For most clients, the idea to hire a CAD engineer only comes up once the drafting work has already started piling up. First a revision round slips by a week. Then a set of as-built drawings is left untouched because the drawing office is tied up with an ongoing project. Eventually there is a deadline that cannot move and nobody is free any more.
We see that pattern at engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and it almost never starts with a lack of knowledge. It starts with a lack of hours.
Our team does outsourced drafting and modelling, entirely remotely, and we take on precisely the repetitive part that costs one of your own drafters days. We deliver 2D drafting, 3D modelling where needed, as-built drawings and revisions. Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and the core of our team has around twenty-five years of practice combined. If you are looking for capacity without ongoing payroll costs, you will find drafters with us who can get stuck in straight away.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The repetitive drafting work companies hire a CAD engineer for
The work clients hire a CAD engineer for is rarely the exciting design part. It is the volume underneath. Think of a piping schematic in greenhouse construction where a valve in 90 and 110 is drawn by hand onto the drawing over and over again. Think of a series of floor plans in which the same detailing recurs fifty times, or a revision round on a pile of existing DWGs where only dimensions and annotation differ. That work does not require engineering, it requires precision and perseverance. We draft, we do not calculate and we do not give structural advice.
It is precisely that boundary that makes the time savings predictable. One of your drafters who takes on work like this alongside their normal tasks loses their rhythm on the project work they were hired for. We take over the volume and keep it separate from their diary. In highly repetitive work we achieve at least seventy per cent time savings with smart components, because a part we build properly once can then be placed anywhere without drawing it again.
Our team scales with the size of the assignment. For a small series we deploy one drafter, and at a peak we deploy as many drafters as needed from our large, flexible team. That scaling up involves no recruitment process, because the team is already in place and we deploy what the project needs. When it is urgent, we add people immediately. That clears the backlog that had built up in the drawing office, while your own drafters stay on the side of the work where their project knowledge adds the most value.
What we deliver when you hire a CAD engineer
When you hire a CAD engineer from us, you do not get a vague promise of capacity but drafting work with a clearly defined outcome. In 2D we deliver floor plans, sections, elevations, detail sheets, standard details and piping schematics, including dimensions, hatching and annotation according to the structure you use. In 3D we model parts, assemblies and building models, and we generate the drawings from them so that model and sheet stay in sync. As-built drawings form a separate stream. We bring existing situations, field notes and old sheets back to a legible, up-to-date set.
Revision work is the fourth stream and often the largest in volume. We process a pile of DWGs with changes to dimensions, a modified grid or a different choice of component sheet by sheet, with a revision marker that matches your document control. We are just as clear about what we do not do. We do not make calculations, we do not give structural advice and we do not handle permit applications. Our role stops at drafting and modelling, and that keeps responsibilities clear.
Alongside the sheets we deliver the associated output, such as material schedules that update with the model and blocks or families your own drafting team can reuse afterwards. Delivery takes place in stages. We send a first batch, collect feedback, incorporate it and continue with the next part, so your project lead can see early on whether we are on the right track. Files go back and forth by email, and on larger projects such as greenhouse construction we use software that you can log into to follow progress. The intellectual property of our drawings passes entirely to you.
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.
Parametric Revit families and smart components
A large part of the time saved comes not from drawing faster, but from drawing less. To achieve that, we build parametric Revit families, in other words smart components. A component like that adapts to a new situation or a different size, so once it is built properly it can be placed anywhere without redrawing. The material schedule updates alongside it. If the component changes, the schedule changes automatically, which saves a manual check for every revision. The clearest example comes from our own work in greenhouse construction. Companies in that sector often work in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not smart at building up components such as valves in piping systems. If someone there needs a valve in 90 and 110, they draw it by hand every time. With a smart family it is placed in a single action, and in that kind of work it saves at least seventy per cent of the time.
The same logic applies to window frames, openings, brackets and other components that recur dozens of times in a set in slightly different sizes. We build families from scratch or clean up an existing library. Which is wiser depends on the state of that library. If a family library is clogged with duplicate variants, loose parameters and naming nobody follows any more, rebuilding is sometimes faster than repairing. We assess that in advance and set out the options, so that you make the choice rather than being presented with a fait accompli. Alongside Revit we use Grasshopper with Rhino, and to a limited extent Dynamo, when a series of variants is better solved with rules than with individual drawings.
Software, versions and formats our CAD engineers work in
Our main software is Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, and we also work with Inventor, Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault. We always run the latest versions, in our own environment and with our own licences. That is a deliberate choice. A hired drafter who has to work in your environment costs you administration, accounts, licences and explanation, and with us that overhead disappears entirely.
We deliver files in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format your downstream process requires. Fitting in with an existing set starts with the set itself and a brief review of it.
We ask for a representative sample sheet, a template, the layer structure and the drawing conventions you use in-house. We draw to those, even if they differ from what we would find more convenient ourselves, because a set that does not match the rest of your archive costs more time later than it saves. With older files, we watch for what a conversion breaks: broken references, missing hatching, text heights that jump.
We flag those points before we continue, so you know where a sheet differs from the original and why. If you have a mixed set in which AutoCAD sheets and Revit models exist side by side, we keep that separation as it is, unless you explicitly ask us to merge them. When you hire a CAD engineer this way, your own standard stays in charge and nothing needs straightening out afterwards.
Frequently asked questions about hiring a CAD engineer
Let us handle your CAD drafting volume
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.