Resources

Thoughts & Research.

Research, product updates, and field stories from the teams building the intelligence layer for custom manufacturing.

Why pure OCR fails at reading engineering drawings

Traditional OCR flattens spatial relationships into linear text. We break down why vision-language models outperform template designers on real GD&T-heavy manufacturing drawings — and share benchmark data from 12,000 pages.

Mar 18, 2026·8 min read

Changelog

HEX v1.2: Improved 3D STEP File Extraction

This release introduces native 3D geometry parsing, automatically pairing parsed PDF dimensions with spatial bounding boxes from the attached STEP models for near-perfect volume calculations.

Mar 10, 2026·4 min read

Customer Story

How Midwest job shops are fighting back against inbox overload

Three shops in Ohio and Michigan share how HEX's structured intake layer cut their RFQ-to-quote cycle from 3 days to 4 hours — allowing them to estimate 3x more jobs with the same team.

Feb 28, 2026·6 min read

Research

Closed-loop validation: Catching quoting errors before they happen

We detail our approach to querying the Tribal Knowledge Log automatically. HEX flags anomalies in material costs, cycle times, and tolerance classifications based on your historical RFQs.

Feb 20, 2026·10 min read

Changelog

HEX v1.1: Webhooks and Custom JSON Extraction

You can now define your own JSON schemas for RFQ parsing. Tell HEX precisely which metadata fields your team requires, and our extraction engine guarantees standard output formats.

Feb 12, 2026·3 min read

Customer Story

From 40 hours to 40 minutes: Reclaiming the estimator's week

A precision machining shop in the Carolinas shares how HEX eliminated manual data entry from customer emails, routing structured job briefs directly to their estimators on day one.

Jan 30, 2026·7 min read

Read the thesis on why manual intake is ending, or book a live parse.