The question clients bring to us about CAD drafting is almost always the same: can an external team take this over without it creating more work for their own office than it saves? The answer is yes, and that comes down to how we define the work. We draft; we do not do engineering.
You keep the design decisions in-house, and we take over the drafting and modelling, often in high volumes and with a lot of repetition. We deliver 2D drafting and, where needed, 3D modelling, as-built drawings and revisions to existing sets.
The work is done entirely remotely from our own office, in our own environment and with our own licences. What we need from you are the details, the existing drawings and the drawing conventions that apply within your organisation. After that we fall into the rhythm the project requires, whether that is a weekly meeting or contact every two days. Everyone who works on your project with us has more than ten years of CAD experience.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Where the time savings lie in repetitive CAD drafting
The part of CAD drafting that takes the most hours is rarely the most complicated part. It is the part that repeats. An elevation that comes back in twelve variants, a piping diagram in which the same components are placed again and again in different sizes, a drawing set that has to be brought up to date down to the last detail after every change. That work is not difficult, it is long. In an in-house drawing office it ties up people who really ought to be working on the tricky part. We take over exactly that high-volume part.
Our drafters all have more than ten years of CAD experience, so there is no learning curve on the software; the time goes into getting to grips with the set and the drawing conventions. We see the pattern most clearly in greenhouse construction. If you need a valve in 90 in AutoCAD and then the same valve in 110, you redraw it by hand every time. Across a complete piping diagram, that adds up fast. Once components like these are built intelligently, it saves at least seventy per cent of the time in this type of work.
So the gain is not in drawing faster, but in drawing less often. That is why, at the start of a project, we look for where the repetition lies before anything is worked out. Sometimes it is a handful of components, sometimes an entire template structure. That analysis takes a day or so and pays for itself over the rest of the project. Meanwhile, your own team keeps its hands free for the work that requires design decisions.
Parametric CAD drafting with smart Revit families
Working parametrically is the core of efficient CAD drafting in Revit. We build families that adapt to a different size or a new situation. The component is built once and then placed anywhere, without redrawing for each variant. The material schedule updates along with it. If the component changes, the schedule changes automatically, so the paperwork never drifts away from the drawing.
A project leader only really notices that difference in the third or fourth revision round, when a manually maintained schedule has long since fallen out of step with what is on paper. In practice we come across two situations. In the first, you already have a family set and templates, but over the years they have become clogged with variants, duplicate names and components nobody dares to touch any more. In the second, there is hardly anything and everything has to be built from the ground up. Which route is wiser depends on the state of the existing set.
If it is very messy, rebuilding is sometimes quicker than repairing, even though throwing things away feels counterintuitive. We assess that based on the set itself and present the trade-off along with what it means in drafting hours. Alongside Revit, we use AutoCAD and Rhino as our main tools and, where the project calls for it, Inventor, Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault. So working parametrically is not an end in itself. It only pays off if a component comes back often enough, and we weigh that up afresh for every job.
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 the delivered CAD drafting set contains
A delivered CAD drafting set has to fit with what happens to it next. That is why we deliver in the formats you continue working with yourself: DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP files, and in practice any common CAD format. We always work with the latest versions of the software. The contents of the set depend on the job. In a revision round, it means updated 2D drawings with the changes carried through down to the detail level. In a modelling job, it means a 3D model with the associated elevations, sections and details. We deliver as-built drawings when the existing situation has to be incorporated into a set that then continues. More important than that list is that the set is built to your standard. We work to the drawing conventions you give us, from layer structure and naming to title blocks and the way revisions are tracked.
That takes a conversation at the start and usually a sample drawing, and it prevents a set from having to be converted after delivery after all. We deliver in parts. You receive the first part, give feedback, we process it and carry on. That keeps any deviation small and avoids a pile of corrections arriving all at once at the end. We deliver one-off jobs by email. On larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we work with software you can log into to follow the progress of the project. Intellectual property in all our work belongs to you.
Scaling up capacity for CAD drafting
The reason for outsourcing CAD drafting is almost always capacity. Too little time, too few drafters, or a peak your own team cannot absorb. We have a large, variable team that scales with each project: one drafter for a small job, and as many drafters as needed on a large project. The team is already there, so for us scaling up means deploying what the job requires rather than recruiting first.
When something is urgent, we add people straight away. That is the practical difference from a vacancy, because a new permanent drafter only arrives months later and then stays on the payroll, even long after the peak has passed. With us, you pay no ongoing payroll costs.
If someone on our side drops out through illness or holiday, we replace them and the work carries on. That is the difference from a single contractor: continuity rests with our team, not with one person. Managing the work also takes little of your time. Barry, our project manager, is usually the first point of contact for a new request, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side. Sam has built up more than fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years, ran his own design practice in the Netherlands and is still an engineer.
He leads the CAD team and is responsible for the technical side and project supervision. As a result, you have one fixed point of contact instead of a group of individual drafters who each need to ask something separately. We work nationwide from our own office and respond to a new request within 1 to 2 working days.
Frequently asked questions about CAD drafting
Hand your CAD 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.