AI Machining Planning for CNC Production

A fast-scaling Portuguese mechanical manufacturer was growing faster than its planning workflow could absorb. CNC machine time, material choice, batching, outsourcing decisions, and cost estimates all depended on expert judgment concentrated in one manual process.

The challenge

The bottleneck was not just machine capacity. It was the planning layer feeding the machines.

Each project required roughly 2-3 days of expert work to evaluate make-or-buy decisions, plan batches, check machine fit, choose raw material, and estimate production time and cost. The workflow relied on experience, spreadsheets, and manual interpretation of BOM and drawing data.

As order volume increased, the planning bottleneck scaled linearly with the business. More projects meant more expert time, slower decisions, and less visibility into why each planning choice was made.

What DPulses built

DPulses built an AI-assisted production planning layer on top of the company's existing BOM and drawing workflow. The system reads real production data, proposes planning decisions, and keeps a human engineer in control where confidence is low.

• Drawing and BOM ingestion from the existing workflow
• Make-or-buy classification for each part: MAKE, BUY, or REVIEW
• Confidence scoring and human review routing
• Batching plans to reduce setup changes
• Planning-fit checks against a real production week
• Raw material, machine time, and cost estimates
• Write-back into existing BOM columns without forcing a new schema

The architecture combines deterministic logic for hard constraints with AI where it creates leverage, especially around drawing interpretation and ambiguous planning decisions.

Results

The showcased project used 268 BOM parts, 27 machined parts, 1,244 CAD inputs, 4 modeled machines, and 12 materials.

The planning workflow moved from days of manual work to minutes plus engineer review. The system gives the team a repeatable planning memory: engineers can override outputs, corrections are captured, and future runs benefit from what the team has already validated.

• 10x faster planning
• −35% setup time benchmark via batching
• €22k+/year expert-time waste identified at minimum

Why it matters

In CNC production, machine hours are scarce. Material is comparatively cheap. The system helps protect throughput by making better make-or-buy, batching, and planning-fit decisions faster, while keeping the production team in control.

The result is not a dashboard and not a black-box AI tool. It is an auditable operational decision layer that scales with machines, materials, tools, and order complexity.