PlanTakeoff — Blueprint Estimating & Subcontractor Bid Engine
The Problem
System Bottlenecks & Technical Friction
A commercial electrical trade contractor bidding on NYC high-rise developments and healthcare facilities was bottlenecked by their manual estimating process. Senior estimators spent 14 to 20 hours per tender manually counting lighting fixtures, disconnect switches, and panel boards across 120+ page architectural and MEP PDF drawing sets in Bluebeam. Because bids had strict 10-day submission windows, the contractor had to pass on 70% of lucrative commercial RFPs simply due to lack of estimating bandwidth.
Our Engineering Approach
Architecture Design & Implementation
We engineered PlanTakeoff as an automated quantity takeoff platform purpose-built for commercial plan sets. The system ingests architectural vector PDFs, detects drawing scale bars automatically, and executes high-resolution computer vision inference to detect, classify, and count electrical symbols (switches, fixtures, receptacles, panels) against the sheet's specific symbol legend. A linear measurement engine calculates conduit and feeder run lengths along wall vectors. Estimators review the results in a web-based Canvas inspection UI with color-coded count overlays, adjust counts in seconds, and export structured bill of materials (BOM) directly into Excel or Procore.
Technical Architecture
System breakdown & stack.
Vector PDF layer parser extracting drawing title blocks, architectural scales, and layer metadata
Fine-tuned visual symbol detection model (PyTorch / OpenCV) trained on 22,000 electrical blueprint annotations
Automatic drawing scale detection calibrating pixel-to-foot ratios across architectural, structural, and MEP sheets
Linear vector measurement engine calculating wire run lengths with automated 10% waste buffer factors
Interactive HTML5 Canvas inspection UI rendering symbol bounding boxes and count heatmaps with 60 FPS zoom
Procore API and Excel BOM exporter generating itemized labor and material cost estimates with unit pricing formulas
PostgreSQL project database storing versioned plan sets and addendum delta comparisons
AWS S3 multi-tier image tile caching for seamless instant rendering of 200MB 300-DPI drawing sheets
Engagement Timeline
Engineering delivery schedule.
Electrical blueprint dataset collection, symbol taxonomy mapping across standard CSI MasterFormat divisions
PyTorch symbol detection model fine-tuning, scale calibration engine, vector extraction pipeline
Linear conduit measurement engine, Procore API integration, Excel BOM generator
HTML5 Canvas review UI, count validation tools, addendum visual diff engine
Backtesting against 15 historical tender bids, estimator team training, full production rollout
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