Uploading artifacts
You upload discovery material on the Discovery tab of Phase 1 (and, for target-state sources, in Phase 3). Each upload starts an extraction job you can watch in the Jobs panel.
What eavantage reads
Section titled “What eavantage reads”| You upload | eavantage reads it as | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| PDF, Word (.docx), plain text | Document text | Strategy docs, interview notes, reports. |
| Excel (.xlsx), CSV | Tabular data | Application inventories, capability lists. Excel process sheets can also seed process models. |
| PowerPoint (.pptx) | Slide text and diagrams | Diagrams on slides go through the vision pipeline (below). |
| Visio (.vsdx), draw.io (.drawio) | Diagrams | Process and architecture diagrams. |
| BPMN (.bpmn) | Process models | Imported as candidate process flows. |
| ArchiMate Open Exchange XML (.xml / .archimate) | An architecture model | Treated as a discovery artifact, not an authoritative import — every element still becomes a candidate for review. |
An unsupported file type is rejected with a clear message rather than silently ignored. Uploads are size-capped.
What happens to each file
Section titled “What happens to each file”- Text is extracted — normalised into text the AI can reason over.
- The AI proposes candidates — capabilities, processes, applications, data objects, and relationships, each linked back to the exact place in the source it came from.
- Candidates are risk-tiered and land in the review queue (or, for a narrow band of high-confidence multi-source facts, are auto-committed and flagged to the lead). See Reviewing AI candidates.
The vision pipeline (diagrams)
Section titled “The vision pipeline (diagrams)”Diagram files — Visio, draw.io, BPMN, and diagrams inside PowerPoint or PDF — go through a multi-stage pipeline: the diagram is parsed, laid out, and turned into a candidate model, then run through a critique loop before the candidates are shown. A hand-drawn or scanned diagram in a slide is handled the same way as a native diagram file.
A note on the model uploads
Section titled “A note on the model uploads”Uploading a client’s existing ArchiMate / LeanIX / Ardoq export does not import their model wholesale. eavantage reads it as evidence and proposes candidates from it, which you then review. Exports out of eavantage are one-way; there is no round-trip. See Exporting to EA tools.