How Parspec's AI Material Matching System Accelerates Construction Timelines
When structural engineer Forest Flager was working on commercial real estate projects, he encountered a persistent challenge that impacts project timelines and budgets: the complex process of procuring material that meets both engineering specifications, as well as project cost and timeline constraints. What makes Flager’s story unique is that he didn’t just acknowledge the problem – he built a solution that’s transforming how construction products move from architect’s vision to a completed property.
The bottleneck occurs in the crucial period between design approval and material procurement. Wholesale distributors serve as the essential link between manufacturers and contractors, responsible for identifying products that meet architect and engineer specifications while managing pricing, availability, and lead times. Previously, this workflow was labor-intensive and inefficient. Distributors would receive design documents as large PDF files containing drawings and specifications, then manually extract requirements for each item into a bill of materials, visiting multiple manufacturer websites to identify price and availability. This manual and time-intensive process often leads to project delays and cost overruns.
Recognizing this inefficiency, Flager founded Parspec, an artificial intelligence solution that automates the procurement process for wholesale distributors in the construction industry. With backing from investors, including an $11.5M seed round, the company built an AI platform that automatically extracts product requirements from construction documentation and matches it against spec-compliant products available in the market.
“What Parspec is doing differently is we’re leveraging AI to automate some of that work,” Flager explains. “The quoter just has to upload those documents. We automatically parse the requirements, and then we’re actually in the background, crawling manufacturer websites and indexing all of the product documentation that’s posted there so that we can automatically match products to spec.”
While approximately 90% of manufacturers maintain digital catalogs, much of the critical SKU-level data is buried within PDF spec sheets, forcing distributors to manually extract and index this information. Parspec’s AI engine automatically extracts and categorizes this data instead, feeding the workflow automation tools their customers use daily. Additionally, by seamlessly integrating with distributors’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, Parspec provides real-time pricing, inventory insights, and intelligent product recommendations. These recommendations consider key factors like regional availability and lead times, helping to keep projects on schedule and running efficiently.
A defining characteristic of Parspec’s methodology is their recognition that technology adoption in construction requires more than sophisticated software. The company provides hands-on, on-site support during implementation – an unusual approach for a technology provider.
“I think users actually like to experience the application for themselves,” Flager notes. “We’ve observed that if people get over that initial hump where they’ve made two or three quotes successfully, they love the system. So it’s just being available, both virtually and in person, to provide that level of support in the first 72 hours of onboarding.”
With success in the electrical distribution sector, Parspec is now venturing into mechanical and plumbing products. This move into new territory brings both technical and market challenges. The company must scale its infrastructure to handle a catalog roughly four times its current size. To drive adoption, Parspec is leveraging success stories from their electrical distribution customers – a strategy that resonates in an industry where companies closely monitor their competitors’ technological advances.
Rather than simply adapting their existing system, they’ve established beta testing groups to ensure their solution meets the specific needs of each regional market – particularly important given how the procurement process varies across the United States many building jurisdictional regions.
Through this blend of innovative technology and deep industry engagement, Parspec is transforming a fundamental aspect of the construction supply chain. As their capabilities grow to encompass more product categories, they’re establishing new standards for how building materials are specified, quoted, and purchased, ultimately helping projects progress more efficiently from concept to completion.
