Bill of quantities
CAD geometry in, a costed bill out, using the estimator's own method.
The situation
A construction company where every bill of quantities took an estimator upwards of two weeks, and where the costing logic lived in that estimator's head rather than in any document.
How it works
Read the drawing
.dwg and .dxf files give walls, openings, rooms and dimensions as real geometry. Floor area per room, wall lengths and heights, door and window counts, material surfaces. Where only a PDF or scan exists, an OCR and vision stage recovers the same measurements.
Apply the method
the estimator's step-by-step methodology is encoded: how each element is classified, which measurement rule applies, how a quantity becomes a line item.
Price it
each line is matched against 50,000+ historical supplier records for a defensible unit cost. A small fine-tuned model handles extraction and classification, far faster and cheaper at construction-firm volume than a frontier model per element.
Outcome
two weeks to two minutes · 50,000+ price records · stage: prototype, moving into full build.
Hardest part
The drawings are the easy half. The costing logic is the hard one, because it lives in an estimator's head: the sequence of judgment calls about how to classify each element, which rule to apply, how a quantity becomes a priced line. Two estimators can read the same drawing and produce different bills, both defensible. Getting that methodology out of a person and into something a model can learn from, precisely enough to trust without flattening the judgment that made it valuable, is the whole project.
See how this maps to your business.
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