In practice, a 2D drawings service is largely about volume: not one drawing, but dozens or hundreds of similar drawings that have to be produced or updated one by one. That is exactly the part of the work an in-house drawing office gets stuck on, not because it is complicated, but because it simply takes too many hours alongside the ongoing project.
We are an outsourced drafting team that takes over this repetitive work from engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers who are short of drafting capacity themselves.
It is drafting and modelling work, not engineering, calculations or structural advice. We deliver floor plans, sections, elevations, details and general arrangement drawings, and where needed also as-built drawings and revisions to an existing set. We work fully remotely, in our own environment and on our own licences. Our large, flexible team scales with each project, and everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience. That keeps a peak in the drawing office manageable without you having to hire extra staff.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
From first conversation to staged delivery of your 2D drawings
A 2D drawing project with us starts with a conversation in which we go through exactly what needs to be done and what material already exists. You supply the details and usually also existing drawings that need revising, together with the CAD standards that go with them. Barry, our project manager, is your first point of contact for a new enquiry and handles that initial conversation, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side and stays involved throughout the project. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days.
As soon as there is enough information, we can start drafting. We do not deliver everything in one go at the end, but in stages spread across the project. A first batch goes back to you for feedback, after which we make changes and carry on with the next batch. That prevents us from working in the wrong direction for weeks on end. The rhythm of check-ins differs per client. On a project that has to move fast we speak every two days, while for calmer work once a week is enough.
For standalone drafting jobs, files go back and forth by email, and on larger projects we use software you can log into to follow progress yourself. Day-to-day contact runs by email, phone and meetings, and we are happy to visit you or welcome you at our own office. We work in our own environment on our own licences, so nobody on your side has to set anything up. A short first assignment is possible if you would like to see how quickly and accurately we work before more work follows.
A real example from our as-built and revision work
An example from our own work shows clearly what outsourcing 2D drawings can involve in practice. Firefly once sent us as-built material where the existing drawings had been printed incorrectly and were partly drawn by hand. The whole thing was hard to read and messy, and some of the information we first had to reconstruct before we could turn it into new digital drawings. Rather than calling the client with questions all the time, we worked it out ourselves and still delivered the file neatly in the requested 2D drawings.
We bring that approach to other revision work as well. Where an existing drawing set no longer matches the actual situation, or where part of it has been amended by hand and never updated digitally, we first establish what is and is not correct before drafting further. That prevents us from carrying an error from an old drawing over into the new set. On an extensive revision file we divide the work across several drafters at once, with a fixed set-up so the drawings stay consistent with one another.
We have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings for Firefly, all based on the same way of working. What these kinds of files often need is not just drafting, but also the patience to find out first what the client actually meant before we draw a single line. We never skip that step, not even when the schedule is tight.
No ongoing payroll costs and no idle staff once the peak is over. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work simply carries on.
Working to your CAD standards when outsourcing drawings
When we produce 2D drawings, we always work to the CAD standards, layer structure and conventions you already use. We receive those standards at the start of the project and draft consistently to them from that moment on, without laying a system of our own over the top. That is a deliberate choice on our part. A drawing that is technically correct but does not fit the rest of your archive costs more time afterwards than one that comes out right first time. Among other things, the layer structure determines how someone uses a drawing later on, for example when filtering out certain elements or adjusting a specific layer without affecting the rest. If that structure does not match, the next user has to sort it out themselves, and that is exactly what we want to avoid.
Where an existing set is no longer entirely consistent, for example because several people have worked on it over time, we map that out first before any new work is added. Sometimes cleaning up is then the faster route; sometimes it is better to continue from a clean set-up. We put that choice to you before we start work. We adopt the naming of files and layers in the same way, so a drawing we deliver fits into your archive without any changes. The conventions you give us are maintained throughout the project, even when we scale up with extra drafters along the way.
Quality control with three review layers on every drawing set
Every set of 2D drawings goes through at least three layers of review with us before it goes to you. A drafter produces the work, a second team member checks it independently, Sam then looks at the technical side as team leader, and finally Barry goes over it as project manager. That set-up may sound laborious, but it is the reason the number of errors stays minimal in practice, even with drawings we deliver at a high pace.
In 2D drafting with a lot of repetition, the risk lies mainly in small deviations that repeat throughout an entire set, such as a wrongly chosen layer or a dimension taken from an outdated revision. Without checks, such an error goes unnoticed until it causes problems further down the process, and by then fixing it often costs more than the checks would have beforehand.
The checks go beyond the drawing itself. We also test whether the agreed CAD standards have been applied consistently, whether the naming is correct and whether the delivered file format matches what we agreed. Anything that requires a decision from you, we flag rather than filling it in ourselves. For a deadline that could not move, we have previously kept working through evenings and weekends without skipping the checks.
We have now applied this approach for Firefly on more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings, and the three-layer review has remained the same throughout, regardless of the size of the assignment. We stick to this approach for every drawing set we deliver, even when the schedule is tight and several drafters are working on the same file at once.
Frequently asked questions about our 2D drawings service
Hand your 2D drawings over to us
Send us your documents and drawing conventions and we will let you know within one to two working days what we can take on and when.