Product Updates
Weekly updates to Fulcrum, always included with your subscription.
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There are a lot of times on drawings where the feature control frames or measurement information is oriented vertically because it flows better with the drawing.
However, our AI was not doing a great job at parsing out this information from the image because it was expecting the text to be readable from left to right.
We now take vertically oriented images and rotate them before parsing out measurement info so that we can get much more accurate results from image snippets taken vertically.
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With this release, you'll now be able to edit drawing annotations (along with their associated IPT checkpoints) from the pdf bubble editor on the job detail page, even once a job has been approved/scheduled/started.
Note: if operations are complete or cancelled, or the IPT checkpoint already has responses, then it cannot be edited. Additional operations can still be added to or removed from those annotations.
Added to the default tolerances panel are two new defaults - First Article, and Sampling Rate. These are per document, and apply the defaults to new bubble annotations as they’re entered.
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Auto-bubbling will be enabled for customers after this release.
In the coming days/weeks, we will continue to train it to try and detect as much as we can, including things like notes.
It’s not uncommon to split the quantity of parts needed for a job across different nests. This release allows better handling for split quantities and split operations. If you add a job operation to a nest, you can decide to assign only a portion of the parts to a given WO nest. The remaining portion will be available as a new job operation to add to a future nest.It’s not uncommon to split the quantity of parts needed for a job across different nests. This release allows better handling for split quantities and split operations. If you add a job operation to a nest, you can decide to assign only a portion of the parts to a given WO nest. The remaining portion will be available as a new job operation to add to a future nest.
We’ve added 3,000 new sheet and plate materials to the Global Materials Database. These additions focus on stainless steel, carbon steel, and aluminum, expanding the range of materials available for estimating and inventory.
This release also introduces our first major batch of metric materials, which opens the door for supporting shops that work with metric standards. With the introduction of metric sheet and plate materials, the system now supports multiple new variant dimensions (including metric) for all materials.
To help streamline item creation, we’ve added a new configuration setting: System Data → Items & Inventory → Default Unit for Material Item Sizes. This setting allows you to define your default sizing unit, which will automatically populate the Item Sizing UoM dropdown when activating materials.
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With this feature enabled, if your line items include a weight, then the total weight will display on your packlist. This helps more easily share that information with your logistics provider, as well as avoiding tedious math to add up the weight of all the individual line items.
The AI model behind auto-bubbling has been improved to detect significantly more characteristics across engineering drawings, including GD&T callouts, dimensional tolerances, and surface finish requirements that previous versions missed. We also redesigned the UI: detected characteristics are now highlighted on the drawing but not bubbled until you explicitly click on them.
In the future, AI will learn from your selection patterns to mirror your bubble preferences, making creating inspection plans not only fast but specific to your shop.
The team recently performed a project to update the receiving page. For the most part, the functionality of the page is staying the same - the primary function is still to receive inventory, but better!
The primary motivation for the update is to use some newer technology under the hood that makes the page faster and more reliable - quicker loads and no crashing.
At the same time, we took the opportunity to add a few new things as well:
New Line Item Grid Data
Improved Visibility
New Functionality (VIDEO)
Currently invite only. Rolling out over the next 6 weeks.
This feature adds the ability to bubble surface finish specifications on drawings. If a specification is selected, Fulcrum’s AI tool will now attempts to capture surface finish information if detected. The annotation form is updated as well here to allow the specification of a surface finish as a new type of control category (now Geometric/GDT, dimensional, thread, note, and surface finish).
In the operations list on a job’s page, you’ll now be able to see the scheduled start date of the operation. This provides improved visibility into a job’s schedule and estimated completion without having to jump between tabs.
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An in process tracking measurement might only be necessary on one part, but you may be required to take multiple measurements to confirm the value is within tolerance.
First Article measurements now always trigger on part 1 and continue at the defined sampling frequency, ensuring required inspections occur on the first part and at every specified interval thereafter.
For those of you on ITAR-compliant environments, you can now use our AI-powered PDF parsing for Nesting Setup Sheets. We know many of you have been waiting for this, and we're excited to finally bring it to you.
What We Did:
This feature required additional work to ensure the AI models we use meet ITAR compliance requirements. That's now in place.
What You're Getting:
The same PDF parsing capabilities our other customers have been using, upload your Nesting Setup Sheet PDFs and let our AI extract the data directly into nests in the app. The system recognizes all major nesting software formats (ProNest, SigmaNest, Dr. Abe, Boost, CADMAN, Lantek, and others) and parses accordingly.
Get Started:
The feature is live now in your environment. If you run into any issues or have feedback on the parsing accuracy, let us know, your input helps us continue improving.
We’ve released a new walkthrough video highlighting Control, our quality management product built to streamline inspection planning, execution, and reporting inside Fulcrum.
Control is designed to improve production outcomes while strengthening compliance. Rather than treating quality as a separate system or after-the-fact documentation exercise, Control connects inspection data directly to jobs, operators, tools, and reporting in one continuous workflow.
We've heard your feedback about errors and inaccuracies when our system reads your Nesting Setup Sheet PDFs. These issues were forcing you to manually correct data or causing problems downstream in your workflow. We've made significant improvements to fix this.
What's Changed:
Our AI now reads your PDF setup sheets more intelligently, preserving the layout and formatting that's critical for accurate data extraction. We've also improved how the system identifies which nesting software you're using (ProNest, SigmaNest, Dr. Abe, Boost, CADMAN, Lantek, etc.) and tailored the parsing specifically for each one.
What This Means for You:
You should see fewer parsing errors right away. The data extracted from your setup sheets will be more accurate from the start, which means less time spent manually correcting information and more confidence that your automated workflows have the right data
These changes are live now. If you've been hesitant to rely on automated parsing because of accuracy issues, we encourage you to give it another try. AI development is a continual process, so please keep giving us feedback on the results you're seeing. This helps us continue to improve accuracy and better serve your specific use cases.
