Nobody has CAD drawings. That's fine.
An enterprise intake questionnaire sent to an eight-person business is not a customer problem. It is a system asking questions it should already know not to ask.
A standard integrator intake questionnaire opens by requesting CAD drawings of the existing line, the PLC model, and the fieldbus handshake method. It is a good questionnaire. It has been refined over years of projects that genuinely needed those answers.
Send it to an eight-person distributor and the reply comes back in one line: they're a small company, they don't have any of that.
The instinct is to treat this as a customer limitation: an unsophisticated buyer who needs hand-holding. That reading is wrong, and it is expensive. The customer isn't failing to answer. The system is asking a question that the shape of this deal had already ruled out. A standalone cell with no line integration has no fieldbus handshake. The field is not unanswered. It is not applicable, and those are different states.
Unanswered versus not applicable
The distinction matters because it changes what the software does. An unanswered field gets chased, which costs a round trip and a small amount of the customer's confidence in whether you understand their business. A not-applicable field is masked before the question is ever asked, and it is auto-answered when the integrator asks for it later. One deal, two rounds saved, and the customer never sees a question that made them feel like the wrong kind of buyer.
The same logic applies in the other direction. At the sophisticated end (an in-house automation group, a line-integrated cell, a regulated environment), the platform must produce a full user requirement specification, request piping and instrumentation diagrams, and plan the validation chain. Same pipeline, same agents, different parameters.
Spatial capture removes the blocker
The second half of the fix is spatial. "We have no drawings" used to be a genuine blocker, because you cannot design a cell into a space you cannot measure. Phone-based capture has quietly removed it. A customer walks their staging area slowly with a phone; video and LIDAR return a workspace envelope, shelf geometry, container dimensions, and the actual operating pattern: an operator scanning at a shelf, then hand-loading, with no conveyor anywhere in frame. Every extracted field carries the frame it came from, because integrators will challenge a specification and you need to be able to point at the source.
That converts the single most common condition in the small-and-mid-sized segment from a disqualifier into a non-event.
What's left is register. The same underlying field can be asked four ways. "Throughput in units per minute" and "roughly how many boxes go out on a normal day?" resolve to the same number. One of them gets answered the same afternoon.
Asking the right question, of the right party, in the right language, once: that is most of what specification actually is.