never leaves that client’s project.
About Franklin Discovery
Franklin Discovery by entigenlogic draws only on the material a firm provides and shows where each answer comes from, so you can check a score or summary against the original. When the answer isn’t in the documents, it says so rather than inventing one. Each project or client can run in its own separate instance, open only to the people working on it, so sensitive material stays with the team it belongs to. The firm keeps its material private and never trains another company’s model.