If you are looking for extra drafting capacity, you usually do not want a consultancy but drafters who can get stuck in straight away. We draft, and we deliberately limit ourselves to that. We produce 2D drafting, 3D models, as-built drawings and revisions, often in high volume and with a lot of repetition.
We leave engineering, calculations, structural advice and permit procedures with you, because that is not our trade. That boundary is not a limitation but precisely the reason things move quickly.
Our team does not have to make design decisions and carries out the drafting to the standard you give us. The work is done remotely from our own office, with our own licences and in our own environment. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and the core of the team has around twenty-five years of combined experience. With our large, flexible team we scale up or down per project, exactly as the work requires. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Getting started with extra drafting capacity
A project with us starts with a conversation in which we go through the job. Barry, our project manager, is usually the first point of contact for a new enquiry, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side. We ask about the size of the set, the file format, your drawing conventions and standard, and the date by which it needs to be finished. Usually you supply existing drawings that need a round of revisions, plus the details that go with them. Once we have enough information, we get started.
We do not invent our own CAD standard but adopt yours, including layer structure, hatching, title block and naming. That saves discussion afterwards and it saves correction work. For a first job we often advise starting small, with a defined part of the set, so you can judge our speed and accuracy before more work is handed over. We deliver in stages, gather feedback, make adjustments and carry on. We decide on the meeting rhythm together. With a tight schedule we speak every two days, with a calmer project weekly.
Files go back and forth by email, and on larger projects such as greenhouse construction projects we work with software you can log into to follow the project. We draft in our own environment with our own licences, so you do not need to arrange a workstation, licence or network access. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, followed by the conversation in which we agree the first step.
Clients who bring in extra drafting capacity
Extra drafting capacity is relevant for engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly for companies with a lot of technical drafting work. The people at the table are managers, team leaders and owners, and the reason is almost always the same. There is too little time, there are too few drafters, or there is a peak the in-house team cannot handle. A drawing office of four people runs a normal week just fine, but gets stuck as soon as two large projects come in at the same time. The project lead then sees that the hours do not add up and that the in-house team mostly gets round to revision work instead of the work the firm actually earns its money with.
That is the moment we come in. We take over the repetitive part: the revision round on an existing DWG set, drafting variants, updating as-built material and modelling components that keep coming back. That leaves the in-house team room for design and for consultation with the end client. We also see clients for whom the trigger is not a peak but structural volume, such as a manufacturer that needs drawings for every order. For Firefly we have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings, and much of that work consists of exactly that kind of repetition.
Our clients are based in the Netherlands and our focus is on the Netherlands. The work runs remotely, but we visit when a project calls for it, and you are welcome to visit us too. Whatever the situation, we only start once it is clear which part of the work is coming to 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.
What extra drafting capacity delivers in practice
In concrete terms, we deliver 2D drafting and, where needed, 3D modelling, as-built drawings and revisions. In 2D this means floor plans, sections, elevations, detail drawings, typical details, piping diagrams and production drawings, set up in your layer structure and title block. In 3D we model in Revit and Rhino, and for individual parts we use Inventor, following the structure you use in your own models. We build parametric Revit families, in other words smart components that adapt to a different size or a new situation without extra drafting. The material schedule runs along with them, so if the component changes, the schedule updates automatically. For a piping diagram in greenhouse construction that makes a big difference. If you need a valve in 90 and in 110 in AutoCAD, you draw it by hand every time, whereas a smart family is in place in a single action.
In that kind of work our approach saves at least seventy per cent of the time. As-built work is a category of its own. Firefly supplied material where the existing drawings had been printed incorrectly and partly drawn by hand, poorly legible and messy. We worked it out ourselves rather than calling the client constantly, and still delivered it neatly. We deliver our output in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format. We always run the latest versions and agree in advance which version you want to receive back. All the drafting work we deliver remains your intellectual property. What we do not deliver is engineering, so no calculations, no structural advice and no permit procedures.
Scaling up with a large, flexible team
Our team is already in place, so we do not need to recruit anyone before the work can start. For each project we deploy from our large, flexible team whatever the job requires, from one drafter for a small job to as many drafters as a large project needs. When it is urgent we add people immediately, and that is not just theory. For a deadline that could not move, our team worked evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, even during a planned holiday of Sam, the team leader.
With us, scaling up does not mean quality shifts with the pace. Every piece of work passes through at least three review layers. A drafter draws it, a second team member checks that work, Sam then reviews it as team leader and Barry, as project manager, gives it a final check.
As a result the number of errors stays minimal in practice, even when a large number of drafters are working on one set at the same time. If someone is off sick or on holiday, we replace that person and the work carries on. You pay no ongoing payroll costs and are not left with idle staff once volume drops. We charge per hour or per project at a fixed price, and we only bill productive working hours.
If someone steps away for five minutes for a coffee, we stop the clock. We do not work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription. Scaling down is just as possible as scaling up, and a short job is fine too. Sam directs the CAD team as team leader and remains responsible for the technical side and project supervision, however large the crew is at that moment.
Frequently asked questions about extra drafting capacity
Let us take on your extra drafting work
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.