When a customer emails a drawing package asking for a quote, most electrical manufacturers face the same bottleneck: before any pricing can happen, an engineer has to read the drawings, extract every component, and build a bill of materials by hand. For a complex switchgear package or relay panel, that extraction takes one to three days. OpenDrawing eliminates that step entirely.
The RFQ Response Problem
Electrical manufacturers - switchgear builders, panelboard fabricators, MCC assemblers, custom relay panel shops - compete heavily on quote turnaround time. A customer soliciting competitive bids often awards based on who responds first with a credible number, not just who is cheapest. Being three days behind because you are still extracting the BOM when your competitor has already quoted is a structural disadvantage.
The manual extraction problem compounds as RFQ volume grows. A sales team fielding 40 RFQs per month, each requiring two days of BOM extraction, needs 80 engineer-days per month just on takeoff. Adding salespeople does not help - the constraint is the extraction step, not the selling.
Catalog Integration: From Customer Drawing to Your SKUs
OpenDrawing extracts component specifications from the customer's drawing - voltage, current, phase, interrupting capacity, enclosure type, kVA rating, metering class, any manufacturer references - and matches them against your uploaded parts catalog. This covers the full range of components electrical manufacturers typically build or supply: switchgear assemblies, power transformers and distribution transformers, meters and metering enclosures, motor control centers, panelboards, relay panels, disconnect switches, transfer switches, and associated protective devices. The output is not a generic component list: it is a list of your specific part numbers, with confidence scores, quantities, and drawing references.
Your catalog is uploaded once during onboarding and updated as your stocking list changes. Match rates on well-structured catalogs typically exceed 85% automatic match, with the remaining 15% requiring a quick human review. For items where the customer's spec does not match anything in your catalog, the platform flags the gap with the extracted spec so your sales team can identify a substitute or note an exception in the proposal.
Proposal Generation: Two Paths
Option 1 - Export to your existing systems. The matched BOM exports to Excel, CSV, or direct import templates for SAP MM, Oracle Purchasing, Salesforce CPQ, and common electrical estimating platforms. Your sales team works in the tools they already use; OpenDrawing provides the data foundation that currently takes days to build manually.
Option 2 - Generate a proposal document directly. For teams that want to go further, OpenDrawing can produce a formatted quote document from the matched BOM - including line items, quantities, your part numbers, and a total - ready for customer delivery. This path is particularly useful for high-volume, lower-complexity quote scenarios where the quote is essentially a priced BOM and speed is the differentiator.
The Outcome: Quote Capacity, Not Just Speed
The manufacturers who get the most value from OpenDrawing are not just quoting faster on the same number of RFQs - they are pursuing RFQs they previously declined because the extraction time made them uneconomical. Quotes that take two days to build manually are sometimes passed over when the team is busy. Quotes that take 30 minutes to build get done even on a full day.
Customers report responding to 2–3× more RFQs per month with the same headcount after full deployment, and same-day response rates going from under 10% to over 80% for standard drawing types.
What Drawing Types Are Supported
OpenDrawing handles the drawing types that manufacturers most commonly receive from customers: single-line diagrams, schematic drawings, relay panel wiring diagrams, MCC elevation drawings, and associated schedules (panel schedules, equipment schedules). Both CAD-exported PDFs and scanned paper drawings are supported. Legacy drawings from customers with older archives are handled through the same extraction pipeline with image preprocessing for quality recovery.
See also AI Bill of Materials Generation from Electrical Drawings and AI Part Number Search and Catalog Matching.