For maintenance managers in complex industrial plants

Every breakdown should make the next fix easier.

Norlan turns maintenance troubleshooting — conversations, interventions and manuals — into maintenance knowledge the whole plant can reuse, next to the CMMS.

For maintenance managers For technicians For manufacturers

Not another CMMS. Not a chatbot over the manuals. The memory of each machine, written while the work happens.

Book a demo How a pilot works

Incident thread · Metal detector MD-3000 · unit 1 of 8 · BerlinLive

Incident from SAP PM

Notification 10048213 · False rejects on MD-3000 in Berlin

Open

New activity in Norlan · 06:11

S. Parker · Production

Photo of the machine, attached to the incident thread

Rejecting good packs again after the format change. Third time this month.

06:12

≈ 50 %

of technicians' knowledge is recorded by their company

$125k

median cost of one hour of unplanned downtime

81 %

of EU manufacturers short of skilled staff

How it compounds

Diagnosis takes less time every time the same failure comes back, in any plant.

Nobody writes a document in between. The fix stays on the model, so the next technician starts where the last one finished, wherever that machine runs.

1st · Berlin4 h
Nobody has seen it. The thread is the work: the photos, the manual, everything that was tried.
2nd · Milan40 min
Same model, another plant. Norlan answers with the fix from Berlin.
3rd · Lyon12 min
By now it is a guide on the model. Every unit of it gets it, in every plant.

Equipment knowledge in one place, searchable and cited, to bring MTTR down.

Chat

Photo

Audio

Note

Report

Update

Mods

Video

OEM

Chat

Photo

Audio

Note

Report

With Norlan

Without Norlan

Live knowledge

Static knowledge

18%

The CMMS knows what the breakdown cost. Norlan knows how it was fixed.

Most corrective work orders close with a line or two. That is enough to count downtime and cost, not to make the next repair any faster.

Everything the plant knows, at the machine
The manual, what was tried last time and what finally worked, in the technician's hand while they are still standing there.
Better with every intervention
Each repair adds to that machine's record and to every machine like it, without anyone writing a report afterwards.
As easy as WhatsApp
Talk, take a photo, reply. If a technician can use a group chat, they can use Norlan on day one.

In Norlan

False rejects after a format change

Metal detector MD-3000 · Berlin

Closing

T. Walker · Maintenance

0:14

“So it was the belt, erm… it went slack after the format change. Re-tensioned it and checked the K5 was seated — no, sorry, the K4. Ran twenty packs, none rejected.”

Norlan proposes the closure from the thread

Problem: False rejects on good packs after every format change: the detector rejects roughly one in forty within the first hour, then settles.
Cause: The belt slackens when the format changes and the K4 relay works loose with the vibration, so the reading drifts until it is reseated.
Solution: Re-tension the belt to 45 N, reseat the K4 relay and run twenty packs before calibrating. The relay step is not in the manual: it only shows up after a format change on this unit.

For the people at the machine

Technicians talk. Norlan writes it down.

Norlan takes the writing off their hands and keeps them as the author. They talk, take a photo, type in their own language with the typos of someone holding a torch. Norlan records what the plant needs.

What the people at the machine get

Voice, clean-up and self-corrections
Plant context: asset, component, cause
Reading in another language

What the technician sent

T. Walker · Maintenance

0:41

“uh… so, the, the motor on the detector, the one on line two, um… it's making a weird noise, like, after the format change… [4 s] … I checked the relay and, eh… nothing, so… yeah. [6 s] … no no, wait — not the motor, I mean the belt, the conveyor belt. And it's line one, not two. [2 s] … that's it.”

06:31

What Norlan records

Abnormal noise from the conveyor belt after the format change. Relay K4 checked — no fault found.

Metal detector MD-3000S1-PK-L1-0051Conveyor belt

Transcribed
Self-corrections applied
Cleaned up
Anchored to the asset

Original kept · Author: T. Walker · A person confirms before it publishes

The minute after closing

Most tools stop when the work order closes. Norlan starts there.

Connected-worker platforms and CMMS copilots ask someone to capture the knowledge afterwards. There is no afterwards: Norlan writes the guide from the thread, asks a person to approve it, and puts it in front of the next technician before they ask.

Recover faster from breakdowns

Diagnose from what was already tried

A fault fires at 03:00 and the technician on shift has not seen it. Before anyone is phoned, Norlan shows what was tried on this machine, or on this model in another plant, and how it was closed.

Recover faster, every shift

Keep the knowledge in the plant

Hand over the incident, not a line

An incident is still open at shift change. The thread is the handover: symptoms, photos and what was already ruled out are on the machine when the next shift opens it. What one person carries stops leaving with them.

Lock in expertise before it walks out

The same standard on every line and site

Reuse the fix on every identical machine

Eight identical machines across three sites. A fix found in Berlin reaches Munich because the lesson is attached to the model, and the correction after a gearbox swap becomes a versioned guide, not a message in a group chat.

Replicate the best line everywhere

How Norlan works

From the thread on the machine to the guide that reaches every identical unit.

Machine threads

Every machine has a thread. Incidents and preventive work happen there — photos, voice, mentions. The conversation is the maintenance history of that equipment, not a report written afterwards.

Assistant

Ask one machine. Answers cite the manual page or the earlier intervention — and say when the record has nothing, instead of inventing one.

Guides

A closed thread becomes a draft procedure. The person who solved it checks it; a maintenance lead approves it. Versioned, superseded, never lost.

Line workflows

Draw how each line runs. Norlan uses it to find causes that come from another machine, and new people learn the line from it.

Installed base

The equipment grouped by model, wherever it is installed. A fix on one unit reaches the next one that fails — in the company’s plants, never in anyone else’s.

Frequently asked questions

Does Norlan replace our CMMS?

No. The CMMS stays where it is and keeps doing what it does — work orders, planning, assets, traceability. Norlan holds the part it was never designed for: the reasoning behind the intervention, attached to the machine it belongs to.

Does Norlan work with SAP PM or Maximo?

Yes, and with Fiix, Limble or MEX the same way. The installed base and preventive plan come in from a CMMS or ERP export, keyed by asset code, so a re-import never duplicates. Write-back — the closed incident creating or updating the order — is product direction, and the integrations page says exactly where it stands. The work order closes where it always closed; the reasoning that closed it stays on the machine.

Why not just point a general assistant at our manuals?

A general assistant can read the manuals. It cannot say what the plant's own team tried on that machine at 03:00 last February, because nobody wrote it down for it. Norlan keeps that while the work happens, cites the manual page or the earlier intervention, and says when the record has nothing instead of inventing an answer. If the company has standardised on one assistant, Norlan can be the knowledge server it reads from.

How is Norlan different from a connected-worker platform?

Connected-worker platforms standardise how operators work: instructions, checklists, skills, huddles. They are excellent at that. Norlan does one thing they do not: it keeps the memory of each machine — what failed, what was tried, what worked, and where else it applies — written while the work happens, by the technician, with the manufacturer's manual as a source. If the plant already runs one, Norlan sits next to it exactly as it sits next to the CMMS.

Do our technicians have to document more than they do today?

Less, in the moment that matters. The thread where the incident is being solved is the record, and a voice note counts as much as typing. Writing up a guide is a deliberate act, but it happens once, by whoever solved it, and the AI does the tidying.

What happens when the AI does not know?

It says so. Every answer is grounded in the machines' actual record — manuals, procedures, approved guides and past activity — and cited to its source. If the record does not contain the answer, Norlan does not invent one.

Who approves the guides?

A person on the maintenance team. The AI can clean up a dictated note or propose wording, and the proposal is shown before it exists. Nothing is published until someone applies it, and a guide can be corrected, versioned and superseded afterwards.

How is our operational data handled?

Data is isolated per customer and is not used to train external models. The plant decides what may be read in the first place: filters block documents before anything is indexed.

Book a demo

A 30-minute walkthrough built around the plant's machines, not a canned demo.

We start with the operation — which failures repeat, who gets called when something breaks, what the CMMS does not hold — and then show how Norlan would work on it.

What we usually cover

How an incident flows today, from detection to fix
Where the conversation actually happens: the systems, or calls and WhatsApp
What takes longer — the diagnosis, or getting the right people and information together
How much of what a technician knows is written down, and what happens when they are away
Which tools are really in play: CMMS, ERP, mobile, paper
What a pilot would measure, and how

Pick a time that suits the plant. Bring one failure that keeps coming back.

Book a demo

The call is with the people who build the product, with no qualification call first. Norlan is pre-general-availability and shaped with maintenance teams in pharma and food processing.