Lead time is almost always the reason a drawing office starts looking for a CAD drafting specialist. There is a set that has to be finished, your own drafters are fully booked and hiring takes months the project does not have. In such cases we start with what is needed and scale up within the same project with as many drafters from our large, variable team as the assignment requires.
We can do that because our team is already in place; we deploy what the job needs and bring in extra people straight away when things are urgent.
If someone is off sick or on holiday, we replace them, so the schedule does not slip after all. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so a long onboarding period is not part of the picture. We draft and model, and we stay well away from engineering and calculations. You remain the owner of the project and the substantive decisions; we add the capacity and the accuracy.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Drawing types and output in our CAD drafting
We deliver 2D drafting as the basis and 3D modelling where the project calls for it. Specifically, that means floor plans, elevations, sections, detail sheets, typical details, assembly drawings, piping diagrams, material schedules generated from the model, as-built drawings and revisions to existing sets. That last category makes up a large part of our work. In many drawing offices, a round of revisions on a series of existing DWGs sits waiting for months, because it carries little prestige and takes a lot of hours. We are actually glad to pick up that kind of work, because that is exactly where the gain lies for you.
We deliver output in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format. We always work with the latest versions of Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, supplemented by Inventor, Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault. For the model we build parametric Revit families, in other words smart components that adapt to a different size or situation. We make that component once, after which we place it everywhere without redrawing it, and the material schedule updates automatically.
In greenhouse construction, this approach saves at least seventy percent of the time on components such as valves in 90 and in 110, which drafters in AutoCAD would otherwise redraw one by one by hand. As far as we are concerned, what we do not deliver is just as clear: no structural calculations, no permit documents and no design advice. We draw what you decide, using your firm's layer structure and title blocks. If something in the supplied documents does not match up, we flag it and wait for a decision.
Consultation with a fixed specialist as point of contact
You have one fixed point of contact with us. Barry, our project manager, picks up a new enquiry and then remains the first contact, even when more drafters join the project. Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side as soon as it concerns the drawings themselves. With well over fifteen years of background in architecture, he worked in Iran for seven years, ran his own design practice in the Netherlands and is still an engineer. He leads our CAD team and keeps hold of project supervision, so the project lead on your side talks to someone who can read the work himself.
We set the meeting rhythm at the start and adapt it to the pace. On a tight schedule we speak every two days, while on a longer project a weekly slot is enough. Day-to-day contact runs by email and phone, and we prefer to answer the shortest questions straight away rather than saving them up. For standalone drafting, files go back and forth by email. On larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we use software that you can log in to and follow the progress of the project.
We visit clients and clients visit our office, although the work runs entirely remotely from our own environment with our own licences. So we do not ask for access to your server or licences, which keeps the start of a collaboration simple. Our response time to a new enquiry is 1 to 2 working days.
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.
Ownership of the CAD files and confidentiality
You own the intellectual property of all our drawings. That applies to the sheets, the model and also the families and templates we build during an assignment. So no library stays behind with us that someone later has to come back for. We consider that agreement self-evident, because we provide capacity rather than sell a product. We are honest about confidentiality: clients have not asked us for a non-disclosure agreement so far, so we have not yet signed one. We are, however, open to an NDA and will sign one without discussion if you want it. Even without paperwork, we treat supplied material as confidential, because in our line of work competitors come across each other in the same sector. We do not share project content with third parties and never use one client's work as sample material for another.
It is also important for you that we work in our own environment. We collect supplied documents via the agreed channels and return our work by the same route, so no material circulates through roundabout ways. We agree in advance which documents we need, and we do not ask for more. A specialist working with half the information makes mistakes, but access to a complete project archive is rarely necessary. We set that boundary in the first conversation, together with the agreements on delivery and invoicing. If you want us to delete our copy after completion, we agree on that and stick to it. Such wishes are rarely complicated as long as they are on the table at the start.
From first conversation to delivery of the drafting work
Everything starts with a conversation in which we go through the project. We ask about the scope, the deadline, your firm's drawing conventions and the software in which the set will live on. You then supply the details, usually with existing drawings that need revising. We first go through those documents in full. If something is missing, we first work out ourselves what we can deduce and then ask targeted questions.
For Firefly we received material in which the drawings had been printed incorrectly and partly drawn by hand; we worked it out rather than calling the client every day, and still delivered the set neatly. We have completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings for that company.
As soon as the starting points are clear we start drafting, and we deliver in stages. The first partial delivery serves as a benchmark for sheet layout, dimensioning and detailing. The project lead gives feedback on it, we process that and move on to the next part. Along the way, everything passes through at least three review layers: the drafter produces the work, a second team member checks it, Sam as team leader looks at the technical side and Barry as project manager goes over it last.
As a result, we keep errors to a minimum in practice. For a deadline that could not move, we have previously worked through evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, to deliver on time. A short first assignment is fine, precisely so you can assess this way of working on a small scale first.
Frequently asked questions about hiring a CAD drafting specialist
Let our CAD drafting specialists help you
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.