Requests for an AutoCAD drafting office almost always reach us at an inconvenient moment. The drawing office is dealing with a peak, a deadline has been brought forward, or a vacancy for a drafter has been open for months without anyone starting. In all three cases the outcome is the same: drawings need to be produced and your own staff cannot keep up.
OutsourceCAD was set up for exactly that problem. We draft, we do not do engineering, and we take on the volume that would otherwise be left undone.
That could be a revision round on existing DWG files, an as-built file that needs to be rebuilt, or a series of drawings that always follows the same structure. The work is carried out from our own office, with our own licences, following the drawing conventions you provide. You will receive a response to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days. This is followed by a conversation in which we go through the project and establish what is needed to get started.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Getting started with an AutoCAD drafting office without a long run-up
A project with us starts with a conversation, not with a form. We want to know what is on the table, what format it is in and which conventions apply within the project. In practice, you supply the details plus the existing drawings, usually a set that needs revising. That is where the guiding information sits: the layer structure, the blocks used, the title block and the way dimensions are noted. We work to your CAD standards and drawing conventions, so you provide them to us and not the other way round.
We start as soon as the necessary information is in. No onboarding period is needed for anyone to get to know the software, because everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience. We always work with the latest versions and in our own environment, so no workstation needs to be set up and no licences need to be freed up. For standalone AutoCAD drafting, files go back and forth by email.
On larger projects, we use software you can log into to follow the project. We deliver in stages, gather feedback, process it and move on to the next batch. That rhythm prevents a pile of work at the end that has to be checked all at once. Meetings take place every two days or weekly, depending on how urgent the work is. If you would like to see how we work first, give us a small first assignment and judge us on speed and accuracy.
Clients who bring in an AutoCAD drafting office
Our clients are engineering firms, architecture practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly companies where technical drafting is a fixed part of production. The people at the table are managers, team leaders and owners, so people who keep an eye on the schedule and can see the pressure building. The trigger is almost always capacity. Too little time, too few drafters, or a peak the in-house team cannot fit in alongside everything else. The problem on the table is rarely complicated in substance, it is volume.
Hundreds of drawings need to be processed, many of them similar, and your own drafters are needed precisely for the work that requires project knowledge. What then gets left behind is exactly the work an AutoCAD drafting office can take over: revisions to existing sets, developing variants and cleaning up drawings that have passed through different hands over the years. A second trigger is absence. A permanent drafter drops out due to illness or holiday and the entire schedule slips with it. We absorb that without an employment contract being involved, because you bear no ongoing payroll costs with us.
A third situation is a deadline that cannot be moved. We know that from our own work, because for one such deadline the team worked through evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, to deliver on time. That project even carried on as normal during a planned holiday of Sam, our team leader. Our focus is on the Netherlands and that is where our clients are based too.
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.
What we deliver as an AutoCAD drafting office
We deliver 2D drafting and, where the project calls for it, 3D modelling of parts and assemblies. We also produce as-built drawings and process revisions to sets that are already in use. In AutoCAD, in practice that means floor plans, sections, elevations, detail drawings, piping schematics and assembly drawings, depending on what is standard in your industry. Output goes out in DXF and DWG, and where the work needs to move further down the chain, we also deliver Revit formats and STEP files. In practice, we work with any common CAD format. Alongside AutoCAD we use Revit and Rhino, as well as Inventor, Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault. That matters, because AutoCAD work rarely stands on its own. A set built up in flat 2D sometimes needs to become a model, or a model needs to be brought back to flat drawings that are usable on site.
What we explicitly do not do is engineering. We do not carry out calculations, give structural advice or handle permits. This is drafting and modelling work, often in high volume and with a lot of repetition. That scope is a deliberate choice, because it keeps it clear where your responsibility lies and where ours begins. The intellectual property of what we produce belongs to the client, including the source files. An AutoCAD drafting office that works this way effectively functions as an extension of your own drawing office, without the fixed costs that come with in-house staff.
From a single drafter to a large, fully deployed team
We have a large, flexible team and scale up or down per project, from a single drafter for a small assignment to as many drafters as a large project needs. Scaling up is not a recruitment question but a planning question, because the people are already in place and we deploy what the project requires. When something is urgent, we add people straight away. For you as a client, that is quite different from filling a vacancy.
Taking on a drafter costs months of recruitment, onboarding and supervision, and then creates a fixed cost that continues long after the peak has passed. With us, you pay no ongoing payroll costs. If someone drops out due to illness or holiday, we replace that person so the work keeps moving.
That is exactly where the vulnerability of tight in-house staffing lies, because a single absent drafter can bring part of the schedule to a standstill. The management does not change with the size of the team. Sam keeps the technical side and project supervision in hand, and you have a fixed point of contact. Barry, our project manager, is usually the first point of contact for a new enquiry, after which Sam takes over the technical side.
Even when many drafters from our large team are working on a project, that line stays the same. Sam has more than fifteen years' background in architecture, ran his own design firm in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer. Combined, the core of the team has around twenty-five years of experience. We only charge genuine working hours, so if someone steps away for five minutes to get a coffee, the clock stops.
Frequently asked questions about our AutoCAD drafting office
Let our AutoCAD drafting office take the load
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.