Case Study: Royal IHC achieves faster document search and quicker service resolution with Microsoft Corporation Azure Cognitive Search

Royal IHC uses Azure Cognitive Search to empower maritime service engineers with AI

Royal IHC, a Dutch manufacturer of complex vessels and equipment for offshore, dredging, and wet mining markets, needed a faster way for service engineers to search more than one million technical documents spread across multiple silos. Using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search, the company aimed to replace slow, manual data lookup with an AI-assisted search experience.

Microsoft Corporation helped Royal IHC and its partners build Project Sherlock on Azure, combining search, OCR, and natural language processing into a single portal with contextual recommendations and filtering. The solution cut search times by about 60%, enabled results in under two seconds, and helped Royal IHC save thousands of euros in a single month while improving customer response times and freeing engineers to focus on higher-value work.

Royal IHC

Arjan Van Limborgh

Product Owner Digital Business