Drawings In. Bills of Materials Out.
Reading a drawing pack is the slowest part of estimating. Your senior estimator spends an hour with a calliper and a calculator, pulling out cut lengths, weld details, plate thicknesses, and finishes. AI does the same job in seconds — and we built the playbook for it at Kingsland Fabrications.
The promise
Where it hurts
The fabricators reality.
Drawing packs arrive in every variation. PDFs from SolidWorks, scans of CAD prints, the occasional hand-marked photocopy with notes in the margin. Your estimator pulls out: parts list, dimensions, weld symbols (fillet/butt/penetration), plate thickness, material grade, finish spec, special notes. That data goes into the BOM, then into the quote. The current process is reliable but slow — and it's held in one or two heads.
What we actually build
Tuned for fabricators.
Read the drawing the way a fabricator reads it
The model is tuned on real fabrication drawings — it recognises weld symbols (BS 8888 and ISO), plate codes (PL10, PL15, etc.), material grades (S275/S355), and the conventions your draftsmen use. Not generic OCR.
Extract the full BOM, not just text
Parts list, dimensions, weld lengths, plate thicknesses, surface area for finish, special notes flagged for the estimator. Structured output, ready to drop into your estimating tool or your quote template.
Handle drawing-pack complexity
Multi-sheet drawing packs, GA + detail drawings, cross-references between sheets. The system stitches the pack together so the BOM reflects the whole job, not just the front page.
Human-in-the-loop for the tricky cases
Bespoke welds, non-standard finishes, customer-specific notes — flagged for the estimator to review. The 80% standard work runs through automatically; the 20% judgement work gets human attention.
Real engagement
The outcome.
Engineering drawings (PDF) → bill of materials with cut lengths, weld details, plate thickness, and finish. Estimating that used to take an hour now takes under five minutes per drawing pack — and the senior estimator now spends time on margin and customer judgement, not data entry.
Typical stack
We integrate with what you have.
- Custom MES
- SolidWorks / AutoCAD PDF exports
- Excel / Google Sheets BOMs
- Sage
- SharePoint / Google Drive
If your stack isn't listed, ask — almost always we can integrate. We've connected to bespoke MES, ancient on-prem systems, and email-only interfaces.
Pricing
Fixed fee, phased delivery.
£4,800–£12,000 for build, ~£300–£600/month for hosting + accuracy monitoring
From £4,800
Document extraction for fabricators
- Workflow audit + industry-specific spec
- Build, integrations, and tuning to your real data
- Live deployment in your environment
- Ongoing tuning + accuracy monitoring
Questions
Things people in this industry ask us.
01 Does it handle our specific drawing conventions?
Yes — we tune for your conventions during build. Whether you use BS 8888, ISO, ASME, in-house standards, or a mix of all four, the system is calibrated to your weld symbols, material codes, finish specs, and notation. Adding new conventions later is straightforward.
02 Can it read scanned drawings, not just clean PDFs?
Yes. Scans, photos taken with a phone, marked-up prints, multi-generation photocopies. Modern vision models are robust to image quality in ways old OCR wasn't. The system falls back to "send to human" when the image genuinely can't be read.
03 What about jobs with customer-specific weld procedures?
Recognised and flagged. Customer-specific procedures (e.g. "WPS-12 applies to all butt welds for this customer") get attached to the BOM as a note for the estimator. The system doesn't make the procedural decision — it just makes sure the human sees the right context.
04 Does the BOM go straight to our quoting tool?
Yes — we integrate with your estimating tool, ERP, or spreadsheet. The BOM lands in the same format you'd expect a human to produce, ready for pricing. Pairs naturally with our quote-generation use case for end-to-end drawing-to-quote automation.
05 How accurate is it?
On the use cases we've deployed: above 95% match rate on standard items, with the rest flagged for review. Critically, the system tells you when it's uncertain — so you never get a silent error in production.
The pattern
See document extraction for other industries.
Document extraction
Every business has the same data-entry tax.
Same pattern, different industries
Related solutions.
Let's see if we can help.
A 15-minute chat with Chris & Kay. No slides. No pitch deck. You tell us what's on your plate; we follow up by email with real thinking.