The work that ends up at a BIM drafting firm consists largely of repetition. On a project of any size, you are quickly looking at hundreds of sheets, a good share of which have the same structure with slightly different dimensions or a different position. That is exactly the work an in-house drawing office never gets round to, because its experienced people are needed for the parts that require project knowledge.
We take on that volume. We draft and model, and we do not do engineering.
Our clients are engineering firms, architecture practices, contractors and manufacturers that run into a peak or structurally lack drafting capacity. The work is carried out remotely from our own office, with our own team and following the drawing conventions you give us. Everyone who works with us brings well over ten years of CAD experience. When you send a new enquiry, you will hear from us within 1 to 2 working days. We always work with the latest software versions and deliver in the file format you use yourself.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Where the volume lies in the work of a BIM drafting firm
It pays to look at which part of a project is genuinely unique. In many assignments, that is the minority. The rest consists of components that keep coming back, sheets that need to be checked again after a change and variants of the same component. This is clearly visible in greenhouse construction. Companies in that sector often work in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not smart when it comes to building components such as valves in piping systems. For a valve in 90 and in 110, the drafter has to do it by hand every single time. Across a complete piping schematic, that adds up to a large share of the lead time, without anything changing in the design.
With a smart family, a component like that is placed in a single action. On this kind of work, it saves at least seventy per cent of the time. That is the core of what a BIM drafting firm adds, because the gain does not come from drafting faster but from drafting the same thing less often. The second place where time leaks away is the revision round. If a dimension changes, every sheet containing that component has to be updated, and that is exactly where discrepancies between sheets arise.
When the model keeps track of that relationship itself, the manual work disappears. The third place is the material schedule, which on many projects is maintained separately and therefore lags behind the drawing. Time goes into comparing list and sheet there too, while the model can make that link itself. At the start of a project, we therefore map out which components recur and how often, because that determines where the time savings can be made.
The output of our BIM drafting firm, from model to sheet
We deliver models and the drawings derived from them. In practice, that means floor plans, elevations, sections, detail sheets, assembly drawings and schematics, derived from the model so that a change in one place carries through to the rest. We also produce as-built drawings and process revisions in existing sets and models. If you only have flat drawings, we build the model from that material. Besides drafting, we build and maintain Revit families and templates.
We can clean up an existing set or build a new one, and which is wiser depends on the state of the existing family set. If it is very messy, rebuilding is sometimes quicker than repairing. We do not make that call on gut feeling, but based on what we find in the material supplied. An assignment sometimes consists of a clearly defined package of sheets and sometimes of an ongoing flow of work across several projects. For Firefly, that grew to more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings.
Our large, flexible team scales with each project, with as many drafters as the work requires. Output goes out in Revit formats, DWG, DXF and STEP files, and in practice in any common CAD format. What falls outside our scope is engineering, so no calculations, no structural advice and no permit documents. The intellectual property of what we produce belongs to the client, including the families we build for you. We deliver in stages, so the structure can be tested early and a wrong assumption is not spread across hundreds of sheets.
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.
Parametric Revit families as smart components
A parametric family is a smart component. A component like this adapts to a new situation or a different size without having to be redrawn. It is built once and then placed wherever it is needed. That is fundamentally different from a block that only exists as a copy and means manual work for every deviating dimension. The gain lies in two places. First, in the placement itself, because a valve in 90 or in 110 becomes a setting rather than a drafting job. Second, in the material schedule, which updates along with the model, because if the component changes, the schedule changes automatically. That eliminates the familiar situation in which schedule and drawing have drifted apart because someone did not carry a change through in both places. Building such a set takes time up front.
That investment pays for itself as soon as the same components recur across several projects, which is almost always the case for manufacturers and companies with a fixed product range. We build families from scratch or take an existing set in hand. With a set that has become cluttered over the years, with duplicate variants and unclear names, rebuilding can be quicker than repairing. We decide which route is best after reviewing the existing set, and we present that conclusion to you along with the reasoning. For a component that only appears once or twice in a project, an ordinary drawing is simply the faster route. Exactly where the tipping point lies depends on the number of repetitions and the complexity of the component.
Software, versions and compatibility at a BIM drafting firm
Our core software is Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino. We also use Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a limited extent Dynamo and Vault. We always work with the latest versions. If you are still working in an older version, we save to that version, so nothing needs to be converted on your side. The file formats we use are DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice any common CAD format.
Aligning with the existing set means more than choosing the right format. We adopt your drawing conventions, meaning the layer names, blocks, hatching, the title block structure and the naming in the model.
You provide these and they take precedence. If we find internal inconsistencies in the supplied set, we report them and ask which variant applies. Making a choice ourselves would only create clean-up work later. We work in our own environment with our own licences, so no workstation needs to be set up and no access rights need to be arranged. On larger projects, you can log into the software the project runs in and follow progress that way.
For standalone assignments, files are exchanged by email. What we also ask for is an overview of the versions in use on your side, including any add-ins that affect how a file is built. Without that picture, a model sometimes comes back into an environment where it opens slightly differently than intended. Before any work goes back to you, it has passed through at least three review layers.
Frequently asked questions about our BIM drafting firm
Hand your BIM drafting work 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.