AI Assistant

Where to find it

Two ways, and they open the same thing:

• The round robot button in the bottom-right corner of every page. You can drag it somewhere else if it is in your way.
• The Search or ask AI box in the bar at the top.

It is not a page in the menu - it floats over whatever you are working on, so you can keep your place. On a phone it opens as a full screen.

Before it will answer anything

Six things all have to be true. If any one is missing, you get an explanation rather than an answer.

There is a ? button in the chat window itself that shows this same list at any time.

Tell it what you are talking about

At the top of the chat window is a box called Talking about — Sales, Production planning, Stock, KPIs, Risks & governance, Quality, Support desk, or General. Each one gives the assistant its own instructions, its own set of tools and its own documents, so a question about "orders" on the Production page is answered from production orders, and the same word on the Sales page from sales orders.

• You do not have to set it. The box follows the page you are on. Open the chat from a production page and it is already on Production planning.
• Pin it (the pin icon) when you want to keep one topic while you move between pages. Unpin and it follows the page again.
• If your words sound like another topic, the assistant says so ("That sounds like a Sales question") with a Switch button. It never switches on its own.
• When the window is empty you get a few starter questions for the topic — click one to use it.

Administrators write the instructions for each topic under Administration ▸ AI Assistant ▸ Prompts for Chatbot: what the user is doing, which figures matter, what to check before answering, which tools it may call and which documents it searches. A change applies to the next question.

Asking a good question

Be specific. The assistant is much better at a narrow question than a vague one.

Useful things to know:

• You can use nicknames. If someone has set up aliases for a machine, site or company - "Line 3", "the mill", "the coast branch" - the assistant understands them.
• It remembers the conversation, so you can follow up with "and the month before that?".
• Enter sends. Shift + Enter starts a new line.
• Clear conversation is in the three-dot menu at the top of the chat window.

The buttons along the bottom

What you get back

• An answer in plain English.
• Result cards underneath - a KPI, a risk, a production order, a sales order, an instrument. Click one and ThreadWare takes you to that record.
• Document cards with a Download button, showing the revision, the file date and a latest tag on the newest version.
• User guide cards when you asked how to do something in ThreadWare - "How do I add a new site?", "Where do I give someone access to Stock?". The answer gives the steps from these guides, and the card opens the guide at the right section in a new tab. The steps for administrators (from the Administration guide and the Administrator Manual) are only given to administrators.
• Thumbs up / thumbs down buttons. Please use them. Thumbs down feeds a review list that administrators look at.

What it can answer, and what it cannot

This is the part people ask about most. The assistant checks your roles before every single question. Each subject area below has its own rule.

Access levels 0 to 3

Every document in ThreadWare carries an access level, and so do you. You can only ever read a document at or below your own level.

Your level comes from whichever is higher: the roles you hold, or the level set on your job definition by HR. Administrators, CEOs, executive committee members and superadministrators sit at level 3.

What a lower-level user can and cannot do

Take somebody who is approved, has agreed to the notice, is assigned to one site, and holds no module roles at all. They can:

• ask general questions;
• ask about KPIs, risks and governance items at their own site, at access level 0;
• ask about their own support tickets;
• search and download public-level documents.

They cannot get sales figures, production orders, machine readings, performance reviews, other people's tickets, or any document above Public. When they ask, the reply says so in plain words:

You do not have permission to view sales order data.

That is not a fault and it is not a bug. It is ThreadWare telling you the truth about your permissions. If you need that data for your job, ask an administrator for the role named in the table above.

The production plan: it suggests, a planner decides

With Talking about set to Production & Planning you can ask about the plan as well as about what happened:

• "How full is Line 3 next week?" / "Where is there free capacity?"
• "What are the plan risks?" / "Which orders will be late?"
• "Why is order F1234 on Press 2 on Thursday?" - it answers from the planning engine's own record of reasons, not from a guess.
• "What if we give order F1234 priority 1?" / "What if we run order F1234 step 2 on Press 1?" - it tries the change on a copy of the plan and tells you the late orders and lateness hours before and after. Nothing is saved.
• "Propose a plan to get the late orders out" (Planner or Production Admin) - it puts forward a proposal with reasons and gives you a link to it.
• "How is item 1234 made?" - steps, machines, rates, settings and raw materials from the item configuration.
• "How much of item 1234 did we make last week?", "Waste on order F1234", "Which orders over-used material?"

The plan is never filled to 100 % of a shift. Every figure the assistant gives is against the planning line (usually 80 %), and it will tell you which line was used. "Full" means full to the line: the rest of the shift is the buffer for breakdowns and missing stock, not spare time. These answers read the last plan that was saved; if nobody has saved one yet, it says so.

Three messages people misread

"Relevant information exists in documents that are above your current access level"

The answer to your question does exist in ThreadWare. You are not allowed to read it. The assistant tells you it is there rather than pretending nothing was found, so that you know to ask rather than assume the company has no answer. Contact an administrator to request access.

A partial answer with a note attached

Some questions touch more than one subject at once. For example, "what is running on Line 3" needs both machine readings and production orders. If you have one and not the other, you get the half you are allowed to see, plus a note saying the rest was left out. Better than refusing the whole question.

"Another company has had similar issues"

Something matching your question exists at a company you do not have access to. You are told it exists, and nothing more - no content, no company name.

Web Search - read this before you use it

You do not have to press the button. If you type something like "search the web for that" or "check the internet", the assistant recognises it and offers the confirmation box itself. If that was not what you meant, click Search local data instead.

Web Search can also return files for you to download - either files it finds online, or files it creates for you.

Asking for a picture

If you just want to see something, say so - "find me a picture of a safety boot", "show me what a lockout tag looks like" - and press Web Search. The pictures come back as cards underneath the answer. Click one to open the page it came from.

You do not have to attach anything for this. Describing the thing in words is enough.

Searching with a picture

The other way round: you hand the assistant a picture and ask it to find things that look like it - shoes, tools, components, packaging - and it comes back with matches, each as a card with a picture and the site it was found on. Click a card to open that site.

There are two ways to give it the picture:

• Attach a photo - use the paperclip and pick a photo from your device.
• Pick it out of a document you already have - use the paperclip menu, Pick a picture from a document. Search for the catalogue or brochure, turn to the page, and drag a box around the one item you want. A catalogue page usually has a dozen products on it, so drawing the box is what tells the search which one you mean.

Then type what you want - "find things that look like this" - and press Web Search. You will be asked to confirm the send in the usual way; the picture goes to the search provider along with your question.

No prices. This search finds pictures and the pages they came from. It does not return prices, and the assistant will not quote you one. If you need a price, open the page and check it there, or ask the supplier.

If your administrator has not switched picture searching on, the assistant says so in its answer rather than leaving you wondering - and it still gives you everything else it can. Everything else in the assistant works exactly the same without it.

Finding a document on the web

Describe the document you are looking for - "a Word template for a quality manual", "an example supplier audit checklist" - and press Web Search. Matches come back as boxes with the file type and where they came from, each with a Download button.

If what you actually want is a document written for you rather than one found on the web, just ask for it that way. That is document generation, described below, and it stays on your own company data.

Anything you download from the web is somebody else's work. Check the licence and the content before you use it, and never assume it fits your requirements.

Pictures of documents

When the assistant finds a document, or creates one for you, it shows a small picture of its first page so you can tell at a glance which one it is. PDFs and image files show a real page.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint are different: nothing on the server can draw a page of those formats, so instead you get the opening text of the document laid out on a page, with a coloured strip naming the file type. That is enough to recognise the document, but it is not the document's real layout - no tables, no logos, no columns. Where even that is not possible, you get a plain coloured tile with the file type on it, which is more honest than a blank box.

The picture is only ever a first page. It tells you which document you are looking at; it is not a way to read it. Download the file to read it, and the same access rules apply as always - if you cannot open a document, you cannot see a picture of it either.

Asking it to create a document

If your administrator has switched it on, you can ask the assistant to produce a Word document, spreadsheet, presentation or PDF from information it has gathered, and download it.

You can also ask for marketing material - "design a brochure about X", "draft a social media post about Y". It styles the result using your company brand documents. For that you need access to the Marketing documents (level 1 or above); with none, it refuses rather than inventing a look. Administrators and document uploaders can save a good result back into the library.

Things to be careful about

• It can be wrong. It is an AI. Check anything you are going to act on. There is a permanent notice at the top of the chat saying exactly this.
• Do not paste personal information you do not need to. Names, ID numbers and medical details should stay out of the chat box.
• It never decides anything about a person. If you search CVs, you get candidates to read. It does not rank or shortlist them. That decision stays with a human, always.
• Answers are not a permissions bypass. If you can see it in the chat, you could already see it elsewhere in ThreadWare.

When it is not working

If an administrator needs to work out why you specifically are not getting answers, they have a report for it: Administration ▸ AI Assistant ▸ AI Access Matrix. It shows, per person, their access level, whether they consented, how many sites they have, and a tick or cross for every subject area.

Related guides

• Document Management - getting documents into the library so the assistant can find them.
• Instrument Tag setup - where machine nicknames (aliases) are set up.
• Recruitment - why CVs are treated differently.
• All guides