Paperless Parts Wingman™: Your New AI-Powered Partner in Quoting

In the Navy, a wingman is a pilot who supports and protects another pilot during a mission. This role is crucial in maintaining formation, providing cover, and ensuring the safety and success of the team during operations. The wingman often flies slightly behind the lead pilot, watching their back, helping to identify threats, and being ready to assist in various tactical situations. The concept of a wingman emphasizes teamwork, trust, and the importance of mutual support in high-pressure environments.

Introducing Paperless Parts Wingman™

At Paperless Parts, our mission has always been to empower manufacturers by making the quoting process as efficient, painless, and risk-free as possible. We’ve seen firsthand how challenging it can be to manage quotes, especially when balancing multiple jobs, tight deadlines, and limited resources. It’s not just about speed; it’s about ensuring precision, accuracy, and consistency and delivering quotes that reflect the true value of your work.

Wingman is Paperless Parts’ new secure, proprietary, AI-powered automation tool inside of our quoting platform designed to arm you with the right information to make it faster and easier to get to the meat of quoting. Wingman automatically extracts critical details from quote packages (prints, models, emails, etc.), so instead of worrying about making a mistake, you can focus on what really matters: delivering accurate quotes, quickly. Consider it an extension of your team—an intelligent assistant that has your back 24/7, making sure you never miss an important detail.

Why Wingman?

We first introduced AI into our platform in early 2024, and today’s launch of Wingman takes that to the next level, with the ability to automatically extract and process even more types of critical information from prints, including more than 10,000 ASTM, AMS, MIL-SPEC, NADCAP, and OEM-specific process/material specifications, threads, and processes. And we’re really just getting started.

The needs of our customers inspired Wingman’s creation. While we would love a world in which buyers were always sending model-based definitions, the reality is prints aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Time and time again, we hear from our customers that quoting from prints is a central pain point and that quote packages are getting bigger and more complex.

With Wingman, our customers can work faster and reduce their risk.

Never Miss Critical Details

Quoting off a print that calls out a dozen details—specs, tapped holes, true positions, brazing, honing, welding—can bury any estimator under complexity. They may need to sift through each detail manually. With so much information to process, even the most experienced estimator can overlook critical details that impact the accuracy of a quote. This isn’t just a productivity issue; it’s a trust issue. If you’re not confident in your data, you can’t be confident in your quotes.

Hit Your Target

We knew that to solve these pain points, we needed a solution that accurately identified the critical elements in a print—every time. We are in the early days, but the more it’s used, the smarter it will get. This isn’t just about using AI for the sake of it; it’s about ensuring that AI can be fine-tuned and tailored to the complexities and security requirements manufacturers need. Wingman is designed to handle the inconsistencies and quirks that come with engineering documents, from varied callouts to different fonts. By doing the heavy lifting on the tedious, manual work, Wingman lets our customers focus on what really matters: making informed decisions, delivering accurate quotes, and winning more business.

Secure Your Customers’ Data

With tools like ChatGPT making headlines seemingly every day, it’s easy to get swept up by bold claims from software vendors. Manufacturers—especially those involved in DoD work—need to be cautious and fully understand the nuances of how their partners’ AI models are built and who has access to their data. Not all AI is created equal, and the security and integrity of your data are paramount. 

So what makes Paperless Parts different? To summarize, it’s built 100% inside of FedRAMP Moderate Equivalent/CMMC-Compliant boundaries, hosted in Amazon GovCloud, and anyone who touches our data is a U.S. Person. To learn more, read our AI Guiding Principles policy on our website.

What Does Wingman Do?

By leveraging advanced algorithms and machine learning, Wingman doesn’t just make quoting faster—it makes it smarter. Today, Wingman’s sights are focused on two key areas:

1. Data Identification and Extraction from Technical Drawings

Wingman extracts information from a print that most directly impacts costing and pricing. Here’s what it can do:

• Critical Specifications Identification: Wingman recognizes over 10,000 ASTM, AMS, MIL-SPEC, NADCAP, and OEM-specific process/material specifications, highlights them on prints, and presents their definitions right next to the print.
• Thread Identification: Wingman identifies UTS and metric thread specifications, which could indicate taps, inserts, or other hardware requirements.
• Process Keyword Identification: Wingman identifies 29 common process keywords, including anodizing, welding, and heat treating.
• Part Number and Revision Suggestions: Wingman extracts and suggests values for part number and revision in the appropriate fields.
• Controlled Information Detection: Wingman identifies terms like “CUI,” “ITAR,” or “Export Controlled” to determine if a print contains export-controlled data.
• Material Extraction: Wingman identifies the best-matching Paperless Parts material from and highlights their source on prints.
• Unpacking 3D PDFs: Wingman unpacks files contained within all PDFs, including 3D models with PMI from 3D annotations in 3D PDFs.

And we’re not stopping here—the team is actively developing AI models to identify additional Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) specifications, further streamlining the quoting process and reducing risk.

2. Data Identification and Extraction from RFQ Emails

Wingman processes RFQ emails that are forwarded into your Paperless Parts account to extract key pieces of information and reduce clicks in the quote setup process. Here’s what it can do:

• Scan for Viruses: Wingman scans RFQ emails and all of their attachments for viruses, keeping your shop safe.
• Extract Attachments: Wingman extracts and processes all of the part files included in RFQ emails, including zip files, password-protected zips.
• Buyer Identification: Wingman automatically identifies who submitted the RFQ and assigns the correct contact and account to your quote.
• RFQ Received Date: Automatically time stamp when RFQ was received, so you can measure the true quote turn-around time.
• Line Item Extraction: Wingman finds and pulls part numbers, revisions, descriptions, and quantities from the body of the RFQ Email to more quickly create your quote.
• Assigning Files to Line Items: After building out your line items, Wingman identifies and helps you move the right files to your line items with a single click.

Long-Term Vision

Wingman is more than just a tool; it’s a partner that evolves with you. Unlike many AI tools on the market, such as Microsoft’s Copilot, Wingman offers persistent memory and historical context, helping to minimize errors and improve efficiency over time. Copilot also poses challenges with its limited compatibility with non-Microsoft platforms, potential data exposure risks, and inconsistencies inherent in generative AI.

Today marks the “crawl” phase, where Wingman extracts key details and places critical information at your fingertips, empowering you to make smarter decisions based on your shop’s unique capabilities. We’re actively working on the next phase—automating complex tasks like extracting BOM tables from prints, which will drastically streamline the setup of intricate assemblies.

So far, we’ve been focused on supporting the first and second phases of the estimating process: quote setup and quote triage. As we move into the “walk” phase, Wingman will begin automating decisions further down the line in the quoting process through binary automation. Imagine a system where if Wingman detects “gold-plated,” it automatically triggers a “no quote,” or if it spots welding, it assigns the task to the appropriate estimator.

Finally, in the “run” phase, we’ll integrate these capabilities with P3L, the coding language that powers costing and pricing within Paperless Parts. For example, if Wingman identifies a tapped hole, it could automatically add time to the estimated runtime of the machine producing the part.

We see Wingman as the foundation of a revolutionized quoting process. We’re dedicated to continuously innovating and expanding Wingman’s capabilities, ensuring our customers have the tools not just to compete but to lead. For us, success isn’t about keeping pace—it’s about setting the pace.

Curious about how you can start using Wingman today? Reach out to [email protected] or contact your Customer Success Manager today.

–––

Jason Ray is the Co-Founder & CEO of Paperless Parts. Jason’s career started in the United States Navy as a Supply Corps Officer. It was during his time at the Pentagon where he found his passion for manufacturing. In 2017, Jason co-founded Paperless Parts to address the issues he observed in the U.S. industrial base by empowering custom part manufacturers to digitize analog processes and grow their businesses.