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AI Systems Engineering & Manufacturing

From 4 Weeks to 45 Minutes: Document Extraction at Scale

A hybrid extraction pipeline that pulls revision data from 4,700+ engineering drawings, replacing weeks of manual work.

From 4 Weeks to 45 Minutes: Document Extraction at Scale

Problem

Pulling revision data out of thousands of engineering drawings was manual, slow, and expensive. A single pass across the corpus took around four weeks and cost roughly £8,000 in engineering effort.

Approach

A three-tier hybrid pipeline that sends each page to the cheapest method that can handle it. Most pages clear with fast automated extraction. Harder pages route to an AI vision model. A small remainder is flagged for human review. A confidence score decides the routing, so cost stays low without losing accuracy.

What we built

A production system that reads revision data from 4,700+ engineering drawings without manual data entry. Confidence-based routing and per-site validation keep the output trustworthy, and anything the system is unsure about goes to a person rather than being guessed.

Outcome

A full pass dropped from about four weeks to 45 minutes, at a cost of around £40 against the previous £8,000. The architecture pattern behind it was published on InfoQ and Towards Data Science.

Want something like this built?

We scope the problem properly first, then build production systems that companies rely on. Book a call and tell us what you need.

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