Drawing Q&A

Drawing Q&A: answers that point back to the sheet and its revision

When the shop floor asks where a datum sits, the answer rarely lives in one file. The sheet carries dimensions and technical notes, the process card carries operations and equipment, the inspection plan carries acceptance criteria, and the change notice says which revision is void. These arrive as PDFs, DWGs, scans and phone photos, and finding the right sheet usually takes longer than reading it. Legacy products survive only as scanned blueprints.

RatioMax puts that material into a knowledge base you can question. OpenDataLoader handles complex-layout PDFs, PaddleOCR-VL reads scans and images, and hybrid retrieval with a ReRank pass routes a question to the drawing passage or process clause with a clickable citation. Chunk-level snapshots and diffs make revisions visible, and retrieval returns the revision in force. The stack runs on your intranet, so drawings never leave the plant.

Where it breaks

  1. Scanned drawings return nothing

    Legacy products survive only as scanned blueprints, where part numbers, material grades and heat-treatment notes are pixels rather than text. Full-text search returns nothing, and a new hire does not even know which sheet to open first.

  2. One answer, three documents

    A single question often needs the sheet, the process card and the inspection plan together. Assembling that answer by hand means any missed step produces an incomplete conclusion, and nobody can see that a step was skipped.

  3. Nobody can say which revision is in use

    After the drawing moves to revision C, the shop floor, the subcontractor and field service may still hold revision B. Nobody can confirm which one is in use until an assembly clash or a customer complaint surfaces.

  4. Engineers interrupted by the same question

    Machinists ask about datums, quality asks about tolerances, suppliers ask about symbols, service asks about spares. The same underlying knowledge, one interruption at a time, and it stops entirely when the engineer is on leave.

How RatioMax responds

  • Scans and complex layouts, parsed

    Complex-layout PDFs go through OpenDataLoader and scans or images through PaddleOCR-VL, across more than ten formats including PDF, Word, Excel and images. Title blocks, BOM tables and technical notes all reach the index without manual re-keying.

    Platform capability: Dual-engine parsing

  • Citations land on the passage

    Hybrid vector and keyword retrieval with a ReRank pass takes a question about a roughness callout straight to the drawing passage or process clause, and every answer carries a clickable citation. Where the documents do not cover it, the system says so rather than guessing a value.

    Platform capability: Traceable citations

  • Changes visible, old revisions kept

    Chunk-level snapshots record every edit, line-level diff marks additions and deletions, and any revision can be rolled back. Retrieval matches the revision in force by default, and superseded versions stay searchable without leaking into answers.

    Platform capability: Version snapshots

  • Drawings, materials and process linked

    The agent organises sheets, process cards and inspection plans into interlinked wiki pages and a knowledge graph: a part links to its material, the material to its heat treatment, the treatment to the acceptance criteria. A visual chunk editor lets you adjust how documents split.

    Platform capability: Auto wiki

Deployment scenarios

  • Shop floor technical lookups

    The shop floor asks where the datum sits or what finish is required for a part number, and the answer points at the sheet and clause instead of a walk to engineering to open a paper blueprint.

  • First-article inspection

    The inspector pulls dimensions, geometric tolerances and datums for that part, then checks them against the CMM report item by item, with every criterion taken from one controlled revision.

  • Spare-part lookups in service

    Field service locates the drawing and spare-parts entry from a symptom and a component name, asking inside WeCom instead of returning to a desk to open a laptop.

  • Supplier questions and releases

    A subcontractor asks about weld symbols and heat-treatment notes inside their authorised scope, cannot reach drawings that were never released to them, and every lookup leaves an audit record.

Terms and knowledge entities

Detail and assembly drawings
A detail drawing states one part's geometry, dimensions and technical requirements; an assembly drawing states how parts fit and locate against each other. They are read together.
Title block
The table in the lower right of a sheet recording number, name, material, scale, revision and signatures. It is where you start when establishing what a sheet is and whether it is current.
Bill of materials table
The table above the title block on an assembly drawing, listing item number, part code, name, quantity and material. Purchasing, assembly and spares all work from it.
Drawing number
The unique identifier a company assigns to each drawing, usually encoding product, assembly and sequence. A stable numbering rule is what lets drawings line up with the BOM and work orders.
Controlled drawing
The released revision that passed approval, where any change restarts the workflow. Production and inspection may only rely on it, and superseded copies must not be used.
Text layer
Extractable text embedded in a PDF. Scans generally have none, so OCR has to run before the content can be searched or cited.
Technical notes
The written requirements on a sheet covering material, heat treatment, surface treatment and inspection. They are often cited on their own as the acceptance basis.
Dimensional tolerance zone
The permitted range of a dimension, set by the basic size together with its upper and lower deviations. It determines fit and constrains the machining process.
Traceable citation
Marking where an answer came from so each conclusion can be checked. In engineering work an answer without a source cannot be used as a basis for building anything.

These definitions are also exposed structurally so search engines and AI engines can read and cite the concepts accurately.

Related deployment

Chongqing Boyue Machinery Manufacturing Co., Ltd.

Wear parts for mining crushers

Makes wear-resistant castings — jaw plates, concaves, mantles, roll shells and tooth plates — for crusher OEMs and mining customers.

Solution: An engineering-drawing knowledge base on RatioMax with multi-format parsing and smart chunking; Wiki mode auto-generates structured pages linking drawings, parts, materials and processes.

  • 20 Drawings & tech docs ingested
  • 107 Knowledge-graph nodes
  • Seconds Natural-language answers vs manual lookup
  • Standard Quality evidence & issue handling

Results shown are project targets

Solution questions

Can scanned drawings really be searched by number and material?
What is legible on the sheet becomes searchable: title blocks, drawing numbers, material grades, dimension callouts and technical notes. PaddleOCR-VL handles scans and images, OpenDataLoader handles complex-layout PDFs, and recognised text enters the index so retrieval can filter by part number or material.
How do we know the answer reflects the controlled revision?
Revisions are stored as separate chunks, every edit keeps a snapshot with a line-level diff, and any version can be rolled back. Retrieval matches the revision in force by default, while superseded copies remain searchable without entering answers. Four-level RBAC and space isolation decide who sees which copy, and access is logged.
Will it invent a dimension that is not on the drawing?
Answers are built from retrieved passages or process clauses, each carrying a clickable citation, and when retrieval finds nothing the system says so rather than offering a plausible number. Langfuse and W3C cross-service tracing keep the retrieved passages, and dimensions and tolerances still get a check against the original sheet.
Our drawings are on an isolated network. Can it run there?
Yes. A single node runs on Docker Compose, production runs on Kubernetes, and the four core services deploy and scale independently. Each knowledge base can bind a private OSS or S3 bucket, and everything sits inside your intranet. Models can come from more than twenty vendors or run locally through Ollama.
How do we release drawings to suppliers safely?
Separate spaces per project or supplier, then narrow with four-level RBAC down to a single knowledge base so a supplier sees only released revisions, with every access logged. OIDC centralises identities and two-tier API keys cover integrations. Files can live in each knowledge base's private bucket, with credentials encrypted under AES-256-GCM.
How does this relate to our drawing management system?
Originals stay in your PLM or drawing management system. What this adds is lookup and answering: who asked what, and which page the answer came from. The platform exposes around 360 API endpoints and an MCP service with 29 standard tools over stdio, SSE and HTTP with OAuth2, so it can be wired into what you run today.
How do we retain a senior engineer's judgement?
Ingest the drawings, process cards, inspection plans and nonconformity reports first, then let the agent generate structured, interlinked wiki pages and a knowledge graph, with editing, snapshots, line-level diff and rollback. A senior engineer reviews a sentence rather than writing a manual, and a new hire walks from the index to the clause.
Can people ask from inside WeCom?
Yes. WeCom, Feishu, DingTalk, Yunzhijia, WeChat, QQBot, Slack, Telegram and Mattermost are all supported, plus a mini program, a Chrome extension and a website widget. Channels are entry points only, and one permission model decides what field service and the shop floor each see.

Other solutions