The question clients ask about concrete construction drafting outsourcing is simple: can an external team take this over without your own drawing office spending more time on it than it saves? Our answer is yes, provided the input is right and the drawing conventions are clear.
We do not do engineering, but we do draft and model. Calculations, reinforcement advice and structural decisions stay with your structural engineer, and whatever he sets out, we put on paper consistently.
Our team is already in place and is large and variable, so it scales with whatever each project requires. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so familiarisation is about your standard, not about the trade. The work is carried out remotely from our own office, using our own licences, and you get a fixed point of contact. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, and we can start as soon as we have enough information.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Who outsources concrete construction drafting, and why
Our clients are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, as well as other companies where technical drafting is a fixed part of production. The person we talk to is almost always a manager, a team leader or the owner. What brings them to us is rarely dissatisfaction with their own drafters, but almost always capacity. There are too few people, too little time, or a peak their own team cannot absorb. Concrete projects come with a specific problem: the number of sheets grows rapidly as soon as a design moves into construction, and every change in dimensions or grid carries through a series of drawings.
That follow-through work requires no creativity, but it does require precision and a lot of hours. A second trigger we often see is a file that arrives in a messy state. At Firefly, we received as-built material where the drawings had been printed incorrectly and were partly drawn by hand, hard to read and without a clear structure. We worked that out ourselves and still delivered it neatly, instead of calling the project leader every day.
A third reason is scheduling. The date is fixed, the volume is fixed, and only the staffing is variable. We started this service last year because a client asked for it for exactly that reason. Since then, we have offered it as a standard service, with a focus on the Netherlands. Our work for Firefly now covers more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings. What these clients have in common is that they would rather deploy their own drafters on the work that can only be done in-house.
Capacity for outsourced concrete drafting
Our team is already in place, so for us scaling up means redistributing work, not recruiting. A small assignment can be handled by one drafter, and where the volume requires it, we deploy as many drafters as needed from our large, variable team. When it is urgent, we add people to an ongoing project straight away, without you having to arrange a new agreement first. Because everyone on our team has more than ten years of CAD experience, familiarisation only concerns your drawing conventions. We record those in reference sheets at the start, so an extra drafter is working at the same level within a short time.
Sam, our team leader, divides the work into parts that can run in parallel and keeps an eye on consistency between them. If someone is off sick or on holiday, we replace him and the work carries on. For you, that means no gap in the schedule and no invoice for the handover. That risk deliberately sits on our side, because it is part of the reason to outsource drafting. You pay no ongoing wage costs and keep nobody on the payroll without work once the peak is over.
We do not use prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription, so no amount keeps running in a month without work. If the volume drops, our input drops with it. If it picks up again, we scale back up without start-up time, because the knowledge of the project stays with us.
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 of concrete construction drafting outsourcing
Hourly rates or a fixed price per project are both possible, and we agree the form together. A fixed price is the obvious choice for a clearly defined package, such as a series of sheets whose scope and detailing are clear in advance. Revision work is different, because it is rarely known in advance how many sheets a change will affect. Charging by the hour is then fairer for both sides, because nobody has to build in a risk premium for work that may never materialise. We only bill actual working hours. If someone steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the clock stops, and we only bill meetings about the project if they are genuinely work. What reduces costs most is the quality of the input. A complete set of documents with clear drawing conventions saves investigation time, and investigation time is the most expensive time in drafting.
Repetition in the set also lowers costs. If a component recurs in dozens of variants, we build it once as a smart component and then place it everywhere, so the extra hours spent building it quickly pay for themselves. An early partial delivery also saves money, because a wrong assumption then affects five sheets rather than fifty. We base an estimate on the documents we see, not on gut feeling. We also state which assumptions it contains and what happens if those assumptions turn out to be wrong. That way, your project leader knows in advance where the flexibility lies and does not have to argue about extra work afterwards.
Working together during the drafting
You have a fixed point of contact with us. Barry, our project manager, picks up a new enquiry and goes through the project with you, after which Sam takes over the technical side as team leader and remains your contact for as long as the work runs. That way, nobody has to explain again how the project fits together every time there is a question.
We tailor the meeting rhythm to the pace of the project. With one client we sit down briefly every two days, with another a fixed weekly moment is enough. When there is a deadline that cannot slip, we touch base more often and more briefly. Day-to-day contact runs via email, phone and meetings, and we visit you or welcome you at our office when that works faster than writing.
For standalone drafting work, files go back and forth by email. For larger projects, we use software you can log into to follow the progress of the project, so your project leader can see where the set stands without having to ask. Whatever we can deduce from the documents ourselves, we work out ourselves.
We only put the real choices to you, bundled and with a proposal attached, so meetings stay short. We have not signed a non-disclosure agreement so far because clients have not asked for one, but we are open to it. The intellectual property of everything we produce belongs to you, and we always supply the source files. We work in our own environment with our own licences, so we do not need access to your network.
Frequently asked questions about concrete construction drafting outsourcing
Hand your concrete 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.