Panel specs from CAD drawings in seconds, not hours

The task

A sandwich panel manufacturer lays out each project in CAD, then counts hundreds of panels by hand and types the spec into Excel. On real projects this took 2–15 hours, and 1 to 15 days passed between a finished drawing and a spec sent to the customer. Drawings were marked up inconsistently — text tags on some, dimensions only on others — so a simple parser would not do.

What we built

• We built a drawing-to-spec pipeline: the app reads DWG/DXF, finds the panels, groups them and writes an Excel file in the client's own template.
• Three recognition strategies cover the different markup styles: text tags, dimension chains and block attributes. The app suggests a mode; a new project is a config change, not code.
• Engineers kept their usual CAD workflow: the app works with the existing drawing markup, and the designer confirms detected panels in a table before export.
• Shipped to workstations as a standalone Windows app with one-click install and on-demand updates. Output was verified against hand-made specs line by line and by totals.
• The next stage — from spec to quotes, orders, production and inventory — is designed and captured as a roadmap, not yet built.

Outcome

784/784 and 189/189

panels on one project and wall panels on another matched the manual specs line by line, size groups included; area within 0.001 m²

2–15 h → 10–30 s

to produce a project spec: manual work vs app processing, measured on real projects

40–200 h/month

potential engineering time saved at 20–30 projects a month, per the project's economics model

1–3 months

estimated payback, per the project's economics model

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