Document and drawing intelligence

Fit-out estimating, CAD redesign and finish QC

Drawing sets become priced bills of quantities, recurring fixtures are redrawn to a new site’s dimensions, and finish checks run from a phone, with anything uncertain flagged rather than guessed.

Sheet
W-03
Title
Case study
Issued for
Information
Drawn by
Snilld

Sheet W-03 · Document and drawing intelligence · Manufacturing and fit-out

Proof of concept
Every job on an invented fit-out line: counts at the estimate, design, check and site steps, and a card for each job saying what it waits on, such as three flagged lines in a bill.
01 / 06The line, on an invented week
Three lines the reading was unsure of, each asked as a question: a logo whose size the drawing does not give, an LED strip read at 78 per cent, and a driver the drawing does not show. Each has Correct and Fix it.
02 / 06What it is unsure of, asked rather than guessed
The quote for an invented wall bay: materials, then wastage, overheads, labour and profit, and a quote total. The send button stays disabled until three more questions are answered.
03 / 06Priced, but not sent until every question is answered
A wall bay set to 1,200 mm wide, its shelves drawn sagging in the 3D view, and a red note that the shelf span breaks the maximum unsupported span for the board and needs a mid-span support.
04 / 06A size that breaks a structural rule is blocked
A generated elevation sheet for an invented wall bay: front and side elevations dimensioned in millimetres, and a title block marked for approval.
05 / 06The drawing set, generated
The finish check for a built unit: points such as measured sizes against the drawing, handles level and shelves straight, each with OK or Problem, and a count of points checked.
06 / 06Finish QC, point by point

Demo data. Every name and number is invented.

Goes in
A multi-sheet drawing set or a fixture to adapt, exactly as the client sent it
What we built
Layout-aware extraction and vision for reading, rule-checked parametric redesign for drawing
Comes out
A bill of quantities in the manufacturer’s own tender spreadsheet, or a fabrication-ready drawing set
The line it does not cross
A line it cannot read is left blank, and a design that breaks a structural rule is blocked rather than drawn

Note 1 · The constraint

A luxury interior fit-out manufacturer working across two hubs spends days reading client drawings before pricing can begin, redraws the same fixtures by hand for every new store, and checks finishes by eye on the factory floor. Rushed bids lose margin. Slow bids lose the job. The company cannot install new hardware in the factory and cannot expose its ERP, so anything we build has to work from the files and the phones already there.

Note 2 · What we built

Four modules on one platform. Estimating reads a drawing set as the client sent it, using layout-aware extraction for structured sheets and vision for drawn ones, and writes a hierarchical bill of quantities into the manufacturer’s own tender spreadsheet. CAD redesign adapts a recurring fixture to new dimensions and produces a dimensioned drawing set and cutlist, checking structural rules first. Finish QC and site snagging run from a phone and produce a punch list. An estimator, a detailer or a QC lead reviews every output, and each correction can be saved as a rate for the next run. It has been validated against six of the manufacturer’s real past projects. Pricing on the most complex drawings is still being tuned against their real rates, and we report that openly rather than quoting a best run.

Note 3 · What transfers

Any business that quotes from documents it did not author has this problem — tenders, specifications, schedules of work, supplier price lists. The reading is the bottleneck, not the arithmetic, and the same design carries to any repeat engineering work that is redrawn by hand.

Stage
Proof of concept, next steps in progress
Client
Anonymised
Modules
Estimating, CAD redesign, finish QC, field
Validated against
Six real past projects
Automated tests
981 backend, 34 accuracy harness
Inputs
PDF, DWG, DXF, XLSX, phone camera
Integration
File in, file out. No ERP coupling.
← All work

Start with a prototype

Two to four weeks working from your own files, and at the end you hold something real. It is the cheapest way to find out whether any of this applies to you.

Start with a prototype