The shop
Forge & Conduit Electric works tenant fit-outs in Cleveland's near-east side. Office buildouts, second-gen restaurant spaces, light industrial conversions in the old Slavic Village foundry stock. Eight techs, two foremen, and Tomasz Wójcik running operations. The owner (call him by his first name and you'll get an answer) is in the field most days.
A typical job runs three weeks from walk-through to final inspection. Maybe a dozen circuits, a small panel, a few branch runs to pull behind drywall. Repeatable work, but every space is different.
The friction
The pain was the line diagram. Three drawings per job, minimum.
The first drawing went into the bid. Pencil on the back of the existing-conditions floor plan, then traced clean in a desktop drafting tool from 1998 that Tomasz won't name out loud. Two hours, give or take.
The second drawing was for the permit. By then the GC had moved a wall, the tenant had added a server room, and the bid drawing was already wrong. Redraw. Another two hours.
The third drawing was the as-built, after install. By then the foreman had run two circuits differently than the permit drawing showed. Redraw a third time. Another hour.
Six hours of drawing per job, half of it the same lines drawn three times.
"Once is fine. Three times is a tax on every project."
The switch
Forge & Conduit moved their drawings to Breakerbox's Line Diagram tool in late 2025. The first job through it was a 6,000 sq ft office conversion in Lakewood.
Tomasz drew the bid version on a tablet during the walk-through. When the GC moved the wall, he opened the same drawing, dragged the panel six feet east, and re-routed two branches. The permit version was the same file, ten minutes of edits. The as-built was the same file again, with two circuits adjusted by the foreman in the field.
| Step | Before | With Line Diagram |
|---|---|---|
| Bid drawing | 2 hr, redrawn from scratch | 45 min, drawn once |
| Permit drawing | 2 hr, redraw with GC changes | 10 min of edits to the same file |
| As-built | 1 hr, redraw with field changes | 5 min of edits in the field |
One file, three states. No retyping panel schedules, no re-labeling circuits, no scanning and emailing PDFs that would be wrong by the time the inspector opened them.
Where they are now
Six months in, the shop runs every fit-out through the same tool. The foremen update the as-built on the tablet at the end of the install day, not Tomasz back at the office on Friday. Inspectors get the current drawing, not last week's version.
The owner cares about one thing: how many jobs a year the shop can run. Cutting six drawing-hours per job to about an hour means roughly two extra jobs a year per foreman. Two foremen. Four extra jobs.
The desktop drafting tool from 1998 is still on the shop computer. Tomasz hasn't opened it since March.