Aeronautics
ALTEN impresses with practical presentations and workshops
The Nuremberg Digital Festival brings together innovation and technology in the Nuremberg metropolitan region and celebrates the digitalization of our modern society. During the ten-day festival, we welcomed a strong professional audience to our premises in Nuremberg on two evenings. We were able to offer participants valuable insights into important topics in software development, as well as exciting discussions and interactive workshops.
“Testing RAG-based AI systems – insights into a customer project at Schaeffler Special Machinery“
In the first event, we teamed up with Schaeffler Special Machinery to demonstrate what is possible today with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Experts André HOLTKAMP (Senior Consultant) and Stephan LIERO (Expert Holistic User Experience at Schaeffler) gave a practical presentation on how RAG works in complex industrial applications.
Stephan first presented his product, the technical features of a RAG system, and its customer value, before André discussed the challenges involved in testing, the actual test concept, and the evaluated frameworks.
The central question: How do you test a system that does not work deterministically? Answers were provided in the form of concrete test scenarios, proven frameworks, their adaptation to the test object, and numerous practical experience values.
“get SERIOUS-PLAY hard”
In our second event, our ALTEN experts Galina HINOVA (Senior Consultant), Steffen SCHILD (Head of Testing), Utz WINTER (Head of Testing), Jakob BABLITSCHKY (Community Lead Cloud), and Sandra CRAMER (Head of Project Management) showed how agile methods can be brought to life.
In interactive workshops, they combined teamwork, agility, and learning through games. And what did the participants take away from the event?
- Hands-on agile simulations
- Learning by doing with real “aha” moments
- Soft skills that don’t disappear from the flipchart
The joint games in small groups and the constructive feedback led to an inspiring exchange and new ideas that can be put into practice right away.
The opinion of our ALTEN experts
How does the RAG system work in complex industrial applications?
What were the specific goals you pursued with the use of RAG?
“Production environments contain many documents, process instructions, and training materials, often comprising hundreds of pages. When a problem arises, it is often difficult for individual employees to find the right content without knowing the exact content or search terms. This is where RAG can play to its strengths by enabling intelligent, semantic search and delivering relevant information even for imprecise queries.”
Stephan LIERO – Expert Holistic User Experience at Schaeffler
What practical experience from this project would you pass on to other companies that want to use RAG?
“From our work with Machine Copilot, we have learned that clearly separating specialist areas into separate RAG systems significantly improves the quality of responses, as a centralized solution often leads to inaccurate results. Optimizing the prompts is also crucial, as even small adjustments can noticeably improve the results and have a major impact. Choosing a powerful language model and a suitable retriever also forms the technical basis for the system’s success.”
André HOLTKAMP – Senior Consultant
How do the games effectively combine teamwork, agility, and learning?
Which soft skills were particularly well developed through the games?
“Definitely teamwork and communication, but also promoting a culture of error, for example, because the game encourages a desire to do things and failure or losing has no impact at first. Playing together strengthens team spirit and thus also trust. This improves interpersonal communication and cooperation.”
Sandra CRAMER – Project Management Division Manager
What tips do you have for teams that want to experiment with serious play themselves?
“Just get started – go for it! Everything doesn’t have to be perfectly planned out. The key is to choose a game that fits your goal and your team, whether digital or analog. Even a small, simple simulation game can have a big impact. Be sure to allow time for reflection, as this is often where real learning takes place. And finally, fun and a good dose of humor often help to make even serious topics accessible.”
Galina HINOVA – Senior Consultant
We look back
It is the fourth time that you participate in this event, why?
“By selecting wide-ranging, current, and forward-looking topics for our events, we can show potential customers in the region what we do, where our strengths lie, and that ALTEN attaches great importance to involving our employees in technologically advanced projects. The Nürnberg Digital Festival offers opportunities to connect with society, other companies, and their employees not only during its ten-day run, but also in the run-up to and after the event. This allows existing relationships to be cultivated and revitalized in a relaxed atmosphere, and new connections to be made.”
Steffen Schild – Test Division Manager
What was particularly exciting or noteworthy – both for you and for the participants?
“The interaction with the participants is always extremely interesting and rewarding. Each participant has their own questions and thoughts on the topics. This always creates great added value, not only for the participants but also for us as organizers. It shows us how important these events are for seeing things from a different perspective.”
Jakob BABLITSCHKY – Community Lead Cloud
