Bringing in a BIM drafting specialist usually starts, with us, with a concrete work package, such as a series of floor plans, sections and details that has to be finished while your own drawing office is already at full capacity. We take over that package in its entirety, including the detailing, the sheets and the revision rounds that follow.
For us, it is about drafting, not engineering. Our clients are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers facing a peak or structurally short of drafters.
We work in Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, always with the latest versions, in our own environment and on our own licences. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and the core of our team has around twenty-five years of combined practice. Our large, flexible team scales with each project: we decide per job how many drafters the work calls for. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, after which we go through the project with you in a conversation.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
When outsourcing BIM drafting makes sense
Outsourcing is not always the right answer, and we would rather say so up front than afterwards. If the focus lies in the design and in the choices your firm makes together with its client, your own team is better placed to keep that in-house. We are not at that table, and we do not need to be. We come into the picture as soon as the work is executional in nature: working up, detailing, revising and carrying it through to sheets. That is exactly the part where a drawing office gets stuck during a peak.
A second situation in which outsourcing BIM drafting makes sense is a file nobody wants to start on. An as-built set that is half drawn by hand and barely legible costs weeks internally and is therefore left on the shelf. We do take on sets like that, because we do it more often and have a set method for it. A third case is a structural shortfall, where your own team is complete but too small for the order book. Hiring takes time and brings ongoing payroll costs, even in quieter months.
With us, you only pay for pure working hours and nothing else. What your own team does need to keep is the final responsibility for content and the contact with your own client. We supply drafting, not engineering, calculations or permit procedures. If you are unsure where the line lies, give us a clearly defined package and see how it goes. A small first job is the most practical test for that.
What a BIM drafting specialist delivers with us
Our work starts with the model and ends with usable output. We model in Revit and produce floor plans, sections, elevations, details, standard details and overviews from it, neatly laid out on sheets. Where a project runs in 2D, we draft in AutoCAD, with the same attention to layers and line weights. We use Rhino for complex shapes that are hard to capture in a standard package, with Grasshopper for the parametric side. We use Inventor for components that come from mechanical engineering, and Dynamo and Vault to a lesser extent.
As-built drawings and revision rounds on existing DWG sets make up a large part of the volume. We also build parametric Revit families, in other words smart components that adapt to a different size or situation. The material schedule updates with them, so if the component changes, the schedule changes automatically. We clean up existing families and templates, or rebuild them if the set has become too clogged. DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP are standard, and in practice any common CAD format is possible.
We always work with the latest versions, and we accept a file from an older release without any fuss. The intellectual property rights to our work belong to you. What we do not deliver is a structural calculation or a permit file, because that is engineering and we do not do it. We deliberately keep that line sharp. If you have a list of the drawing types you need, we will give you our approach and plan of attack for each type in the first conversation.
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.
The repetitive part of drafting
Most of the volume lies in repetition, not in unique drawings. We see that most clearly in greenhouse construction. Companies there often work in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not smart when it comes to building components such as valves in piping systems. If you need a valve in 90 and in 110, you draw it by hand every time, in dozens of schematics one after another. With a smart family, it is in place in a single action, at the size the schematic requires. For this type of work, that saves at least seventy per cent of the time. The same logic applies to window frames, openings, standard details, connections and anything else that recurs dozens of times in a project. We build the component properly once and then place it everywhere, without drawing it again.
If the dimensions change halfway through, the rest follows along instead of someone manually going through every drawing. For you, this means costs fall as volume rises. A revision round benefits too, because a change to one component carries through the entire set. At the start of a project, we look at which part of the work lends itself to this approach. Sometimes that is half the set, sometimes a small part, and then we tell you so. Building a family takes time before it saves time, so we weigh that up together. If you want to see what this would deliver in your own piping schematic, send us a representative file.
Working with our BIM specialist and your own team
With us, you have one fixed point of contact. Barry, our project manager, picks up the new enquiry and gets the project under way, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side. He directs the CAD team, safeguards the content and guides the project. His background is in architecture, with more than fifteen years of practice, seven years of work in Iran, his own design practice in the Netherlands and work as an engineer that he still does today.
Your project lead therefore does not have to deal with each drafter separately. The project starts with a conversation in which we gather the details and review the existing documents.
We then deliver in stages, gather feedback, make adjustments and carry on. The rhythm of our check-ins varies per client: on a tight project we speak every two days, on a calmer one weekly. For day-to-day contact, we use email, phone and meetings. For standalone drafting work, files go back and forth by email. On larger projects, such as in greenhouse construction, we work with software you can log into to follow progress.
We come to you or you come to us, but the work itself is carried out remotely from our own office. Our market is the Netherlands, where all of our clients are based, and for now we are not looking further afield. We work to your drawing conventions, which you give us at the start. If you want to know how this rhythm fits your own schedule, discuss it with us in a first conversation.
Frequently asked questions about a BIM drafting specialist
Hand your BIM drafting 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.