Requirements Review: Never Miss What Matters Most

When we founded Paperless Parts in 2017, we assumed 2D drawings would soon be obsolete. We were convinced that model-based definition files would take over and PDFs would become a relic of the past

Eight years and nearly 800 customers later, it’s clear that drawings aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they remain the center of the quoting process and the place where the most costly mistakes most often happen.

Quoting is one of the most high-stakes responsibilities in manufacturing. The risk usually doesn’t reside in the obvious things; it hides within the fine print: a tolerance buried on page 12, a note about NADCAP, or a callout that seems minor but changes everything about how you need to run the part.

Senior estimators often know where to look, but even they spend hours combing through drawings to make sure nothing slips by. Junior estimators are at an even bigger disadvantage because it’s not just about finding the spec or note, but interpreting them.

Miss just one detail, and you underquote. And when shops underquote, they don’t just win some of that work—they disproportionately win it. Those are the jobs that collapse margins and put owners in impossible situations:

• Eat the loss and hope to make it up elsewhere.
• Go back to the customer and admit you missed something, risking your reputation.
• Or try to cut corners in production, only to watch scrap pile up and losses grow deeper.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen across the industry, and it’s painful to watch good shops pay the price for one overlooked note on a drawing.

That’s exactly why we built Requirements Review.

Requirements Review is the next phase of automation in Paperless Parts. Powered by Wingman™, our AI assistance tool, it surfaces critical requirements early and turns them into simple, rules-based workflows. It allows your team to better collaborate and quote faster, more confidently, and more consistently.

Faster Quote Triage

When a large RFQ package lands in your inbox, the first question isn’t how to make every part—it’s should we make every part:

• Is this part even manufacturable for us?
• Will it be profitable, or is it too far outside of our sweet spot?
• Who should own it (can I offload it to a junior estimator, or does it need my most experienced person)?

Requirements Review helps you answer those questions quickly by surfacing requirements early and flagging high-risk conditions. You can no-quote unprofitable line items immediately, assign the right work to the right people, and focus attention on the jobs that fit your shop best.

One of our early beta users, Tawny Bush, lead estimator at Reata Engineering & Machine Works, said Requirements Review has completely changed how she approaches new RFQs.

“It points out issues that make my workflow easier and helps me quickly recognize when a part has too many problems to be worth quoting. I can flag those to my boss right away, and we can decide whether it’s worth our time, saving us both a ton of effort. It also lets me highlight potential issues right away so I can loop in programming and quality before investing too much time. That way, I don’t spend an hour building a quote only to find out it’s not manufacturable.”

Tribal Knowledge → Shared Intelligence

For decades, shops have relied on their most experienced estimators to catch the details that make or break a job. These are the people who can glance at a print and say, “That tolerance means we need a different setup,” or “This material with that datum structure is going to increase our scrap rate.”

But what happens when that person retires? Or if they’re on vacation? Or simply too busy to quote every job? Too often, shops tell us: “He’s phenomenal, but he’s leaving in three years. How do we get what’s in his head into the system?” It took decades to build that knowledge. Without a way to capture it, the next generation is left to start from scratch.

Requirements Review is our answer to the costly problem of disappearing expertise. It doesn’t replace estimators; it amplifies them. It handles the tedious work of scanning pages of fine print, so your people can apply judgment where it matters most. It will even link to previous parts where that GD&T, callout, or note appeared, making it easier to find similar parts and go back and reference what was done to address the requirement (something that’s often done in a senior estimator’s head from memory).

From there, you can turn those findings into rules:

• “Every time an asymmetric tolerance shows up, flag it and route it to the right machine.”
• “When a part is too big for any of our machines, outsource or no-quote.”
• “When ‘NADCAP’ is stamped on a print, push it to the workflow for specialized processing.”
• “Every time ‘deburr’ appears, add a deburring operation to my router.”

These rules become a living library of your shop’s knowledge. Instead of thirty years of experience walking out the door when someone retires, that experience trains every new estimator from day one.

Requirements Review helps the next generation build confidence faster. Grant Wiser a business solutions specialist at Klesk Metal Stamping who has no manufacturing or engineering background, shared:

“Given my lack of technical background in reading prints, Requirements Review makes my life a lot easier. Being able to pinpoint where certain callouts are is helping me learn how to read prints, because I can see how they’re built and pick up on trends being pointed out by these rules.”

Confidence Builds Trust

The strongest shops know their customer relationships are built on trust, and admitting that a requirement was missed can put unnecessary strain on that trust. That’s why so many shop leaders would rather absorb the loss and try to make it up elsewhere than go back to the customer and admit they missed something.

One of the first customers that tested Requirements Review described how catching problems early changes the conversation with their customers: “Requirements Review helps us identify potential problem areas early, before they become costly mistakes. It saves our team time, money, and frustration while protecting customer relationships.”

Another customer told us it flagged an export-control note so tiny they couldn’t even read it on-screen, but their auditor certainly would have. Catching it early avoided a compliance flag and gave them confidence to say, “Look what we found,” instead of apologizing for missing it after the fact.

In every case, the theme is the same: Requirements Review reduces the chance of missing something critical, and with fewer misses comes healthier businesses.

Shaping the Future

Requirements Review helps build a future where tribal knowledge doesn’t retire with a senior estimator, where junior estimators can confidently contribute to the quoting process, and where shops don’t have to choose between speed and accuracy.

Drawings may not be going anywhere any time soon, but the risks of missing what’s buried in them don’t have to define your business. Requirements Review brings the clarity and speed shops need to triage faster, quote smarter, and capture decades of know-how before it’s lost. Quoting will always be high-stakes, but it doesn’t have to be a gamble. Requirements Review is here to make sure you never miss what matters most.

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Jason Ray is the Co-Founder & CEO of Paperless Parts.