Reading every P&ID at once, in seconds
Ask an engineer to pull the data and flow out of a P&ID and they'll do it the only way there's ever been: one drawing at a time, by eye. For a single P&ID that's thirty minutes to an hour. A real project has hundreds.
At a glance
- Reading a P&ID dropped from 30–60 minutes by hand to a few seconds.
- The tool reads many P&IDs at once — not one at a time.
- It pulls out both the data and the flow, not just a parts list.
The situation
Engineers extracted information from P&IDs by hand — tracing lines, reading tags, noting equipment and how it connects, one drawing at a time. Each P&ID took 30 minutes to an hour, and a project has stacks of them. It was slow, it didn't scale, and by the hundredth drawing attention drifts and details get missed.
What we did
We built a tool that reads multiple P&IDs at once and pulls out the data and the flow automatically — the tags, the equipment, and how it all connects — instead of an engineer working through them one by one. What took half an hour to an hour per drawing now takes a few seconds.
What changed
A task measured in hours per drawing is now seconds, across the whole set at once. Engineers stop spending the day tracing lines by eye and get a consistent extraction they can work from — and the work scales to the size of the project, not the size of the team.
Why it worked
P&IDs are dense, but they're structured — exactly the kind of repetitive reading a tool should carry, so engineers spend their judgement on the engineering rather than the tracing.
Reading P&IDs one at a time?
If it's structured and repetitive, a tool can read it — in seconds, across the whole set.