Context: An Industry Under Pressure

In the energy sector, managing technical drawings is a critical challenge. Each project involves hundreds of elements to check, and every weld must be properly identified and accounted for to ensure safety and compliance. Yet, with growing project volumes and increasingly complex installations, traditional methods quickly reach their limits.

Our client, a major French group in the energy industry, wanted to modernize its processes by reducing repetitive manual tasks, improving the reliability of drawing analysis, and boosting the productivity of its engineering teams.

The Challenge: A Time-Consuming and Risky Manual Process

Before ATN WD, analyzing piping drawings relied entirely on manual work:

• Visually locating all weld symbols on piping plans,

• Classifying them one by one by type and characteristics,

• Repeating the same operation dozens, even hundreds of times,

• Manually compiling a summary table (number, type, distribution of welds),

• Checking and correcting every time an update or modification was requested by production.

👉 Consequences: a considerable loss of time, a higher risk of human error (missed welds, misclassification), delays, and unnecessary workload for highly skilled engineers.

The Solution: ATN WD

Developed by ATN Tech, ATN WD automates the reading and interpretation of piping drawings.

The solution can:

• Automatically read drawings and detect all weld symbols,

• Identify and classify welds based on the predefined database and business rules,

• Generate a complete summary table with type, position, and number of welds,

• Export results directly into internal management tools,

• Ensure full use of 100% French technology, with sovereign and secure data.

The role of the engineer evolves: instead of spending hours spotting and entering each weld manually, they now focus on validation, quality control, and technical optimization.

Results Achieved

Implementing ATN WD delivered immediate, measurable gains:

• Analysis time reduced from several hours to just minutes,

• Automatically generated summary tables, reliable and comprehensive,

• Significant reduction in human errors, thanks to systematic detection,

• Stronger overall productivity, with teams able to process a higher volume of drawings,

• Better use of engineering expertise, with time refocused on high-value tasks,

• Data sovereignty and security, fully under the company’s control.

Applications Beyond Piping Plans

The ATN WD experience shows that the same approach can be applied to other technical documents requiring automatic detection and classification:

• Mechanical structure drawings with repetitive symbols,

• Complex industrial schematics (electricity, instrumentation),

• Network plans where systematic identification is essential,

• Any technical document where repetitive checks slow down teams.

ATN WD is therefore part of a broader approach: using specialized digital assistants to reduce repetitive tasks and accelerate the analysis of technical drawings.

Conclusion

With ATN WD, weld detection and classification are transformed from tedious manual work into an automated, fast, and reliable process. Engineers work more efficiently, projects move forward faster, and companies secure their data in a sovereign framework.

This project illustrates ATN Tech’s ability to turn time-consuming processes into agile, secure workflows—serving the performance and competitiveness of the energy industry and beyond.