Tech sheets, unified — a packaging manufacturer’s spec system

A packaging manufacturer’s product specifications lived in a wall of legacy documents — decades of PDFs, Excel sheets, scanned drawings, and engineers’ memories. Sales pulled the wrong version into a quote and the customer got the wrong part. Production pulled the right version but couldn’t find it in time. Engineers kept the system running by carrying the specs in their heads. There was no canonical answer to "what are the specs for this SKU?"

What we built

One system that owns every spec and generates every tech sheet. Legacy documents are ingested by an AI pipeline that parses PDFs, Excel sheets, and scanned drawings into structured records — dimensions, materials, tolerances, finishes, certifications, lead times. Every SKU has one canonical entry. From there, sales pulls a customer-facing tech sheet, production pulls a shop-floor sheet, and engineers update the source record once — never the downstream documents.

How we built it

A Next.js internal tool on Vercel, Supabase as the source of truth for SKUs, specs, materials, and certifications. OpenAI drives the document ingestion — parses each legacy file into structured records, flags conflicts for an engineer to resolve, never silently overwrites. Stirling PDF takes the structured records and renders consistent tech sheets — customer-facing, production-facing, regulator-facing — from one source. MinIO stores the legacy documents alongside the structured data, so the lineage is always one click away.

The outcome

A thousand-plus SKUs with one source of truth. Sales sends the right sheet; production builds the right part; engineering stops being the human spec-lookup service. The decades of legacy documents are still there — just no longer the system.