Marmor Hotavlje has cut stone in the Poljane valley since 1948, in a village that has worked marble since the 1720s. It is today the largest natural-stone processor in Slovenia. Their stone ends up in megayachts, hotels, private residences and restored churches.
Every project is unique, every client draws differently, and the stone itself, as the company puts it publicly, makes cutting the simplest and the least predictable part of the job. Business growth means a great deal of documentation. A single bathroom on a yacht is 150 to 200 separate pieces of stone. One room going into shipment is 20 workshop drawings and more than 150 pages.
So the hours do not go into the stone alone. They go into the paper around it, too. That is where we were asked to look.
"We have a standard and we have to follow it. If we change it, there will be chaos."
Luka Romih, Head of Technology, Marmor Hotavlje
The software must adapt to existing processes, not the other way round.
The challenge: two jobs that are almost pure reading
Two tasks were selected by their team. Before a room ships, someone has to work out from the drawings how many shipping pallets to build and how large each one has to be. And after a slab is cut, someone has to record what usable stone is left on it, so that the next project can find it rather than reach for a new slab.
Both are careful, repetitive reading, both are done by experienced people, and neither adds anything to the stone.
Four things the work needed
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Reading documents Reading documents
Dimensions, annotations and title blocks, out of SolidWorks PDFs and BricsCAD DWGs — two drawing channels, both in daily use.
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Computational geometry Computational geometry
Projection, polygon algebra and packing produce the numbers. No model guesses them.
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CAD integration CAD integration
The tools attach to exports the company already has. Its internal drawing standard does not change.
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Human in the loop Human in the loop
Every result is a proposal, presented so that a person can check it quickly and overrule it.
The solution: two small tools built around existing processes
From the first meeting, two working tailored prototypes assisted by AI were demonstrated, and both went to the company for testing shortly after. Three constraints shaped them.
- The internal drawing standard does not change. Input and output stay in the formats the company uses today, so nothing upstream or downstream has to be adjusted.
- No macro written by a language model inside the CAD. That route had been tried before and had not held. Our tools integrate with the CAD.
- Confidential material stays home. The company works under strict confidentiality with its clients.
Pallet calculator
Drag a room's drawings in PDF or DWG into our tool. The tool reads them, works out what ships and how it packs, and proposes the internal dimensions of each pallet with multiple tiers. Out comes a pallet production sheet drawn in the company's own title block, and the rows for its pallet register. Where the tool is not certain, the row is flagged and waits for a person.
Offcut tool
The second tool runs inside BricsCAD, on the cutting sheets the company already draws. One command traces the outline of every slab from the photographs on the sheet using computer vision, locally and in seconds. A second command takes the pieces laid out on a slab and finds the largest usable offcut — not the literal leftover, which comes out as a ragged shape nobody can work with, but the clean polygon a person would draw — and draws it back into the drawing, respecting the organization of its layers.
Because the CAD stores its solids in a closed format, the CAD only exports and receives; all the geometry runs outside it. No logic lives in a macro. Run the command again on an offcut and you get offcuts of the offcut, which is what actually happens in practice.
The result
Few weeks from the first meeting to two working tools, and into testing shortly after. Both were demonstrated running on the company's own production files.
- The proposed pallets check out against pallets actually built. The company's own records gave us ground truth to test against. On the test room, the proposed length and height matched to within few cm on every pallet, with no human input at all.
- Hours of reading become minutes of checking. That is the company's own estimate of what the tools change. Both are now in testing, and the same records give a way to measure the real figure afterwards.
- 600 hours a year is the saving the company expects from the pallet tool alone.
- Nothing left the building. Real production files were processed on our own servers. No customer drawing went to a public model.
- Once delivered, the tools contain no model at all. We used Claude AI to build them — the drawing readers, the geometry engine, the CAD bridge, the web application and the tests. What runs at the customer is deterministic software that keeps working whether or not it is connected to anything.
"I was honestly sceptical. Now I have seen both — the pallets and the offcuts — and they work. I expect that will open the door to other projects in the company, and we will come to Abelium first."
Luka Romih, Head of Technology, Marmor Hotavlje