A drawing office manager thinking about getting DWG drawings drafted usually compares three routes. Hiring someone, bringing in a self-employed drafter, or handing the work to a drafting firm. Recruitment takes weeks to months and then creates a fixed cost that remains once the peak is over.
A self-employed drafter is on board faster, but is a single individual with no backup and no second pair of eyes on the work. We offer the third route.
Our large, flexible team is already in place, we deploy what the project requires and scale up or down per project. If someone is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work continues. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and every piece of work passes through several review layers before it leaves the office. You pay no ongoing payroll costs and keep a fixed point of contact. We respond to an enquiry within 1 to 2 working days.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
When outsourcing DWG drawings makes sense
Outsourcing is not always the answer, and we would rather say so upfront than afterwards. Work that is closely intertwined with internal engineering decisions is better kept in-house, simply because coordination would then take more time than the drafting itself. The same goes for small, one-off changes that someone can make in five minutes. Our added value lies elsewhere. We are strong in volume and repetition: a revision round across a few hundred DWGs, an as-built file that has been left lying around, a series of variants in which the same structure keeps coming back.
That is exactly the work that ends up at the bottom of the pile in an in-house drawing office, because new work takes priority and revisions seem to have no deadline until they suddenly do. Outsourcing also makes sense when a peak is temporary. If you need extra capacity for four months, you do not set up a vacancy for it. We scale with you and then scale back down, without anything being left behind. It makes less sense when the source material is completely unclear and nobody is available to answer questions.
We often solve that too, but the investigation work then takes time that shows up on the invoice. Companies that get DWG drawings drafted do well to organise their documents and drawing conventions in advance. That is the cheapest measure there is. In the first conversation, we are happy to think along with you about which part belongs with us and which part stays in-house. That conversation costs nothing and often already results in a sharper scope.
The cost side of getting DWG drawings drafted
We charge by the hour or a fixed price per project. We decide which option fits together with you, not according to a fixed formula. We choose an hourly basis for work whose scope only really becomes clear during drafting, such as a revision round on a set of unknown quality. A fixed project price suits a well-defined assignment with a counted number of drawings and a known structure. On an hourly basis, we only bill actual working hours. As soon as someone goes for a five-minute coffee, we stop the clock.
That may sound petty, but it is exactly what sets us apart from an agency arrangement in which presence is the unit of charge. With us there are no ongoing payroll costs, no prepaid hour bundles and no monthly hours subscription. Quiet weeks therefore cost nothing. What else keeps costs down is something you can influence yourself. Documented CAD standards save investigation time. Legible source material saves reconstruction.
A clear picture of which variants are still to come lets us set up the work so that repetition saves time later. And a fixed contact person who answers a detail question within a day prevents a drafter from standing idle. We only produce an estimate after we have seen the documents, because an estimate based on a description is a guess. That is why we do not quote a rate as long as we do not know the work. After a conversation and a look at a representative set, it can quickly be made concrete. If you want to speed that up, send a few sample files along with your enquiry.
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 companies this applies to in practice
Our assignments come from engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly from companies with technical drafting work. The people we talk to are managers, team leaders and owners, in other words people who keep an eye on both the schedule and the bill. The reason is almost always the same: too little time, too few drafters, or a peak that the in-house team cannot handle. The problem on the table is rarely the drafting itself. It is the pile that keeps growing while new assignments come in that nobody wants to turn down. At an engineering firm, we often see this in the form of revisions that lag behind reality, so the set on site no longer matches what has been built. At a manufacturer, it is more likely to be a product line with dozens of variants, each requiring its own drawings.
At a contractor, it is regularly as-built material that still needs processing while the next project is already under way. Our clients are based in the Netherlands, and that is where our focus lies. We carry out the work entirely remotely from our own office, and clients are welcome to visit whenever they like. We started this service last year because a client asked for it. We have since drafted hundreds of drawings for Firefly across more than twenty projects. That is still a short list, and we do not hide it. It is, however, exactly the kind of work that companies getting DWG drawings drafted typically come to us with. If you are a team leader and recognise that picture, a short conversation is the quickest way to find out whether our work is a good fit.
From the first conversation to delivery of your DWG drawings
It starts with a conversation in which we go through the project. You supply the details and, usually, existing drawings that need revising. Your CAD standards come with that: the drawing manual, templates, layer structure and title blocks. If none of that is documented, we derive the conventions from a representative file and have those agreements confirmed before we press on.
We start as soon as enough information is available. We then deliver in stages. A first part goes to you, we gather feedback, make adjustments and move on to the next part. That prevents a wrong interpretation from copying itself through the entire set, and it gives your project leader early insight into the quality.
The meeting rhythm varies per client. With a tight schedule we talk every two days, while on a calmer project weekly is enough. Contact runs through email, phone and meetings, and visits in both directions are possible. For standalone drafting work, files go back and forth by email, which in practice is fastest. On larger projects, such as the greenhouse construction projects we run, we use software that you can log into to follow progress.
Before a set leaves the office, it passes through at least three review layers. The intellectual property belongs to you, and we supply the source files in DWG, DXF, Revit formats or STEP. A phone call or the contact form is enough to schedule the conversation. What happens next depends on what is on the table, and we decide that together.
Frequently asked questions about getting DWG drawings drafted
Let us draft your DWG drawings
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.