How Emons Spedition Makes Thousands of Pages of Regulations Accessible in Seconds

Emons Spedition is an internationally operating logistics company headquartered in Cologne. Since 1928, this family-owned mid-size enterprise has provided comprehensive transport and logistics services across road, rail, air, and sea. Thousands of employees across numerous depots throughout Germany work daily with one of the most complex regulatory frameworks in the industry: more than 20 operational manuals covering hazardous goods, processes, freight forwarding, and more.

With a growing network of depots, an internationally distributed workforce, and increasing regulatory complexity, the pressure on every individual employee continues to rise: the right information needs to be available quickly, completely, and without error. At the same time, the relevant knowledge is spread across more than 20 manuals, totaling thousands of pages.

Emons extended its internal knowledge management with octonomy’s AI expert solution. The AI agent understands questions in natural language, retrieves information from all connected manuals, consolidates knowledge from multiple sources, and delivers answers with precise chapter and source references in seconds. Answers are provided directly within the intranet, in Emons’ tone of voice, and following its corporate identity.

95%+ answer accuracy, verified through ground-truth testing. Live within 3 weeks. Fewer errors in hazardous goods compliance, faster onboarding for new employees, and a consistent knowledge base across the entire network.

Logistics at the mid-market level means navigating many regulations, edge cases, and operational manuals. At Emons, the operative framework includes the Spedition forwarding manual, the driver manual, the hazardous goods manual, process management and packaging manuals, as well as ESG and compliance documents, including thousands of pages that are relevant daily and updated regularly.

The core problem is structural. When an employee needs an answer, they first have to identify the correct manual, locate the right table, confirm they have the current version, and then correctly interpret the information. That process takes up to 15 minutes per query, is prone to error, and becomes particularly unreliable when the answer spans multiple manuals. Anyone handling damaged hazardous goods, for example, needs to consult both the hazardous goods manual and the driver manual. Overlooking either one risks an incomplete, and potentially safety-critical, response.

On top of that: Emons has an internationally diverse workforce that speaks many languages. Information available only in German does not reach all employees equally.

Traditional document repositories and PDFs do not solve these problems. They offer no contextualization, no cross-language search, and no ability to consolidate knowledge from multiple sources. That gap was the starting point: make knowledge accessible quickly, completely, and reliably, without compromising precision or compliance.

Emons focused on three clear objectives:

1. Day-to-day relief. Employees should not have to spend valuable working time searching through lengthy PDFs for regulatory information. Routine questions about hazardous goods, processes, and shipment requirements should be answered immediately and reliably.

2. Regulatory precision. Particularly when it comes to hazardous goods regulations involving UN numbers, ADR classes, and quantity limits, errors are not an option. Answers must be traceable, source-based, and accurate.

3. Consistent knowledge base across the network. Whether an employee works in Cologne, at a regional depot, or as part of an international team, everyone should have equal access to the same information, in their respective language.

octonomy operates as an internal expert system. It is not a conventional chatbot built on predefined answers, but an AI agent that understands more than 20 operational manuals from SharePoint, recognizes connections between documents, and delivers answers with precise chapter and version references.

The system thinks in context. When an employee asks how to handle damaged hazardous goods, the agent pulls the relevant passages from both the hazardous goods manual (transport prohibition for damaged packaging, inspection per Section 5.1) and the driver manual (contacts dispatch immediately, does not continue without authorization) and delivers a complete, actionable response in a single step.

This extends to complex customer inquiries as well. When a globally leading food and beverage company submitted a sustainability questionnaire with 36 detailed questions covering Scope 1-3 emissions, GHG footprint, electric vehicles, biofuels, and certifications, answering it without the expert system would have required weeks of cross-departmental research. With octonomy, all 36 questions were answered accurately and consistently in seconds.

Emons and octonomy took a pragmatic approach: define requirements clearly, build the system, test it, and go live. From the first joint conversation to productive deployment, the entire process took three weeks.

The rollout in four steps:
1. During the first two days, the project plan and responsibilities were established.
2. Week one focused on building the expert system: creating the knowledge base, integrating the manuals, and defining AI guidelines.
3. Week two was dedicated to the testing phase, with a focus on functionality, usability, and ground-truth QA.
4. In week three, key users were trained and the system was deployed in the production environment.

With a scalable expert system in place, additional manuals, processes, and use cases can be added incrementally. New employees onboard faster because they have access to reliable answers at any time. A growing team no longer means a proportionally growing training burden.

Particularly in a network that continues to expand internationally and faces continuously rising regulatory requirements, the objective is clear: scale knowledge quality and operational safety without a linear increase in coordination overhead.

• Channel: Intranet chat widget, embedded directly within the existing infrastructure

• Systems: SharePoint with all operational manuals as the knowledge source

• Knowledge sources: Hazardous goods manual, freight forwarding manual, driver manual, process management and packaging manual, as well as ESG and compliance documents

• Rollout logic: Fully automate standard queries related to hazardous goods, shipment regulations, and operational processes; hand off complex edge cases with full context to internal experts