For many drawing offices, drafting on a project basis is the quickest way out when a peak builds up, a deadline draws closer or a vacancy stays open for months. In that situation, we take over a clearly defined package of drafting work, so your own team can stay on the ongoing work.
Our large, flexible team is made up of drafters with more than ten years of CAD experience, and we scale with each project to match what the work requires. We draft and model, we do not do engineering, and we keep that distinction sharp.
You supply the details and usually the existing drawings, we work out the rest ourselves and deliver in batches. The work is done entirely remotely from our own office, with our own licences. You will receive a reply to a new request within 1 to 2 working days, after which we talk the project through. That way, your project leader quickly knows where the project stands. A short first assignment is open for discussion, so you can judge our speed and accuracy for yourself.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
How drafting on a project basis works, from first call to delivery
Every project with us starts with a conversation. We ask about the size of the set, the required output and the date by which the work must be finished. You then supply the details, usually together with existing drawings that need a revision pass. We first review that material as a whole, because otherwise an incomplete set will still cause delays halfway through. We start as soon as enough information is available. We split project-based drafting into batches and deliver them one after another, instead of everything at once at the end.
There is a practical reason for delivering in batches. Your project leader sees early on whether our interpretation is right and can adjust course before a hundred drawings contain the same deviation. We collect that feedback, process it and move on to the next batch. We agree the meeting rhythm together with you. With a tight schedule we speak every two days, with calmer work weekly. For a new request, Barry, our project manager, is usually the first point of contact, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side, so there is always one fixed line.
Files go back and forth by email. On large projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we choose software you can log into to follow the project. We charge by the hour or at a fixed project price, depending on what the work requires, and we agree that in advance. If it turns out during the work that there is more to it than expected, we tell you immediately rather than afterwards. What we draft remains your property.
An as-built file we straightened out on a project basis
For Firefly, we have delivered more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings so far. One of those assignments shows well what this kind of work involves in practice. The as-built material we received had been printed incorrectly, was partly drawn by hand and in places was hard to read. A drafter working strictly to instructions would call every morning with a new question. We turned that around and started working it out ourselves.
Our drafters laid the hand-drawn parts alongside the other material, compared dimensions and only asked a question when no conclusive answer could be reached. That kept the client's diary free and the work moving. The set was still delivered neatly. We take two things from that assignment into every project that follows. First, we deliberately spend time at the start getting to grips with the material supplied, because every hour we invest there pays for itself later in fewer corrections.
Second, we bundle our questions. We collect them and put them forward in one meeting, instead of letting them trickle in one by one. When a deadline could not move, our team worked evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, even during Sam's planned holiday. That is not our standard way of working, but it shows how we treat an agreed date. Drafting on a project basis stands or falls with that attitude.
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.
Drafting to your CAD standards and layer structure
We do not draft in our own house style, but in yours. We receive the drawing conventions from you: the layer structure, the naming, the hatches, the title blocks, the scale conventions and the way details are numbered. We go through that set of conventions at the start, so our drafters do not introduce their own interpretation halfway through. If a firm has no documented standard, we derive the conventions from the existing drawings we receive and put our assumptions to you. We work in our own environment with our own licences, not on your servers. That saves you a workstation, a licence and a login procedure. For the exchange it makes little difference, because we deliver in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format. We keep our software on the latest versions, so we can send files back without a conversion step.
If you run an older version, let us know in advance and we will deliver in that version. With drafting on a project basis, this fit matters more than it seems. A set that is technically correct but departs from the house standard still costs the drawing office a day of cleaning up. That is why, at the end, we check not only the content but also whether the layers, blocks and naming match what we agreed. If the standard changes during the project, we adjust the ongoing work and tell you which drawings already delivered we will go back over. That way, the drawing office keeps a set that fits anywhere in its own archive.
Three review layers on all our drafting work
Every package that leaves our office goes through at least three review layers. A drafter produces the work, a second team member checks it, Sam then reviews the technical side as team leader and finally Barry goes over it as project manager. That sequence is not a formality. The second drafter finds the things the author no longer sees, such as a layer accidentally in the wrong place or a detail that was not updated after a revision.
Sam has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years, had his own design practice in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer.
As a result, he looks at the work through a different lens than a drafter and picks out the errors that would only hurt on site or in production. The final round is a step-back look at the completeness of the set. We deliberately keep this checking within our own team, so you do not lose time reviewing. In practice, this keeps errors to a minimum. With project-based drafting that involves a lot of repetition, this counts double, because a deviation in a repeated component immediately ends up in dozens of drawings.
We catch that by looking extra critically at the first batch and carrying the findings through the whole package. Combined, the core of our team has around twenty-five years of experience, and everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience.
Frequently asked questions about drafting 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.