If you wait too long to hire a 3D drafter temporarily, the problem shifts from the drawing office to the schedule. First a revision round is left undone, then detail sheets get pushed back, and eventually construction is waiting for drawings that do not exist yet.
Your own team usually solves this with overtime, and that works reasonably well for three weeks or so. After that, accuracy drops, precisely in the work where errors turn out most expensive later on.
During periods like that, we take over the repetitive drafting with a permanent team that is ready to go. All our people have more than ten years of CAD experience and draft in Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino. We work to the client's conventions, check internally in several rounds and deliver in stages. Below, you can read how such a temporary project runs, what we have taken away from our as-built work and how we safeguard quality throughout the project.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The process when you hire a 3D drafter temporarily
With us, a temporary project starts with a conversation, not a quote. We want to know what is waiting, how many sheets are involved, which dates are fixed and how your own team is used to drawing. The client then supplies the details, usually together with existing drawings that need revising. We go through all that material first. An ambiguity we resolve in advance costs a few minutes; the same ambiguity halfway through a series costs a day of corrective work. As soon as we have enough information, we can start, because our team is already in place and does not need to be recruited.
We deliver in blocks. The first block goes back, you review it, we process the comments and continue with the next part. We keep up that rhythm until the package is finished. We hold meetings every two days or weekly, depending on the urgency, via email, phone and scheduled contact. For one-off AutoCAD drafting work, we email the files. For larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we use software you log into to follow progress yourself.
When the assignment ends, the deployment stops with no notice period and no ongoing payroll costs. That is why many firms choose to hire temporarily rather than taking someone on straight away. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days. We say in advance which part we can handle within the set timeframe, rather than explaining afterwards why something did not work out. That is also what a project leader expects from temporary help.
As-built and revision work from our practice
The hardest work is rarely the most complex work, but the worst documented. For Firefly, we received as-built material in which the existing drawings had been printed incorrectly and were partly drawn by hand. The whole thing was hard to read and messy, and at a moment like that the easy route is obvious. Send it back, or call the client every day with a new question. We sorted it out ourselves and still delivered the set neatly. That choice says something about how we work.
A client hires drafting capacity to free up room, not to spend the whole week answering questions. We collect ambiguities and put them forward in one go, rather than sending them through in dribs and drabs. We also took practical lessons away from that project. With hand-drawn or poorly printed material, we start with a small trial block, so you can see early on which interpretation we are following. We also record the assumptions we make along the way, because they are worth their weight in gold at the next revision. In total, we have completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings for this client.
We apply the experience from that volume to every revision dossier that comes in, even when a client only brings us in for a few weeks. What we deliberately do not do is make the client pay for the lack of clarity in their own archive. Investigative work is part of this type of assignment, and we factor it in rather than presenting it as an extra. A revision dossier rarely arrives clean, and we are set up for that.
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.
Our drafters work to your CAD standards
Outsourced drafting rarely fails on technique and often fails on conventions. That is why we ask for the client's CAD standards at the start and stick to them. We adopt layer structure, layer names, line weights, hatching, stamps, sheet layout and file naming from the existing set. A sample sheet from a previously approved project helps us more than a long manual, because it shows us how the conventions are applied in practice. We do not impose our own preferences on a set that has been in use for years. If a convention is missing, we make a proposal, record it and then apply it consistently, even if more drafters join later. That keeps a series of hundreds of sheets recognisable as one whole. This point carries a lot of weight when firms hire a 3D drafter temporarily, because temporary work that deviates from the standard only creates rework for the client.
We draft in our own environment with our own licences, always on the latest versions, and deliver back in DXF, DWG, Revit formats or STEP. Beyond that, you do not need to set up a workstation or account for us. The intellectual property of everything we draw belongs to the client, so the set remains your firm's own. We also note any deviations we come across in the existing set, so your firm knows where the old sheets do not match your own conventions. We include that list with the delivery. You benefit from it directly in the next revision round.
Three review layers on every temporary drafting package
Work that leaves our office has been through at least three review rounds. A drafter produces the sheet, a second team member checks that work, Sam, our team leader, then looks at the technical side, and Barry, our project manager, gives it a final check. That sequence is fixed and also applies to small packages. In practice, this keeps the number of errors to a minimum.
Even more important is what this set-up prevents at volume. A systematic deviation, such as a wrong layer or a detail at the wrong scale, is spotted in the first block, not after three hundred sheets have copied the error. Sam has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years, ran his own design practice in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer, so he quickly sees when a drawing is technically wrong.
For the client, this means your own project leader does not have to act as final checker. Our checks do not replace your firm's approval, but they do ensure there is little left to correct. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, a team member steps in and the same review process stays in place.
For a deadline that could not move, our team previously worked evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, and even then the review rounds stayed in place. We process small corrections in the current round, so you are not left with a list of outstanding items after the project ends. We also report what we have changed and why.
Frequently asked questions about hiring a 3D drafter temporarily
Let us take on your drafting peak
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.