The need to get working drawings made often only comes up once things are already going wrong in your own team: a schedule that is overrunning, a drafter who has no room left for an extra package on top of regular work, or a deadline approaching while the drawings are not yet finished.
If that work stays on the shelf, the delay carries through into construction, and that usually costs more than outsourcing part of the package in time. At that point we step in with our large, flexible team that is already in place and gets straight to work, from one drafter to as many drafters as needed when the scope calls for it.
Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so no time is lost on onboarding before the first work is ready. Our process starts with a conversation in which you supply the details and usually existing documents, after which we deliver in stages and process your feedback until the result is right.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The cost side of getting working drawings made
We handle the cost of getting working drawings made in two ways: on an hourly basis or at a fixed project price, and we decide together with you which option suits best. If we work by the hour, we only bill productive working hours. If a drafter steps away for five minutes for a coffee, we deduct that time, so you only pay for what we have actually done on the package. With a fixed project price, the amount is set in advance, which gives clarity once the scope of the work is clear after a first conversation.
What mainly keeps costs down is how complete and well organised the information supplied is: the less investigating we have to do up front, the more focused our drafting. Reusing existing components helps as well, for example through a parametric Revit family that we build once and then use again and again without redrawing everything. We do not use prepaid blocks of hours or monthly hours subscriptions, which keeps invoicing simple for you.
There are no ongoing payroll costs attached to using our drafting team, and if a team member is ill or on holiday we replace that person so the work does not stop and you pay nothing extra for it. A short, clearly defined assignment can serve as a first step, so you can judge how quickly and accurately we work before outsourcing a larger package. We usually give a cost estimate after the first conversation, once it is clear exactly which working drawings are needed.
Scaling capacity when you get working drawings made
Getting working drawings made by no means always calls for the same level of staffing. We handle a small package with one drafter, while on a larger project we deploy as many drafters from our large, flexible team as the scope requires. We scale with the work, because our team is already in place and nobody has to be recruited or trained first. When it is urgent, we add extra people to an ongoing assignment straight away, so a tight schedule remains achievable.
If a team member is temporarily unavailable due to illness or holiday, we replace that person, so work on the working drawings does not stall and you do not have to find a solution yourself. You pay no ongoing payroll costs as you would for your own permanent employee, and we scale back down after the peak as soon as the staffing is no longer needed. At Firefly we have already applied this way of working on more than twenty projects, resulting in hundreds of drawings across different projects. When a deadline could not move, we also worked through evenings and weekends at the time, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, to complete the package on time, even during a planned holiday of Sam, our team leader.
Working drawings often need that flexibility in staffing, because the scope of a package only becomes truly clear to both sides after the first conversation. And when a project quietens down again after the peak, we adjust our staffing without any ongoing obligation in return.
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.
How the process runs from first conversation to delivery
With us, getting working drawings made always starts with a conversation in which you explain the situation. We discuss the details of the project and you usually also supply existing documents, such as earlier drawings or a sketch of what is needed. Based on that, we decide how best to divide up the package and which staffing suits it. We then deliver the work not all at once at the end, but in stages, so you can respond to the first drawings along the way. We process that feedback before we pick up the next part, which prevents a wrong assumption from only coming to light at the final delivery. Our contact rhythm differs per client: on one project we talk every two days, on another weekly contact is enough, depending on how quickly the package needs to be ready.
Files usually go back and forth by email, and on larger projects we work in software you can log in to yourself to follow progress. Throughout the project, every drawing goes through at least three review layers, from the drafter themselves to a final look by Barry, our project manager, before we call it final. The result is a set of working drawings that comes together step by step, with room to adjust course rather than having to fix something afterwards. We follow the same approach even on a small package, so you never face surprises at the final delivery.
Who needs working drawings made
Getting working drawings made mainly comes up at engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly at companies with technical drafting work. The people at the table are usually managers, team leaders or owners who can see a project getting stuck on drafting capacity that simply is not there. The trigger is almost always the same: too little time, too few drafters, or a peak that the in-house team cannot absorb alongside regular work.
For a contractor, it is sometimes a set of working drawings needed before construction starts on site, for a manufacturer a series of components that has to be fixed before production begins.
An architectural practice runs into this more often when a design has been approved and someone has to work it out into drawings the builders can actually build from, while the in-house team is already busy with the next design. An engineering firm comes across it on a project in which drafting capacity structurally lags behind the amount of work coming in. In all these cases we do not supply a temporary pair of hands for one task, but a drafting team that scales with the assignment and aligns with the standard you already use.
That way you remain responsible for the design and the choices within it, while we take on the hands-on drafting, from the first set-up to the final check before we deliver a drawing. A smaller client with a one-off peak can use our team in the same way, without needing to enter into a long-term commitment.
Frequently asked questions about getting working drawings made
Let us draw up your working 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.