How KONE Delivers the Right Information to Technicians Instantly

Editor’s note: This article is based on the journey, lessons, and insights shared in a recent webinar titled “How KONE Delivers Smart Information with AEM and Fluid Topics”. Watch the on-demand replay here.

KONE is a global leader in the elevator and escalator industry. They are shaping the future of cities by making people’s journeys more safe, convenient, and reliable.

Moving 2 billion people every day leaves no room for uncertainty. With thousands of service calls happening worldwide each day, KONE recognized that instant access to accurate technical documentation was essential for safe and efficient operations as the company scaled globally.

To explore this transformation, Hanna Heinonen, Digital Content Lead, and Kristian Forsman, Product Owner for TechDoc and Translation Management at KONE, sat down with Fabrice Lacroix, CEO of Fluid Topics. Their conversation highlights KONE’s journey toward intelligent content experiences, why the shift was necessary, how it changed the way information is delivered, and what it means for technicians who need to find the right answers quickly, confidently, and safely.

4 Challenges in Global Maintenance Operations

As KONE expanded its global footprint, several structural challenges emerged within its maintenance operations. These challenges were interconnected and rooted in scale, workforce change, and operational complexity, extending well beyond tooling issues or documentation alone.

Together, they underscored the need to rethink how knowledge is created, delivered, and used in the field.

1. Information Access at Scale

The numbers alone show the scale of this challenge:

• 80,000 maintenance visits per day
• About 25,000 field technicians globally
• Technical manuals: 700-800 pages per equipment type

In this environment, a technician’s ability to find the right information quickly can mean the difference between resolving an issue efficiently or delaying service, potentially impacting safety and customer experience.

Hanna Heinonen explained, “When you talk to maintenance technicians and ask what their main pain point during their workday is, they usually reply that they don’t have access to proper information.“

This gap showed that traditional technical documentation, often static (PDFs, printed manuals) and scattered, was insufficient for the demands of real-time maintenance work.

2. Serving Diverse User Needs

KONE’s global technician workforce required information at different levels of depth, in different languages, and in different formats.

That system needed to support:

• Veteran technicians who required quick checklists and specific details to fix machines.
• Junior technicians who required prerequisite definitions alongside comprehensive step-by-step instructions.

The challenge was enabling this flexibility without fragmenting content or multiplying documentation workloads.

3. A Retiring Technician Workforce

As part of a natural workforce evolution, many of KONE’s most experienced technicians, particularly in Europe, are approaching retirement. Rather than viewing this as a setback, it represents an opportunity to strengthen how knowledge is shared across generations.

This transition creates clear priorities:

• Capture and formalize the expertise of veteran technicians.
• Accelerate training so junior technicians can become autonomous more quickly.
• Maintain high service quality throughout the transition.

4.The Help Desk Bottleneck

In the past, technicians who could not resolve an issue on their own had to contact the technical help desk for support. After receiving a call, the help desk would review technical documentation and available data, then respond with guidance on the next steps. This process often required technicians to wait several hours for a reply.

This support model was effective at an earlier stage of KONE’s growth, but continued expansion required a different approach. As KONE grew, relying on a centralized help desk to handle service calls across the entire fleet became increasingly difficult to sustain. KONE recognized the need to reduce dependency on synchronous support.

The Solution: 4 Essential Strategies

To address these global maintenance challenges, KONE rethought how its technical documentation was created, managed, and delivered.

On the authoring side, they adopted Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Guides as their CCMS. This allowed them to create structured content, enable collaborative authoring, and easily reuse and repurpose content components.

Then, to manage content delivery, KONE implemented a Product Knowledge Platform and selected Fluid Topics for its ability to centralize content in a single knowledge repository, enrich and manage metadata, feed any digital application with relevant content, and build unlimited customizable documentation portals.

Together, this architecture made technical content consistent, searchable, and accessible across all digital channels. On this foundation, KONE established four complementary strategies to overcome its operational challenges.

Strategy 1: Structured Content Foundation and Smart Metadata

KONE built its new documentation strategy on structured content using DITA XML. By developing structured content, they ensure their documentation can scale and adapt through modular content. Rather than producing traditional static manuals, their technical writers create reusable content modules that they can easily assemble for different contexts.

With this strategy in place, they made a few other key technical decisions to bolster their documentation for information retrieval.

Web-only authoring:

To keep authoring efficient and accessible, KONE standardized on browser-based authoring tools rather than complex, locally installed applications. As Kristian Forsman explained, “We’re not using any thick client authoring. We manage with web authoring only. We don’t want to make things too complex in authoring; keep it simple, don’t use all the features of DITA. We take them piece by piece into use.“

Strong metadata management at the authoring level

A key part of KONE’s approach is robust metadata management during authoring. Technical writers carefully tag each content module with relevant metadata in the CCMS, establishing context and relationships upfront.

Metadata enrichment post-publication

Once content is published in Fluid Topics, metadata can be enhanced or extended without reauthoring the original source. This enables the team to introduce new relationships, refine searchability, and adapt content for different delivery contexts. The structured content in the CCMS provides a solid foundation, while Fluid Topics adds a flexible layer for ongoing enrichment.

Strategy 2: Context-Aware Multi-Channel Delivery

Once the content in AEM Guides is validated, KONE publishes the documentation to the Fluid Topics platform. From the central knowledge repository, KONE dynamically delivers it to three main channels:

• Technical Information Portal (TIP)
• Field Service Applications
• AI Chatbot (Technician Assistant)

By leveraging context-aware delivery, KONE ensures that technical content is always up-to-date, relevant, and accessible, no matter which channel the technician uses.

Multi-portal architecture

Using Fluid Topics, KONE created multiple specialized portals from a single content source. Having multiple “brand” type customer portals and backend platforms allows KONE to optimize how they feed the right content to the right users.

Intelligent, context-sensitive search

KONE’s solution delivers highly relevant search results by intelligently combining equipment data with structured content metadata. Instead of searching across all documentation, the system pre-filters content based on a technician’s context before running the search.

Personalized content delivery

This delivery model enables the same documentation to support users with different experience levels. The interface presents only the most relevant information by default, while allowing users to access more detailed guidance when needed.

• Veterans: Only see concise checklists with expandable detail sections.
• Juniors: See prerequisites and step-by-step instructions.

Strategy 3: The Technician Assistant Chatbot

KONE introduced a Technician Assistant chatbot powered by Generative AI and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. A key design decision was to use live search rather than pre-trained answers, ensuring every response is always based on the most current, approved documentation without the need for constant retraining.

Here’s how it works:

1. A technician asks a question in natural language (in any of the 50 available languages).
2. The chatbot searches the content in Fluid Topics’ knowledge base, applying context filtering based on service order data.
3. GenAI generates a summary and includes source citations where the user can read proper instructions.
4. On-the-fly machine translation delivers the response in the technician’s language.

The results speak for themselves. Technicians get seamless access to self-service solutions, reducing downtime and increasing user satisfaction. The service desk team gets lower call volumes for routine questions, allowing them to focus on complex cases.

Strategy 4: Translation at Global Scale

KONE’s documentation teams provide content in around 50 languages to 25,000 technicians across 60+ countries. In safety-critical work, there is no room for errors. Technicians don’t care about style, they need clear, accurate instructions and correct machine terminology to prevent equipment failures and keep themselves safe.

To tackle KONE’s global requirements, the company integrated trained Machine Translation (MT) engines into its documentation workflow. They selected this solution over Large Language Model translation as MT prioritizes consistency and reliability over conversational fluency, essential for industrial maintenance.

KONE’s Results

Vision for the Future

The KONE teams see their current achievements as just the beginning. Hanna’s vision for next steps includes:

• Advanced capabilities on the roadmap: Computer vision integration with automatic component recognition through smart glasses, including instructions overlaid on equipment.
• Predictive content delivery: Context-aware instructions that compile on-the-fly based on equipment state, service history, and real-time conditions.
• Real-time safety systems: Detecting unsafe actions (e.g., approaching live electrical components) and triggering instant warnings.

Key Success Factors for KONE