For Australian fabrication, structural steel, sheet metal and welding shops

AI and Automation for Metal Fabrication and Welding

In plenty of Australian fabrication shops the estimator is also the owner, on the floor at 7am, on the crane at 11, and only sitting down to price work after everyone has gone home. Meanwhile RFQs pile up in the inbox as emailed PDF drawing sets, marked-up plans, Excel schedules and the occasional phone photo of a sketch. Yes AI automates the admin wrapped around that work, so an enquiry gets acknowledged the same hour, a draft take-off is waiting when you sit down, and the quote you sent three weeks ago actually gets followed up.

We do not price your jobs. A human estimator who knows your shop, your labour rates and your steel merchant still does that. We remove the typing, the chasing, the re-drawing of the same purchase order and the paperwork that has to be assembled before a load leaves the yard. Built around the systems you already run, including Xero, MYOB, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

Book a Workshop Call (03) 9003 0111

Realistic ROI

Hours/week

Estimating admin removed

Opening attachments, renaming files, typing line items into a spreadsheet and rebuilding the same header block on every quote stops being a person's job

Same hour

Every RFQ acknowledged

The builder or PM who emailed at 4:50pm gets a proper acknowledgement with a reference number, not silence until you get to it on Thursday

Fewer misses

Quotes actually followed up

Quotes stop dying quietly in a folder because nobody had the time to make the second phone call before the tender closed

2 to 6 weeks

From scope to live

Most workshop builds go live inside a fixed, agreed timeframe once we have mapped how enquiries, quotes and job packs really move

Why Australian Fabricators Automate With Yes AI

Fabrication is not a software problem, it is a bottleneck problem, and the bottleneck is almost always the one or two people who can read a drawing and price it. Everything else in the office exists to feed them or to clean up behind them. Four things make Yes AI the right partner to take that load off without pretending a machine can do the estimating.

We start in the estimating office, not in a demo

Before we build anything we sit with whoever prices the work and watch a real RFQ come in. Where does the email land, who opens the drawing set, what gets typed into the spreadsheet first, which merchant gets rung for plate and which for sections, how the take-off is marked up, and where the last three jobs went wrong. Two fabrication shops of the same size price work in completely different ways, so the map of your process is the brief, not a generic manufacturing template.

Built for how a workshop actually runs

We automate around the awkward reality rather than an idealised process. Drawings arrive at Rev B and the addendum lands two days before the tender closes. The customer sends a bill of quantities in one format and a plan set in another. Half the job is stock sections and half is a nested plate order that will not be confirmed until the deposit clears. Purchase orders get raised against a job number that did not exist yesterday. We build the automation to survive all of that, because if it only works on the tidy jobs it will not get used.

Your drawings and your customer data stay yours

The documents flowing through this are your customers' drawings, their site details, their pricing and often their commercial-in-confidence tender information. We are an Australian consultancy and we design every flow with the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles in mind wherever personal information moves. Access is least-privilege, connections are encrypted, and we keep a clear record of what goes where so you can answer a client who asks how their drawing set is handled.

One team, from scope to support

The people who sit in your estimating office during discovery are the people who build it, test it and support it after go live. You are not handed from a strategist to an offshore developer who has never seen a fabrication drawing, then to a ticket queue. When you win a bigger contract, add a second bay, take on a new galvaniser or change how you book labour hours against a job, the same team extends what is already there.

What We Build Around the Estimating Desk and the Workshop Floor

Six concrete capabilities, each aimed at a specific place where fabrication businesses lose hours or lose jobs. None of them replace an estimator, a leading hand or a qualified welder. All of them mean those people spend their day on the part only they can do.

Nothing lost

RFQ and enquiry intake

Every enquiry that hits the quotes inbox is captured, given a reference, logged against a client and a due date, and acknowledged straight back to the sender with a realistic response time. Attachments are pulled out, renamed to a consistent convention and filed into the job folder instead of living in the email. If a tender close date is stated in the enquiry, it becomes a reminder rather than a thing you were meant to remember.

Never a blank page

Take-off draft from the incoming documents

Line items, quantities, section sizes, plate thicknesses, lengths, finishes and any noted materials are extracted from the emailed drawing set, schedule or bill of quantities into a structured draft your estimator opens and corrects. Anything ambiguous is flagged rather than guessed, with a pointer back to the sheet and the note it came from. Your estimator still owns the price, and starts from a populated sheet rather than an empty one at nine at night.

Second call made

Quote follow up that happens without you

Sent quotes are tracked with their validity period, and follow up happens on a schedule you set: a short note at day three, a call task in front of whoever handles the client at day seven, and an alert before the price validity expires so you can requote rather than get held to a number built on last quarter's steel. Revisions are tracked against the original so you know you are discussing Rev 2, not the number you quoted six weeks ago on different plate pricing.

Ordered once

Purchase orders and material ordering admin

Once a job is won, the material list from the accepted quote becomes draft purchase orders per supplier, with your job number, delivery address, required-by date and finish already on them. Merchant order confirmations and back-order notices are read as they arrive and matched to the job, so a delayed batch of RHS raises a flag while there is still time to re-sequence the floor rather than on the morning the bay was booked.

One current set

Job packs and revision control to the floor

When a job is released, the pack is assembled and issued to the floor and to your workshop screen or tablet: current shop drawings, cut list, weld details, finish requirements, delivery date. When a revision lands, the superseded set is marked and the leading hand is told, by name, that Bay 2 is now cutting to an old sheet. Re-cutting a member that has already been fabricated, drilled and painted is expensive work nobody gets paid for, which is why this is usually the first alert we build.

Calls answered

Phone coverage over the plasma cutter

Nobody hears the phone over a plasma table, a guillotine and three grinders, so calls ring out and the caller rings the next fabricator on their list. An AI answering line picks up every call in an Australian voice, takes the caller's name, company, site and what they need, tells them honestly when someone will call back, and sends a written summary to the right person. Urgent site issues can be escalated straight to a mobile. You stop finding out about a lost job three days later.

Six Australian Fabrication Shop Plays We Build

Task	Traditional	With Yes AI	Notes
Structural steel shop quoting off builders' emailed drawing sets	Owner opens PDFs at night, retypes quantities into a spreadsheet, tender closes slip past unnoticed	Draft take-off waiting the same day, tender dates tracked, acknowledgement sent automatically	The estimator still checks every line and sets every rate. What changes is that the retyping and the filing are already done before anyone sits down, and no enquiry sits unopened for a week.
Sheet metal fabricator with quotes that never get followed up	Quotes emailed, filed, then forgotten until a customer eventually rings back or does not	Scheduled follow up per quote, validity expiry alerts, revision history against each client	Work you already did the hard part on gets a second conversation. The follow up call is often what decides the job, and it is the first thing that gets dropped in a busy week.
Workshop where nobody can hear the phone	Calls ring out or go to a voicemail box nobody empties, callers move on to the next shop	Every call answered, details captured, written summary and callback task raised immediately	Set up so genuinely urgent site calls reach a mobile straight away, while price enquiries are queued for whoever prices work.
Fabricator buying to a job across three or four merchants	Purchase orders typed by hand, confirmations buried in email, back orders discovered on the day	Draft POs generated per supplier from the won quote, confirmations matched, delays flagged early	Material price movement between quote and order becomes visible, so you can see which jobs were priced on steel you can no longer buy at that number.
Shop losing money on rework from superseded drawings	Latest revision emailed to the office, the floor keeps cutting from the sheet on the bench	Job pack issued as one current set, revisions pushed to the floor with a named alert	Detail that matters: the alert names the bay and the leading hand, and asks for an acknowledgement, so an issued revision is not the same thing as a read revision.
Engineering workshop assembling certification and delivery paperwork	Someone hunts for mill certs, welder tickets and NDT reports the afternoon the truck is booked	Documents collected against the job as they are produced, delivery pack assembled on release	The pack is built as the job runs rather than reconstructed at the end, and expiring welder qualifications and calibration dates are flagged before someone notices at handover.

Six Honest Limits and How We Handle Them

A human estimator prices the job. Full stop.

This is the most important line on the page. Automation extracts what is written on the documents and structures it. It does not know that this builder always changes the connection detail, that your fitter is slow on stainless, that the site has no crane access, or that you want an extra margin on anything going past Ballarat in winter. Every draft take-off is a starting point for a person who knows your shop. If anyone sells you AI that prices structural steel unsupervised, walk away.

Document extraction is good, not perfect, so it is built to admit doubt

A clean drawing schedule or a bill of quantities in a spreadsheet extracts very well. A scanned plan marked up in biro, photographed on a phone at an angle, is a different story. We build the extraction to flag low confidence rather than quietly guess, so ambiguous items arrive on the estimator's sheet highlighted with a link back to the source sheet and note. The failure mode we design for is "this needs your eyes", never a confident wrong quantity buried in line 34.

Geometry from a drawing is not a take-off from a model

Reading quantities and text off a PDF drawing set is not the same as detailing. We are not replacing your detailer, your 3D model or your nesting and cutting software, and we will not pretend to calculate weld metres or plate nests from a flat PDF. Where you already have structured data, a model export, a cut list, a CSV from your detailing package, we use that because it is far more reliable than reading a picture. Where you only have a PDF, we are honest about what can and cannot be pulled from it.

Certification and WHS records: we handle the workflow, you own the compliance

We can make sure welding procedure and welder qualification records, material test certificates, heat numbers, inspection and test plans, coating certificates and NDT reports are captured against the right job, that expiry dates raise a warning, and that the delivery pack assembles itself. What we do not do is certify anything or make a compliance judgement. Your qualified people, your welding supervisor and your customer's engineer decide whether the work conforms. Automation makes the evidence complete and findable, which is usually where audits actually come unstuck. Treat this page as general information rather than legal or compliance advice: none of it changes who is accountable under your contracts, your welding standards or work health and safety law.

Hot work permits and safety paperwork must stay a human decision

A hot work permit, a job safety analysis and a safe work method statement exist because someone competent looked at the actual task, the actual location and the actual hazards. We can push the right form to the right phone at the right moment, keep the signed record, chase the one that was not completed and flag an expired ticket, which is usually the difference between patchy records and complete ones. We will not auto-approve a permit, auto-fill a hazard assessment, or let a tick box replace the person who has to make the call.

It only pays off if the floor actually uses it

The classic failure is a beautiful system in the office and a workshop still running off a printout on the bench and a WhatsApp group. So we design for a noisy, dusty, gloved environment: few taps, big text, works on a shared tablet, and it must be faster than the old habit or it loses. We involve the leading hands during discovery, not at training, and we start with one workflow that visibly saves them time. Adoption is earned on the floor, not mandated from the office.

How Yes AI Helps

Discovery in your estimating office and on your floor

We spend time with whoever prices the work and whoever runs the bays, follow real enquiries from inbox to delivery docket, and count where the hours and the errors actually are. You get a clear written picture of your current process and a prioritised list of what is worth automating first, which is useful whether or not you build anything with us.

The build, tuned to your shop

We build the RFQ intake, the take-off draft, the quote follow up, the purchase order admin, the job pack distribution and the phone coverage, connected to the systems you already run for accounting and job management. One accountable team, a fixed scope and a fixed timeframe agreed before any build starts.

Certification and record keeping that keeps itself

Material certificates, welding procedure and welder qualification records, inspection and test plans, NDT reports, coating certificates, delivery dockets and signed safety forms captured against the job as it runs, with expiry warnings. When a client or an auditor asks for the pack, it is already assembled rather than reconstructed from three inboxes and a filing cabinet.

Support that stays after go live

We monitor the automation, catch the exceptions and stay reachable as the business changes. A new merchant, a new client with a different document format, a second site, a change to how you book labour against jobs: the people who built it adapt it, so the automation keeps earning its keep rather than slowly going stale.

Our Fabrication Workshop Rollout

A clear five-step path from a first conversation to a live, monitored system. Most Australian fabrication and welding businesses are fully live inside two to six weeks, depending on how many workflows are in scope and how consistent the documents coming in from your customers are.

Discovery in the shop

We sit with your estimator and walk the floor. We follow real RFQs from the inbox through take-off, quote, follow up, purchase orders, job release and delivery, and we collect a sample of the actual documents your customers send you, good and bad. We count hours, find where jobs are lost, and agree what a win looks like before anything is designed.

Design and fixed scope

We turn that into a concrete design: which enquiries get intercepted and how they are acknowledged, exactly which fields are extracted from which document types, the follow up cadence, how job packs and revisions reach the floor, what the phone line does with each call type, and what stays a human decision. You sign off a fixed scope, timeframe and price before a line of code is written.

Build against your real documents

We build and tune the extraction against your own drawing sets and schedules, not sample data, because your customers' document habits are what the system has to survive. Integrations to your accounting and job management systems are built with least-privilege access, tested in a safe environment, and never straight into a live production system on a hope.

Parallel run and calibration

For a few weeks it runs alongside how you work now. Your estimator compares the draft take-off against what they would have written and tells us where it drifted, which is how the extraction gets tuned to your terminology, your section notation and your customers' quirks. Nobody switches off the old way until the new way has been proven on real live enquiries.

Go live, train the floor, keep watching

We cut over, train the office and the leading hands separately because they need different things, and stay on the tools after go live. Exception alerts surface anything odd, we review how it is being used after the first month, and we tune or extend it as you take on bigger contracts or new clients with new document formats.

FAQ

Will AI price my fabrication jobs for me?

No, and you should be suspicious of anyone who says it will. Pricing a fabricated job depends on things that are nowhere in the documents: how your fitters actually go on that detail, your labour rates, what your merchant quoted you this week, site access, crane and transport, the finish, and how badly you want that particular client. What we automate is everything around the price. The enquiry gets captured and acknowledged, the quantities and sections written on the drawings are extracted into a structured draft, and your estimator opens a populated sheet instead of a blank one. Your estimator still sets every rate and owns the number that goes out.

Our RFQs arrive as emailed PDF drawings and marked-up plans. Can that actually be read?

A lot of it, yes, and we are straight with you about the rest. Drawing schedules, bills of quantities, member lists, spreadsheets and clean typed PDFs extract very well: quantities, section sizes, plate thicknesses, lengths, finishes and notes. A scanned plan marked up in biro and photographed on a phone is harder, so we build the extraction to flag anything it is not confident about rather than guess, with a link straight back to the sheet it came from. The result is a draft with the straightforward items already populated and the awkward ones highlighted for your eyes, which is a very different evening than starting from nothing.

We have drawings in DWG or DXF and a nesting package. Does that help?

It helps a great deal. Structured data always beats reading a picture, so wherever you already have a cut list, a model export, a detailing package export or a CSV, we use that source in preference to a flat PDF and the accuracy goes up accordingly. We are not replacing your detailer or your nesting and cutting software and we do not try to calculate nests or weld metres off a PDF. We connect to what you already produce and take the retyping out of the middle.

We run Xero and a job management system already. Do we have to change anything?

No. This sits around what you have rather than replacing it. We connect to your accounting package, whether that is Xero, MYOB or something else, and to your job management or ERP system, so a won quote can raise the job, the purchase orders and the invoice without anyone re-keying it. Your bookkeeper keeps the tools they already know, GST and BAS figures keep coming off the same reconciled data, and nobody has to learn a new platform to get the benefit.

How does the phone coverage work when the workshop is deafening?

An AI answering line picks up in an Australian voice on the calls you route to it, so the phone is never ringing out into an empty office. It takes the caller's name, company, site and what they are after, gives them an honest callback time, and sends a written summary straight to the right person by email or text. You set the rules: price enquiries queue up for whoever prices work, an existing client with a site problem can be escalated to a mobile immediately, and anything it cannot handle is passed on cleanly rather than fumbled. It is not there to have a technical conversation about weld prep. It is there so a prospect is not left ringing the next fabricator on their list.

What about our welding procedures, welder tickets and certification paperwork?

We handle the workflow, you keep the compliance. Welding procedure and welder qualification records, material test certificates and heat numbers, inspection and test plans, NDT and coating reports and delivery dockets are captured against the job as they are produced, so the delivery or handover pack assembles itself instead of being hunted down the afternoon the truck is booked. Expiring welder qualifications and calibration dates raise a warning before someone spots them at the wrong moment. We do not certify anything and we do not make a conformance judgement. Your welding supervisor, your qualified people and your customer's engineer do that. What changes is that the evidence is complete and findable, which is where audits usually come unstuck.

How long does it take, and what does it cost?

Most fabrication workshops go live in two to six weeks, depending on how many workflows are in scope and how consistent your incoming documents are. We scope every engagement properly rather than quoting a number sight unseen. Strategy and scoping engagements start at $1,000 AUD for a focused BASIC piece, $3,000 for a STANDARD engagement, and $10,000 for a STRATEGIC one across a broader operation. After that you get a fixed scope, timeframe and price for the build before anything starts, so you are never signing up to an open-ended project with an open-ended invoice.

Is our customers' drawing and tender information safe?

It has to be, because a lot of what flows through this is commercial-in-confidence tender material belonging to your clients. We are an Australian consultancy. Access is least-privilege with dedicated credentials rather than someone's admin login, connections are encrypted, only the data that genuinely needs to move actually moves, and wherever personal information is involved we design to the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles. We keep a clear record of what flows where, so when a builder asks how their drawing set is handled you have a straight answer rather than a shrug.

Stop Losing Jobs In The Quotes Inbox

Book a call and we will walk through how enquiries, quotes, purchase orders and job packs move through your shop today, then show you exactly which part we would automate first and what it is worth. No obligation, no jargon, and an honest answer about what AI will not do for a fabricator.