The Human Limit
Engineering decisions disappear when the people who made them move on. The evidence remains. The context behind them does not.
Great manufacturing is accumulated human intelligence
Over time, that intelligence becomes distributed — when engineers retire, when decisions go unrecorded, when systems store the artefact but lose the context behind it.
ShapeSense captures it, connects it, and makes it compound. Every decision your organisation has ever made, available to the next person who needs it.
Manufacturing solved the cost of making things. It never solved the cost of decisions.
The System Limit
CAD. PLM. ERP.
Each system stores part of the story.
None of them understand it as a whole.
Together, they ensure past decisions rarely help future decisions.
The result: decisions that should take hours takes weeks.
- Relearning the same lessons — Teams repeatedly solve problems the organization has already solved.
- Missing reuse opportunities — Parts, suppliers, inventory, and designs that could be reused remain invisible.
- Slower sourcing decisions — Critical decisions wait for information scattered across people and systems.
- Inconsistent outcomes — The same question produces different answers depending on who is asked.
Every day, manufacturers make expensive decisions without access to their own intelligence.
That is about to change.
ShapeSense is built for manufacturers who know the answer is in their data — and refuse to accept that finding it should take weeks.
- The sourcing head who knows the supplier has already made something similar.
- The quality engineer who suspects this failure happened before.
- The engineering manager who is convinced a solution already exists somewhere.
- The inventory planner who believes stock is being overlooked.
Here’s why the problem persists — and what makes ShapeSense different.
Every system stores knowledge. None of them preserve intelligence.
- CAD — stores geometry
- PLM — manages lifecycle
- ERP — tracks materials & costs
- QMS — stores quality events
Enterprise systems capture pieces of the picture. None connect them.
That’s where ShapeSense starts.
Shape captures what a design is.
Sense provides the context that explains what it means.
The Decision Library
ShapeSense reveals what already exists in your engineering data — making it visible, searchable, and actionable.
- Previously invisible duplicate and near-duplicate parts
- Reuse opportunities across programs and plants
- Excess inventory that can be redeployed instead of scrapped
- Inconsistencies in sourcing and pricing across identical components
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Early outcomes from manufacturers we work closely with
- RFQ cycles measured in hours, not weeks — Mid-sized OEM (India): sourcing turnaround reduced from 3–6 weeks to same-day decisions.
- ~$100K in hidden reuse uncovered — Global tractor manufacturer: duplicate and near-duplicate parts uncovered across existing programs in hours.
- Decades of engineering knowledge reconnected — Tier 1 supplier: legacy 2D blueprints, STEP files, and PLM records connected for the first time — making decades of knowledge searchable and actionable.
Customer Outcome
“ShapeSense helped us identify nearly $100K worth of potential reuse opportunities across our existing products — something that would have been extremely difficult to uncover through conventional enterprise systems and manual engineering review.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ShapeSense?
ShapeSense is the Decision Library for Manufacturing — a platform that reads and understands engineering artefacts (drawings, CAD models, BOMs, specifications) and connects them to enterprise evidence (supplier history, quality records, cost outcomes, inventory) to create compounding intelligence. Unlike CAD search tools or AI copilots, ShapeSense does not just find similar parts — it surfaces every decision ever made about similar engineering problems, making organisational experience reusable for the first time.
Who is ShapeSense built for?
ShapeSense is built for engineering, sourcing, quality, and manufacturing teams at OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers with decades of accumulated engineering artefacts. If your organisation has engineering drawings, CAD files, or PLM records going back ten or more years — and your teams spend weeks finding information that should take minutes — ShapeSense is built for you.
What is the Decision Library and why does it matter?
The Decision Library is where engineering decisions become reusable organisational intelligence. It is the core of ShapeSense — a continuously growing repository that connects every engineering artefact to the decisions, outcomes, and evidence surrounding it. When an engineer searches for a similar part, they do not just find the geometry — they find the supplier who made it, the quality failures that occurred, the cost it was produced at, and the decisions that were taken. Every new decision added to the library makes the next one faster and better. Intelligence compounds rather than disappears.
How is ShapeSense different from a CAD search tool or a PLM system?
CAD search tools find geometrically similar parts. PLM systems manage engineering files and workflows. Neither captures the decision behind the design — why a supplier was chosen, why a revision was made, what failed and what worked. ShapeSense is not a search tool and not a PLM replacement. It is the intelligence layer that sits between your existing systems — reading what CAD, PLM, ERP, and QMS store separately, and connecting it into a single Decision Library that compounds with every program, deployment, and outcome.
What does “engineering intelligence that compounds” mean?
Most enterprise systems treat every new program as a fresh start. Engineers rediscover what was already known. Suppliers are re-qualified. Failures repeat. ShapeSense changes this by ensuring every decision adds to a growing body of organisational intelligence. Every decision strengthens the next. Every outcome recorded makes the next recommendation sharper. ShapeSense doesn’t reset between programs — it compounds across them.
Ready to make your engineering intelligence compound?
See what thirty years of engineering decisions look like when they’re finally connected.