Works/SocWeld

About

SocWeld builds software for the welding industry. Their users work with detailed images — identifying and mapping welding points by hand, one by one. Creative Oak developed a machine learning system that automates this process: a trained computer vision model that scans images and identifies welding points with high precision. The algorithm runs entirely on SocWeld's local server, keeping sensitive production data exactly where it should be — on-premises, away from the cloud. A quiet piece of infrastructure that does a lot of heavy lifting.

The challenge

Manually mapping welding points from images is precise, repetitive work. For SocWeld's end users, it meant going through images methodically — marking each point by hand before any downstream process could begin. There was no inherent error in the workflow, but it was slow. The bottleneck wasn't skill; it was volume. SocWeld needed a way to handle the bulk of that work automatically — without sending sensitive production imagery to an external service. The system had to be fast, accurate from the start, and built to improve over time as more data became available.

The solution

Creative Oak built a computer vision model in Python and PyTorch, trained to detect welding points directly from images. The model runs locally on SocWeld's own server — no data leaves their environment. At deployment, it identifies welding points at hight precision, handling the majority of the mapping workload without manual input. What makes it sustainable long-term is retrainability: as SocWeld accumulates more labelled data, the model can be updated to push precision further. It's not a fixed tool — it's one that gets more accurate the more it's used.

The result

SocWeld's users can now run images through the system and get most of their welding points mapped in moments rather than manually. The high precision means the bulk of the work is done before a human ever opens the file. And because the model can be retrained, that number isn't a ceiling — it's a starting point. This is how we work at Creative Oak — contact us to hear what we could do for your business.