Correcting the wrong drawing
The company built to client drawings. When an order came in, we had to submit our own version of the client's drawing back to them as an approval drawing. The client reviewed it and marked up corrections in red.
The trouble was that clients were correcting our drawing, not their own control drawing. One engineer was assigned to each set, producing and resubmitting as many times as it took. Between submittal, the client's review, and the return, a single drawing could take a couple of weeks. And the problem that came back again and again was a drawing that didn't meet a specific standard the client expected.
Every redline round cost twice
Each extra round of redlines made the drawing less accurate, not more, and stretched the lead time. That put the company in a bind with customers who were waiting on their order.
It also spread. The back-and-forth on one client's drawings slowed the engineering work for every other client in the queue.
Catch it earlier, then check it faster
Vetting at the front of sales. We started the review where the order started. The solutions engineering group began vetting the client's drawing much more deeply before it ever reached engineering, so more problems were caught before the first submittal.
A manual check that took a whole day. Once a drawing reached engineering, there was a manual quality check before it went back to the client. Reviewing a batch of 15 or more drawings could take a single QA person nearly eight hours.
An AI tool built for exactly this job. I built an AI tool focused on that one task. It reviews the same batch of drawings in about 20 minutes.
Trust earned with the same people. We validated the tool's results with the same group that had been doing the manual review. The first version was 90 percent accurate against what the client had originally asked for. The remaining 10 percent stayed with a person: the tool flags what it isn't sure of, and someone on the team confirms it.
Two days instead of two weeks
Final approval of our drawings dropped from about two weeks to two days. The quality check that used to take a QA person most of a day now takes about 20 minutes, with a person still confirming anything the tool flags.
Off their plate
- Spending most of a day checking a batch of drawings by hand.
- Sending drawings back that missed a standard the client cared about.
- Waiting through round after round of redlines.
- Letting one client's revisions slow every other client's work.