Increasing efficiency without sacrificing quality is an impressive accomplishment for any business, in any industry.

With the high financial stakes and exacting compliance demands in industries like aerospace, heavy machinery and medical devices, realizing this objective is all the more impressive.

How can your company save time, increase accuracy and generally improve its documentation and compliance processes?

DISCUS IDA™ — an intelligent, automated, and effective solution for engineering and inspection planning — is the answer.

IDA™ vs. OCR: Is there really a difference?

In short, yes.

To better understand the generational improvement from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to Intelligent Drawing Analysis™ (IDA™), let’s take a quick look at the efficiencies OCR offered compared to manually extracting information from 2D engineering drawings.

OCR is a time-tested tool that provides valuable, automated assistance for extracting text from drawing images and specification documents. The time savings are substantial compared to staff creating manually ballooned drawings and generating a list of requirements. While a manual process can take about two hours, and significantly more for complex drawings, OCR cuts the workflow down to roughly 40 minutes.

With that said, there is room for even more powerful solutions.

OCR is a static process, in the sense that it will either read a set of text or it won’t. The individual components that make up the tool do not have the capacity to learn or change for the better over time. And, despite the powerful benefits OCR offers over a fully manual approach, engineering and quality planning personnel must maintain significant involvement throughout the workflow for successful completion.

Moving forward with IDA™

IDA™ is a powerful evolution in manufacturing and quality engineering software solutions. It represents the next generation of tools for reading all the information in a drawing and generating full, compliant, and appropriate documentation.

The difference in name between the two systems is a simple way to highlight the transformative nature of IDA™:

  • Optical Character Recognition refers to a specific action: the conversion of written or printed text, like the type found in a legacy PDF drawing, to information that can be processed by a computer.
  • Intelligent Drawing Analysis™ refers to a much more comprehensive approach to automating the extraction of characteristics and associated information from a drawing, and creating the necessary documents for inspection.

Part of what makes IDA™ stand out from other software addressing the same need is its intelligent nature. Through artificial intelligence (AI), IDA™ is laying the groundwork to make the information extraction process almost completely automated. The IDA™ technology framework enables the automated extraction of much more technical data contained in the 2D engineering drawing, requiring less attention from your personnel while also providing better results.

AI tools empower IDA™ to improve over time. Based on usage and feedback when an exception arises, IDA™ can improve its performance, creating greater accuracy and time savings in the future.

With a better understanding of what sets IDA™ apart from similar solutions, let’s take a closer look at its benefits.

The advantages IDA™ brings to the table
Increased speed

We’ve already noted that OCR significantly cuts down on the amount of time needed compared to the manual process. A difference of 40 minutes versus two hours, respectively. The time savings you can realize with IDA™ are even more impressive: the same process can be completed in about 5 minutes.

That timeline is all the more notable because IDA™ is continuously evolving. Future releases of IDA™ will automatically capture the bill of documents, bill of materials, default tolerances, and other pertinent information.

The speed at which IDA™ operates cuts down on lead times as well, helping to reduce backlog and keeping review and inspection processes running smoothly.

Reduced need for human involvement, lower potential for human error

When your staff members use IDA™, they take on a more supervisory role as compared to the amount of hands-on, direct work required by other tools. They complete a simplified workflow, requiring only a few clicks of their mouse.

After running IDA™, a set of candidate characteristics is presented to the user for review. This review process puts skilled professionals in a role where they can excel — ensuring quality and catching the rare discrepancy that may arise.

Even the most talented and experienced staff can cause errors when they manually review and annotate a drawing. The tedious and repetitive nature of the process works against them. With IDA™, these errors are greatly reduced.

Enhanced precision

Automating the documentation process with AI supports more accurate results. This benefit emerges through the solution both mitigating the potential for human error and by continually enhancing its own capabilities. IDA™ outperforms OCR and many other options when identifying and reporting the details found in a 2D engineering drawing, and your company can count on it evolving and improving as time goes on.

Take the next step with DISCUS Software

DISCUS Software is the market leader in manufacturing and quality engineering software. We invented the first tools to address First Article Inspection, and continue to innovate as the market leader.

IDA™ is one of the most transformative solutions we’ve ever developed, and we want you to take full advantage of its ability to address key pain points and broadly improve workflows related to drawing analysis, review, and reporting.

To learn more about implementing IDA™ in your organization, get in touch with our team to schedule your demo today.