A job ad headed 'Inventor drafter wanted' by no means always produces a candidate quickly. Meanwhile, the work just keeps coming. There is a peak in the drawing office, a deadline is approaching, and the project lead is spreading drafting work across people whose own schedules are already full.
We fill that gap without a recruitment process. Our large, variable team is already in place and scales with whatever each project requires. Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so onboarding is limited to your standard and your agreements.
Our work is drafting, not engineering. The work is done remotely from our own office, with our own licences and always on the latest versions. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, and when it is urgent we add people to the ongoing work immediately. If the volume later drops again, we take those people off just as easily.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Repetitive volume work where an Inventor drafter makes the difference
The work that comes to us is rarely the most exciting part of a project. It is the part with a lot of repetition: series of variants, views that have to be worked up again and again, revision rounds on sets that no longer match after a change in the workshop. That is exactly where a drawing office gets stuck. Not because it is difficult, but because there is so much of it and because it never produces a single day on which anyone feels they have made progress. We take over that volume. Our drafters handle this kind of work every day and do not need to work out from scratch each time how a set is structured.
When work comes in, we first look at where the repetition lies, because that is where most time can be saved. If the same part appears in five sizes in the set, we approach it differently than when every piece is unique. We explain that approach upfront, so you know why we spend more time on something than you expected. A second place where we save time is cleaning up existing sets.
A file that has grown over the years is full of duplicate layers, loose references and variants nobody uses any more. We tidy that up while we update it, in consultation with you rather than on our own initiative. The result is a set your own drawing office can work in faster afterwards, even without us. We report per part what we have cleaned up, so nobody goes looking later for a layer that was deliberately removed. A clean-up like that usually pays for itself by the very next revision round.
Parametric working and smart components
Part of the time we save comes from smart components rather than from drawing harder. In Revit, we build parametric families: components that adapt to a new situation or a different size. We make such a component once, and then place it wherever it is needed without drawing it again. Because the material schedule is linked, it updates automatically when a component changes. The clearest example from our practice comes from greenhouse construction.
Companies there often work in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not smart at building up components such as valves in piping systems. If you need a valve in 90 and in 110, you draw it by hand every time. We place it in a single action with a smart family. For this type of work, that saves at least seventy per cent of the time. We can clean up existing families and templates or build new ones, and which route makes more sense depends on the state of the existing set.
If a family set is very messy, rebuilding it is sometimes faster than repairing it, and we will tell you so. We also use Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault. For a client looking for drafting capacity, this is often the surprise: part of the work they wanted to fill simply disappears, because after a one-off investment it no longer needs to be done by hand. We estimate that set-up in hours beforehand, so you can see for yourself from how many repetitions it pays off. If that number is low, we simply draw it out.
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 our Inventor drafter delivers and how the set carries on
We deliver source files, not just an export nobody can work in any more. You receive the models and drawings in the formats your downstream process can handle, so DXF, DWG, Revit formats or STEP, and in practice any common CAD format. The intellectual property of what we make belongs to you, so you can carry on without us. The delivery contains the drawing types we agreed beforehand, built up according to your layer structure, your naming and your title blocks. We agree that level of detail explicitly, because a set that is structured just slightly differently from what you use internally costs more time later than it saves. Before anything leaves our office, it has passed through at least three review layers. A drafter draws, a second team member checks, Sam, our team leader, reviews it and Barry, our project manager, gives the final sign-off.
As a result, the number of errors stays minimal in practice and nobody on your side has to check the entire set. We deliver in stages, so you see early on what is coming and can adjust course. The set then goes on to production, to a supplier or into the archive. We build it with the next round in mind, because there is almost always a change. If that comes months later, we pick up the same set and keep the numbering intact. For your drawing office, that means a file that keeps growing rather than a series of loose variants nobody can tell apart any more. At handover, we record once more what the delivery includes.
Scaling up and cover within our Inventor team
Where a vacancy takes months, scaling up with us takes one conversation. We have a large, variable team and deploy per project what is needed, from one drafter for a small job to as many drafters as a large project requires. If something has to be delivered urgently, we add people to the ongoing work immediately. When the volume drops, we take them off again and you are not left with staff you do not use.
That is the practical difference with hiring. A permanent drafter comes with payroll costs that continue even when things are quiet, and leaves a gap during illness or holidays that nobody fills quickly. If someone drops out on our side, we replace them from our own team and the work carries on.
Project knowledge stays within our team, because Sam, as team leader, follows the technical side from start to finish. His background includes more than fifteen years in architecture, seven years in Iran and his own design firm in the Netherlands, and he still works as an engineer. Barry is the first point of contact for new enquiries and remains the familiar face for the client.
Onboarding costs us little, because everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience and the core of our team has around twenty-five years of combined practice. What does need to be aligned is your standard. We receive it from you and follow it, right down to the layer structure, naming and title blocks. Getting started with us usually needs no more preparation than that.
Frequently asked questions: Inventor drafter wanted
Hand your Inventor drafting over to us
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.