If your dossier isn't in order, you pay twice.
Having documentation, inspection reports and drawings in order is crucial for maintenance and renovation.
A contractor receives a tender for the renovation of a substation. First question to the asset manager: send the current as-builts, the cable and pipework schematics, and the latest inspection report. A week later a zip file arrives with 240 PDFs, of which 100 are poorly legible old scans, three are revisions of the same drawing with conflicting dates, plus an email: “This is what we could find, the rest must be in someone’s drawer somewhere.” The contractor tries his best to pin down the latest revisions and assemble a complete picture, but doesn’t manage it. The upshot: he needs a 3D laser scan and partial redrawing before he’s even willing to put a quote on the table. Tens of thousands of euros for a simple asset, quickly into the six figures for a viaduct, a large pumping installation, or a complex switchyard.
For renovations and major maintenance on existing infrastructure, a serious party wants to know the starting position before a price hits the table. If that starting position can’t be reconstructed from the existing documentation, you get one of two outcomes: a risk premium baked into the price, which the asset owner ends up paying, or a survey and redrawing round up front. For an average asset, the scanning itself isn’t the big cost; the redrawing is, easily running to dozens of drafting hours at €60-150 an hour. For complex installations or civil-engineering structures the total readily climbs into the six figures.
The painful part is that the asset manager is paying for information he once had himself. The drawings are in four places. The as-builts were once delivered by a contractor that has since been acquired or gone bust. The structural calculations sit in the mailboxes of engineers who have left. Revision numbers don’t line up between the CAD server, the PDF archive and the DMS. And somewhere a version is in circulation that is not the latest but is used the most because it’s on the shared drive. The real problem isn’t duplicates — it’s that there are too many near-identical documents. Twenty drawings of the same room, each with small differences. Which one is approved? Which is a draft that should never have left the studio? Without searchable content and proper metadata, the answer comes down to a coffee with the colleague who “usually knows.” And that colleague retires at some point.
Our platform makes everything findable first. OCR on drawings — including blueprints from the 1950s — makes asset numbers, room codes and installation labels searchable. Vision models read title blocks and automatically extract project number, revision number and date. A purpose-built pipeline visually compares technical drawings so the platform can say: these two are 98% identical, but a shut-off valve has been added in the bottom right corner. The latest revision is flagged as the authoritative version; earlier revisions remain traceable. And everything that belongs together — main drawing, detail sheets, maintenance log, inspection reports, certificates, correspondence — is automatically linked on asset numbers and content.
The next tender no longer starts with a zip file and a “this is what we could find.” The asset manager searches on the asset and within seconds has the full dossier, with the authoritative revisions clearly marked. A contractor who can trust the starting position doesn’t need to add a higher risk premium. An asset manager whose dossier is in order avoids a survey-and-redraw round that already costs tens of thousands of euros on a simple asset, and six figures on a complex one. For parties managing dozens or hundreds of assets, that investment pays for itself once and keeps returning after that.