CAD Drawing Data Extraction
The technical drawing is the API of your supply chain. Its parser is currently a human with a keyboard.
Every week, hundreds of drawings flow into a machine-building company from outside: supplier drawings for purchased parts, customer drawings for parts to be made to print, revised versions of both. And every one of them triggers the same quiet ritual — someone opens the PDF, reads dimensions, tolerances, threads, surface symbols and material designations, and types them into another system. Into the inspection plan for incoming goods. Into the SAP material master. Into the calculation sheet for the RFQ.
It is transcription work performed by qualified people — quality planners, buyers, estimators — at fifteen to thirty minutes per drawing, with the error profile every manual transcription has. The data was structured once, in the sender’s CAD system; it printed to paper geometry; and your organisation pays to re-structure it by hand.
AI drawing extraction closes that loop: dimensions, tolerances, GD&T, threads, fits, surfaces, materials and title-block data are read automatically from the drawing — confidence-scored, source-linked — and delivered where your processes need them: the CAQ inspection plan, the ERP master record, the quotation sheet.
// Manual drawing transcription, in numbers
One drawing, four departments, four keyboards
Follow a single supplier drawing through your organisation and count the keyboards. Quality planning reads it to build the incoming-inspection plan — characteristic by characteristic, tolerance by tolerance. Purchasing reads it to fill the material master and request quotes. Work preparation reads it for feasibility and routing. The estimator reads it for costing. Four skilled people, four partial transcriptions of the same document, four opportunities for a typo that surfaces weeks later as a wrong inspection characteristic or a mis-specified order.
And revisions multiply everything: when the customer sends revision C, someone must find what changed against revision B — or re-transcribe defensively, because comparing by eye is slower than re-typing.
None of this is anyone’s “real job”. It is glue work between the drawing and your systems — exactly the kind of structured, repetitive reading that document AI now does reliably, with the crucial property manual transcription lacks: every extracted value stays linked to its exact spot on the drawing, so checking takes a glance instead of a re-read.
// One extraction — every consumer served, nothing re-typed
Incoming-inspection plan
Characteristics with tolerances and inspection severity, generated as a plan draft — rev delta marks the two characteristics that actually need re-approval.
Material master & classification
Material, dimensions, weight class, thread attributes into the master record and class system — typed once, by nobody.
RFQ & costing basis
Key features and tolerance classes feed the request and the calculation sheet — the same structured record the DFM check triages against.
From inbox to systems: how the pipeline works
The extraction is a pipeline with a quality loop, built into your document flow rather than beside it — and it runs where your customers’ and suppliers’ IP must stay: on your infrastructure.
Drawings, as they arrive
- PDF, scans, mixed quality
- Email inbox / folder watch
- Portal downloads included
- Batches or one at a time
Every annotation, structured
- Dimensions, tolerances, fits
- GD&T, threads, surfaces, welds
- Materials, heat treatment, notes
- Title block & revision data
Confidence-scored, human-checked
- Score per extracted field
- Flagged items to review queue
- Value links to its spot on the sheet
- Rev-delta against prior version
Into your systems, not a silo
- CAQ inspection plan draft
- SAP / ERP master data
- Quoting & DFM check feed
- API for everything else
When does drawing extraction pay off?
The case scales with drawing volume and the number of systems fed by hand. You are a candidate if most of these apply:
- Hundreds of third-party drawings enter your company every month — from suppliers, customers, or both.
- Quality planning builds incoming-inspection plans by reading and re-typing drawings characteristic by characteristic.
- ERP material masters are filled manually from drawings — and their quality shows it.
- Revision changes trigger defensive re-transcription, because comparing by eye is slower than starting over.
- Transcription errors surface downstream — wrong inspection characteristics, mis-specified orders — weeks after the typo.
- Your customers’ and suppliers’ drawings are under NDA — on-premises processing is a requirement, not a preference.
What the extraction reads and feeds
Built for real production drawings — and integrated into the systems your departments already work in.
Before and after: one supplier drawing, revision C
A revised shaft drawing arrives from your supplier. Here is what happens on each side of the change:
Before — four keyboards
- Quality re-reads the full sheet, rebuilds the inspection plan — 30 min
- Purchasing updates the master record — if anyone tells them — 15 min
- What changed vs. rev B? Compared by eye, or not at all
- The tightened fit slips through — found at incoming inspection, three deliveries later
- Multiply by 500 drawings a month
After — one extraction
- Drawing extracted on arrival, rev-delta computed — seconds
- Inspection plan draft updated — only the 2 changed characteristics flagged for approval
- ERP record updated from the same extraction — no second keyboard
- Humans review flagged fields — a glance at the linked spot, not a re-read
- Same 500 drawings — a fraction of the hours, an audit trail for free
Why inteliScience
Extraction engines exist — good ones. The reason drawing extraction projects still fail is rarely the reading; it is the last mile into your processes: mapping extracted characteristics onto your CAQ system’s plan structure, your SAP class system, your Teamcenter items; handling the supplier whose drawings are scanned faxes; deciding what happens with a 0.82-confidence tolerance on a safety-relevant characteristic. That integration work is precisely what we do — we build the pipeline end to end, choose the best extraction engine for your document mix (including specialised engines where they fit — we integrate rather than reinvent), and wire the results into the systems your quality planners and buyers already live in.
The quality loop stays honest, because inspection plans are not a place for silent guesses: every value carries a confidence score and a link to its exact location on the drawing, flagged items queue for human review, and safety-relevant characteristics can be configured to always require a human eye — regardless of confidence. The accuracy report in the pilot is measured on your drawings, per field type, so you know exactly what to trust before anything touches production.
And because every one of these documents is someone’s IP under NDA, the pipeline runs on your infrastructure — on-premises or in an EU cloud under your control.
Fixed price — no day rates, no surprises
Drawing Extraction Pilot
- Extraction tuned on your top 3 drawing sources (key suppliers / customers)
- 200 real drawings processed end-to-end, incl. revision-delta cases
- Measured accuracy report per field type — your drawings, your numbers
- One live integration demonstrated (CAQ inspection-plan draft or ERP master data)
- Rollout blueprint: all sources, all consumers, review-queue governance
4 weeks · runs on your infrastructure · pipeline and results are yours, whatever you decide afterwards.
For comparison
The cost of re-typing
- 500 drawings/month × 20 min — ~2,000 hours a year
- Transcription errors surfacing as wrong inspection characteristics and mis-orders
- Qualified quality planners and buyers working as human OCR
Frequently asked questions
Inspection plans are quality-critical. What if the extraction reads a tolerance wrong?
There are extraction APIs on the market. Why not just buy one?
Our supplier drawings range from clean PDFs to scanned faxes. Does it cope?
How does this relate to your legacy drawing mining and DFM offers?
Customer and supplier drawings are under NDA. Where does processing run?
Can we start with one department instead of all four?
Your quality planners didn't train for years to work as human OCR. Give them the glance instead of the re-read.
Send us 20 drawings from your real supplier mix — we'll show you the extraction, the confidence scores and a generated inspection-plan draft on your own documents.
Talk to an Extraction EngineerAlways here to support you – reach out to us with your questions, and we’ll guide you every step of the way.
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- +40 774 463 429
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- Str. Ploiești 9, 400157
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