If you bring in a CAD drafter on a project basis, it is almost always because the lead time is tight. The job is there and the scope is clear, but the weeks available are too few for your own staff. We solve that with a team that is already in place. We can start small and scale up per project with our large, variable team as the work demands.
Nobody has to be recruited, because the people are already with us and all of them have been working with CAD for more than ten years. When something is urgent, we add someone straight away, even in the middle of a working week.
Sam, our team leader, divides the work and keeps the technical line consistent, so a larger team does not lead to four different styles in the same set. We draft and model; we do not do engineering. That keeps the agreement clear and the schedule achievable. What you get from us, then, is drafting capacity that moves with the phase your project is in. If the work tails off, we take people off the job and nobody pays for idle capacity.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Who a CAD drafter on a project basis is for
Our clients include engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly any business with technical drafting work. The people at the table are managers, team leaders and owners. The problem they bring is rarely complex in content and almost always a matter of capacity: too little time, too few drafters, or a peak their own team cannot handle. At an engineering firm this looks different from how it looks at a manufacturer. The firm often has a set that still needs to be fully worked up, while the manufacturer is dealing with production drawings that come back for every variant.
With contractors it is often as-built material that needs to be properly recorded after handover, and with architectural practices it is a detailing round that has to run in parallel with the design. What these situations have in common is that the job has a clear beginning and end. That is exactly why a CAD drafter on a project basis works well there: capacity is added while the project runs and falls away as soon as the set is finished.
You do not pay ongoing payroll costs for a peak that has passed. We also notice that the need often arises at a moment when nobody in-house has time to train someone up. Our team does not need that familiarisation period on the tools, because our drafters already know the software and the way of working. What we do need is your standard, and we go through it at the start. That usually takes one session, after which our drafters can carry on within the existing conventions without constantly having to ask questions.
What we draft within a project-based assignment
The core of our work is 2D drafting in AutoCAD and Revit. Within that, we deliver floor plans, sections, elevations, detail drawings, assembly drawings, typical details and schematics. Where the project calls for it, we model in 3D, for example when you would rather pull elevations and quantities from a model than from separate sheets. As-built drawings and revision work make up a large part of our practice, because many jobs revolve around something that already exists and now has to be accurate. In Revit we build parametric families, in other words smart components that adapt to a different size, with a material schedule that updates automatically.
We use Rhino and Grasshopper for geometry that is hard to capture in a standard library, and Inventor for parts in the manufacturing industry. We use Dynamo and Vault to a more limited extent. We deliver in DWG, DXF, the Revit formats and STEP, and in any other common CAD format. We deliver in stages, not all at once at the end. After each batch we collect feedback, process it and move on to the next part.
Every drawing goes through at least three review layers: a drafter produces the work, a second team member checks it, Sam as team leader looks at the technical side, and Barry, our project manager, carries out the final check. If you use a CAD drafter on a project basis for a large series, you will notice this above all in the low number of correction rounds afterwards. The intellectual property of all our work belongs to you. That also applies to the families, templates and libraries we build during the project, so your own drawing office can simply keep working with them afterwards.
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 cost side of a CAD drafter on a project basis
You can be billed by the hour or per project at a fixed price. Both are possible, and we agree which makes more sense before the work starts. A well-defined series whose size is clear in advance lends itself to a fixed project price, because you then know where you stand. If the scope is less fixed, for example in a revision programme where it only becomes clear along the way how many sheets are affected, we prefer to work on an hourly basis. We are strict about those hours: we only bill genuine working hours. We stop the clock as soon as someone goes to get a coffee for five minutes. We do not use prepaid hour bundles or monthly hour subscriptions, so nothing keeps running after the last delivery. What really keeps costs down in practice is the quality of what you supply. The more complete the documents, dimensions and drawing conventions, the less time we spend working things out.
Repetition also lowers the cost, because that is where we build smart components that take away the manual work. A third factor is the meeting rhythm: on a tight project we meet every two days, on calmer work weekly, and that saves on the hours spent on coordination. We only prepare an estimate after we have seen the documents, because an estimate without drawings means nothing. So if you are looking for a CAD drafter on a project basis, you will first get questions from us and then a proposal. In it we also point out where we see a risk of additional work, because an estimate that keeps quiet about such points will not hold up in the end.
Getting started with a CAD drafter on a project basis
We respond to new enquiries within 1 to 2 working days. This is followed by a conversation in which we go through the project: what is already there, what needs to be finished, which standard applies and what the schedule looks like. Barry is the point of contact for that first enquiry, after which Sam takes over the technical side, so you do not have to deal with changing contacts.
We start as soon as we have enough information. It helps to have a set of existing drawings, the details and dimensions, the drawing conventions with layer structure and title blocks, and the file formats you need. If anything is missing, we say so straight away.
Where possible we find things out ourselves rather than calling your project leader every day, as we did on an as-built file whose drawings had been printed incorrectly and were partly drawn by hand. A short assignment is fine. Many clients start with a small first batch to assess our speed and accuracy before handing over a whole set. If that goes well, we scale up. For standalone AutoCAD work, files go back and forth by email, and on larger projects such as greenhouse construction we work with software you can log into to follow the project.
We work in our own environment with our own licences, so nothing needs to be set up on your side. If you want to bring in a CAD drafter on a project basis, you can call us or use the contact form. We will then go through the project with you and tell you which level of staffing fits the schedule you need.
Frequently asked questions about a CAD drafter on a project basis
Hand your project 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.