How To Win More Bids with Automated Construction Takeoffs 

If you’re in the construction industry, you know that submitting takeoffs on time can make or break your chances of winning a project. The faster you submit, the better your odds. But let’s be honest—how often does everything go smoothly?

The takeoff process in construction (also known as material takeoff (MTO) or quantity takeoff (QTO)) involves identifying, measuring, and quantifying materials from drawings and specifications to estimate costs and plan procurement. 

The Real Cost of Slow Slow Takeoffs

You receive a Request for Quotation (RFQ) and feel confident that this project is yours. Your team gets to work, analyzing the MEP drawings, measuring everything manually, checking product availability against inventory, and piecing together the quotation. By the time you’re ready to submit, you realize you’re already behind.

Meanwhile, your competitors, who streamlined their takeoff process, have already sent their bids. And just like that, you’ve lost another project.

But let’s say, against the odds, you still manage to secure the contract despite the delay. The challenges don’t stop there. Because your takeoff was slow, you’re now purchasing materials at the last minute, paying extra due to price fluctuations, and missing out on negotiation opportunities. Your project costs more than anticipated, your margins shrink, and you’re left scrambling to make the numbers work.

The worst part? This isn’t a one-time mistake. It’s a cycle that keeps repeating.

What’s Actually Slowing Down Your Takeoff Process?

From the moment you receive the Request for Quotation (RFQ) to the final submission of your takeoff estimate, the construction engineering drawings pass through multiple teams within your organization. At every stage, delays creep in. But where exactly does the process slow down? Let’s break it down.

Slow, Manual Reading of MEP Drawings

One of the biggest bottlenecks in the takeoff process is extracting data from MEP drawings. Contractors often rely on a team of trained professionals to manually enter data into their systems, which creates two major issues.

In most cases, your team is either manually reading construction drawings or relying on outdated OCR technology to process them. For those still manually extracting data, the problem is obvious. The process is time-consuming, tedious, and prone to human error. A single misread value can disrupt the entire flow, forcing your team to start from scratch.

But the second group has it even worse. They’ve already invested in traditional OCR-based automation, only to realize it still produces errors and mismatched values—forcing them to double-check everything manually. It’s frustrating to spend money on automation only to be bogged down by inaccuracies. In fact, most of our clients come to us because they’ve been through this exact struggle. We get it. We know the pain.

Manual Measurement Calculations

Once the data is extracted, the next challenge is calculating measurements—a crucial step in the takeoff process. Every value, from pipe lengths to wire types, determines the material quantities required for the entire project.

This is where teams waste the most time. Construction drawings often come with scale inconsistencies, meaning values must be manually converted from ratios into real-world measurements. It’s a painstaking process that demands multiple cross-checks to ensure accuracy.

One miscalculation can throw off the entire material estimate, causing ordering issues, project delays, and cost overruns.

Verifying Requirements Against Inventory

Even after measurements are finalized, you’re still not ready to submit the takeoff. Before finalizing the bid, your team needs to check resource availability to ensure you can deliver the project on time.

But here’s the problem: checking inventory manually across multiple databases is incredibly slow. It can take days to confirm whether all the required materials are available. If stock is low, getting timeline estimates from suppliers adds even more delays.

By the time you finish this step, your competitors have already submitted their bids.

Manually Generating the Quotation

Even after all the data is collected, the sales team must compile everything into a final quotation—a process that involves constant back-and-forth communication between teams.

Since data comes in from different sources, this coordination can take weeks from the time the RFQ is received. Meanwhile, clients are already reviewing faster, more responsive competitors who have automated their processes.

How Not to Automate Your Takeoff Process

Despite the high volume and complexity of engineering drawings, there have always been efforts to automate data extraction. Many of our happiest customers today once relied on Traditional OCR for their construction drawings—before switching to Infrrd's software. And there’s a good reason for that.

Why Traditional OCR Fails for Engineering Drawings

Traditional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is designed to recognize characters and values within fixed templates. While it works well for structured documents, it struggles with complex engineering drawings that contain:

• Images, symbols, and technical diagrams
• Numbers, barcodes, and tables
• Logos and handwritten text
• Inconsistent formats across different drawings

Because engineering drawings vary so much in structure, OCR-based tools often produce alarmingly high error rates.

While it is technically possible to train OCR systems to recognize new formats, the effort required to manually train and maintain them outweighs the benefits. Given the unpredictability of engineering documents, OCR simply isn’t built for the job.

From visual challenges and scale inconsistencies to the ever-changing templates of construction drawings, traditional automation tools like OCR no longer cut it.

How to Automate the Takeoff Process the Right Way

One thing constructors like you should know is that you don’t have to compromise speed for accuracy—or vice versa—when it comes to your takeoff process. The right automation guarantees both in the most efficient way possible. From the moment you receive the Request for Quotation (RFQ) to the time you submit the final takeoff, there are multiple stages where automation can optimize your workflow. To fully harness its potential, you need to apply it at every level.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of where automation makes the biggest impact.

Finding Quantity Take Off Request Emails

The first step in speeding up your takeoff process is ensuring that you identify the takeoff request the moment it arrives. Often, these requests are sent via email, making them easy to lose in a flood of other messages. Contractors managing multiple projects at once struggle to track these requests manually, increasing the risk of missing deadlines.

This is the first point where automation can step in—by automatically flagging, sorting, and prioritizing takeoff requests in your inbox.

Reading Construction Drawings with Accuracy

Now comes the challenging part. Engineering drawings are highly unstructured and vary in format, making them difficult to process manually.

Take critical values, for example. Many tolerance values include upper and lower limits, but when processed by traditional automation tools like OCR, the entire value is often extracted as a simple string of digits—making it unusable. Engineers then have to manually correct the data, leading to wasted time and increased errors.

To solve this, you need an AI-powered automation solution that can accurately interpret engineering drawings and extract values in a structured, usable format.

Scale Readability and Conversion

Most construction drawings contain scale variations, meaning that measurements are not presented in real-world units. For example, if the actual components are measured in meters, the drawings may display them in centimeters proportionate to the scale for space efficiency.

When done manually, an estimator has to convert scaled values into real-world measurements before calculating the quantity takeoff. This step significantly slows down the process and increases the risk of miscalculations. Automating scale detection and conversion ensures accuracy and saves valuable time in preparing the bid.

Resource-to-Inventory Availability & Scope Mapping

Once you have a rough estimate of the required materials, the next step is checking their availability in your inventory. Before submitting a takeoff response, you need to confirm whether your inventory can supply the necessary materials or if external procurement is required.

Manually verifying material availability across multiple databases is an extremely time-consuming process. The estimator has to cross-check the list of required materials with the inventory records, often resulting in delays and errors.

This is another critical step that should be automated, allowing instant inventory checks, real-time availability updates, and seamless integration with procurement systems.

AI Automation for Quantity Takeoff: Finding the Right Solution

Now that we’ve identified the need to automate multiple stages of the quantity takeoff process, let’s explore the AI automation technology available to tackle this challenge.

AI and automation have become buzzwords in the industry, and we hear them every day. But finding the right solution that delivers real results can be tricky. That’s where we come in—to bring clarity and help you choose the best AI-powered tool for your construction takeoff process.

Currently, the market offers three types of automation solutions for this issue. Let’s break them down.

1. False and Deceptive AI

This category consists of outright scams, where vendors claim to offer an advanced AI solution capable of reading engineering drawings effortlessly and helping you win more bids.

During product demos, these tools appear impressive, often due to heavy hard coding behind the scenes. But once you purchase the software and try it in a real-world setting, you quickly realize that it doesn’t actually work. The AI was nothing more than a smokescreen, leaving you frustrated and stuck with an ineffective tool.

2. AI That Automates Only Part of the Process

Not all AI solutions are outright bad. Some genuinely improve parts of the takeoff process, and if they solve your biggest pain point, they may still be a viable option.

For example, let’s say an AI tool specializes in reading water management construction drawings with high speed and accuracy. If your projects primarily involve AutoCAD drawings, this AI might work fairly well for your current needs.

But here’s the issue: construction projects vary. If, in the future, you need to process different types of drawings with custom symbols, this limited AI tool won’t adapt, and you’ll find yourself back at square one.

3. Custom AI Software Pre-Trained for Construction Drawings

Engineering drawings require a completely different level of automation than standard document processing. Winning bids isn’t just about reading construction drawings—it’s about doing it with speed, precision, and adaptability to handle varied formats and unique use cases.

To stay ahead, you need a custom AI automation solution that can handle the entire takeoff process from start to finish. That’s where Infrrd’s AI-powered automation for construction drawings comes in.

Trained on billions of real construction drawings, Infrrd for Construction Drawings ensures you turn in winning bids faster—before your competitors even have a chance. 

The right automation isn’t just an upgrade—it’s a game-changer. Make the switch today and stay ahead of the competition.

Infrrd for Construction Drawings: Custom Built Solution for Automated Takeoffs

Stay ahead of the competition with Infrrd’s advanced AI solution, designed to accelerate your quantity takeoff process from start to finish. Trained on millions of real-world engineering drawings, Infrrd delivers highly accurate data extraction tailored specifically for construction projects.

From the moment you receive a quantity takeoff request to the final submission of your bid, Infrrd automates every step

With Infrrd’s image extraction tool for engineering drawings, you can:

• Speed up RFQ submissions with automated data extraction
• Extract critical values from complex construction engineering drawings
• Perform title block extraction for seamless data identification
• Automate internal catalog checks for material validation
• Accelerate quotation submissions with AI-driven insights
• Enable advanced pipe detection
• Easily integrate with any of your existing automation software

What can you automate with Infrrd for construction drawings? 

Infrrd’s AI-powered automation takes the hassle out of manual data extraction, helping you process quantity takeoff requests faster and more accurately. Here’s how Infrrd automation works at every step of your workflow - 

Quantity Takeoff Requests Identification and Relevant Page Detection 

Manually sorting through emails for quantity takeoff requests is time-consuming and prone to errors. Infrrd’s software automatically detects these emails, extracts key details, and categorizes the request files—so you don’t have to.

It identifies critical project details and automatically separates the relevant pages and drawings from the large “request for quantity takeoff file”. This ensures a faster, more streamlined bidding process and eliminates delays in getting the right team involved.

Critical Component Detection and Extraction 

Infrrd’s software automatically identifies critical components within construction diagrams, including pipes, connectors, wires, and other individual parts, and extracts these values with high accuracy.

For complex data, such as tolerance values with upper and lower limits, each segment is extracted separately and organized into structured tables, making it easier for users to analyze and utilize the data efficiently.

Measurement Calculations

Infrrd automatically detects scale inconsistencies in construction drawings and accurately converts them to real-world dimensions. The final values are then formatted according to your specific business requirements, ensuring precision and consistency in your takeoff process.

Intelligent Object Detection

If you're working with a new drawing type or a unique construction diagram containing unfamiliar objects, shapes, or components, you can still accurately identify and extract data using Infrrd’s ready-to-train custom models—all without adding extra time to your workflow.

Automated Take-Off calculation 

Once all the details are extracted, our platform can further process the data, calculate the values, and provide you with the most accurate quantity takeoff estimation.

Auto-Validates Availability from Databases

Once the takeoff is finalized, Infrrd’s software automatically cross-verifies material availability with your internal catalog. Built to handle even the most complex construction drawings, Infrrd for Construction Drawings is both robust and flexible, ensuring seamless integration with your inventory database for smooth and efficient verification.

At this point, the takeoff is complete, and you can send the details to your project coordinators. Even though we’ve covered multiple steps, the entire process takes only a few minutes! Sounds unbelievable? Well, our customers thought so too—until they experienced it for themselves.

Generate The Final Quotation 

With the final quantity takeoff details, you can now automatically generate the final quotation in seconds and submit your bid. Good luck! 

In a Nutshell: How Infrrd Automation Helps You Win More Bids on the Move 

Speed is everything in the construction bidding process. The first contractor to submit an accurate, well-structured bid often gains the upper hand. With Infrrd’s AI-powered automation, contractors can generate precise takeoffs in a fraction of the time, significantly reducing the manual effort required to analyze engineering drawings.

Be the fastest and beat the competition.

• Accelerate bid preparation: Automated data extraction significantly reduces the time needed to gather and analyze project details, allowing contractors to prepare bids faster than their competitors.
• Leverage real-time data: Access to up-to-date market rates, material costs, and labor expenses ensures that bids are competitive and reflect the latest industry trends.
• Streamline workflows: Minimize manual effort and eliminate bottlenecks by integrating automated tools that speed up document analysis, takeoffs, and pricing calculations.

Precise takeoffs with higher price accuracy

• Capture every project detail: Advanced AI-powered tools extract dimensions, materials, and quantities directly from engineering drawings, ensuring no critical component is overlooked.
• Prevent costly miscalculations: Accurate takeoffs help contractors avoid underquoting (leading to profit losses) or overquoting (reducing bid competitiveness).
• Enhance estimation consistency: Standardized digital takeoff methods ensure uniformity across all bids, reducing errors and improving the reliability of cost estimates.

Win more bids during high-volume periods

• Maximize bidding capacity: By reducing the time required for each bid, contractors can submit more proposals within tight deadlines, increasing their chances of securing projects.
• Improve bid quality: Faster turnaround does not mean cutting corners—automated precision ensures every bid remains highly detailed and competitive.
• Gain a strategic advantage: Contractors who consistently submit timely, well-researched bids position themselves as reliable partners, improving their reputation and likelihood of winning contracts.

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