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: a job that is almost pure reading
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. It is careful, repetitive reading, done by experienced people, and it adds nothing to the stone. By hand, a typical shipment takes two to four hours.
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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Claude integration Claude integration
Staff work in Claude; Claude runs the calculator and returns its results. The drawings never reach the model.
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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: a pallet calculator built around the existing process
A few weeks after the first meeting, a working prototype was running on the company's own production files. It went to the company for testing shortly after and has been in production since 28 September 2026. Three constraints shaped it.
- 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. The calculator works on the exports the company already makes.
- Confidential material stays home. The company works under strict confidentiality with its clients.
How it works
A room's drawings in PDF or DWG go into the calculator. It 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 calculator is not certain, the row is flagged and waits for a person.
Drawings stay home: the server reads them on the company's own infrastructure; Claude sees only the calculator's results. The numbers still come from deterministic geometry: Claude runs the tool, it does not compute the pallets.
The result
A few weeks from the first meeting to a working tool. The pallet calculator went into production on 28 September 2026.
- With Claude in the loop, preparing a shipment's pallets takes less than 30 minutes instead of 2–4 hours.
- About 75% less time ordering pallets. On a small project, a staff member took about an hour to work out and order the pallets by hand, and about 15 minutes with the calculator. A typical shipment takes two to four hours by hand.
- 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 a few cm on every pallet, with no human input at all.
- 600 hours a year is the saving the company expects from the pallet calculator.
- Nothing leaves the building. Real production files are processed on the company's own infrastructure. No customer drawing goes to a public model.
- Once delivered, the calculations are done deterministically. We used Claude to build all the tools — the drawing readers, the geometry engine, the CAD bridge, the web application and the tests. What runs in production is deterministic software that keeps drawings private; Claude sees and automates only the results.
What's next: the offcut tool
The second tool from the same project runs inside BricsCAD and finds the largest usable offcut left on a cut slab, so the next project can use it instead of reaching for a new slab. It is in testing.
"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