Case 04 · Process engineering bids
A technical proposal from a raw client package
Clients send engineering firms a package, not a brief: PDFs, specification sheets, spreadsheets, CAD drawings and long email threads. We built an agent that reads all of it, runs the engineering, and assembles a review-ready technical proposal — showing where every requirement came from.
The situation
Engineers were spending bid time reading, not designing.
Each enquiry arrived as a folder of mixed files. Before any engineering could start, someone had to read every document, pull out the requirements, and reconcile what the drawings, sheets and emails said — often in conflict with one another.
What we built
An agent that reads the package the way the team would.
- Reads every format the client sends: PDFs, Excel sheets, CAD drawings (DWG and DXF), text and Outlook email files.
- Keeps a readable layer between the raw files and the design — each source is first turned into plain text an engineer can check, then into structured data.
- Runs the engineering on the extracted requirements, and shows its working.
- Assembles the technical proposal for the engineering team to review, rather than starting from last year's template.
What was hard
Deciding what the agent should not do.
Engineers choose what goes in. Client packages are technical and inconsistent, so intake is deliberately a folder an engineer fills after reviewing the files — not an automatic pull from email. Automating that step was consciously left for later.
Drawings are not documents. CAD files had to be parsed for the information that matters to sizing, not just converted to an image.
Trust needs a readable middle. Converting each source to plain text first means an engineer can see exactly what the agent read before trusting what it concluded.
What changed
Bid time goes to engineering judgment.
- Proposals start from what the client actually sent, with requirements traceable to their source.
- Conflicts between drawings, sheets and emails surface before the design, not in the client's review.
Client name withheld. A reference call can be arranged under NDA.