Questions about Kanopi, answered in the words of the people who did the work. The engagement itself is on its own page.
What set the blind second pass as the standing rule on every takeoff?
The one that set the rule came from our own first pass. A manufacturer's VP of Operations sent two unsolicited plan sets the same day and wanted wall and roof footage, and the blind second pass, a re-measurement with no access to the first, caught a wall-height model that would have undersized the shell. The corrected numbers are what shipped, inside his own estimating spreadsheet on his own rates. After that, the blind second pass became the standing rule on every takeoff we produce, not a flourish for a trial.
What was protected by declining to license the method to the manufacturer?
We declined to license it for now, not forever. The manufacturer wanted to roll it out to 50 states and we did not like that model. We think it is worth more delivered as a service than sold once for a license fee, especially now, when the method keeps updating as the models change. So we kept doing the estimating for them as a service.
How does the independent check work on a large plan set?
The same way we did it originally, and we still do it now. A human opens the set of plans and reviews it. Kanopi gets better every time, and we think it will end up better than a human, but it is too important not to double check. So there is still a human overlay on top, and it just takes about a hundredth of the time.