Companies that put off kitchen manufacturing drafting outsourcing for too long usually see the same pattern develop in their own drawing office. Production drawings get priority, because they have to go to the workshop. Tidying up, the revision round on the existing set and building decent components keep getting pushed back.
Meanwhile, someone draws a cabinet variant for the umpteenth time that already exists in a different size. That costs hours nobody ever gets back and makes the set a little messier every month.
That is exactly the part we take over. Our team is already in place and is large and variable, so we scale up or down per project to match what the work requires. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and we work to your drawing conventions. We draft and model; we do not do engineering. When an enquiry comes in, we respond within 1 to 2 working days. We can start as soon as we have enough information, and the work is carried out remotely from our own office.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The repetitive side of kitchen drafting
In kitchen manufacturing, the volume is not in the special sheet but in the repetition. A cabinet build-up recurs in dozens of widths, a connection to a sloping wall comes back on every project, and a front drawing differs from the previous one only in size and material. The same logic applies to panel schedules, drilling patterns, carcass details and the layout drawings that have to be produced again for every project. Each sheet on its own is quickly done. Added together, entire weeks disappear into work that has already been thought through once.
We are set up for exactly that kind of work, because high-volume drafting with a lot of repetition is our daily practice. For us, the time savings come from three places. First, staffing, because we can put several drafters on a package in parallel without you having to hire anyone. Second, set-up, because we build components that keep recurring as smart components instead of drawing them again every time. Third, sequence, because we group the variants rather than jumping through the set project by project.
What your own drawing office keeps is the time for work only it can do: the special situations, discussions with the customer and coordination with the workshop. We started this service last year because a client asked for it, and since then we have offered it as a standard service in the Netherlands. Back then, too, the reason was capacity, because a peak could no longer be absorbed by the in-house team.
What we deliver when you outsource your drafting
Our deliverables consist of 2D drafting and, where the project calls for it, 3D modelling. Specifically, this covers layout drawings, floor plans and elevations of the fit-out, carcass and front drawings, detail sheets of connections and finishes, assemblies and the accompanying schedules. We also do a lot of revision work. A dimension or a material changes, and we apply that change consistently across every sheet it affects, using your revision marking. We also produce as-built drawings, even when the material supplied is far from tidy.
At Firefly, we took on an as-built file where the drawings had been printed incorrectly and were partly drawn by hand. We worked that out ourselves instead of calling the project leader every day, and still returned it neatly. The output goes back as source files, with your title block, layer structure and file naming, so the set fits straight into your own archive. Our boundary is clear. We do not make calculations, give structural advice, handle permits or take design decisions about materials or layout.
Whatever the work preparation engineer or designer sets out, we put on the sheet verifiably. Where the documents supplied contradict each other, we raise the point with a proposal attached rather than deciding ourselves. You retain the intellectual property of every drawing we make. Alongside the sheet work, we can also take on the library those sheets are built from, because that is where most hidden time sits for many kitchen manufacturers. We state in advance which part of such a clean-up already pays for itself in the current project and which part only pays off later.
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.
Smart components in kitchen manufacturing drafting
Repetition is the reason we build parametric Revit families. Such a smart component adapts to a new situation or a different size, so a drafter builds the component once and then places it anywhere without drawing it again. The material schedule updates along with it, so if the component changes, the schedule changes automatically and nobody needs to update a list by hand. An example from our own practice shows how much that saves. Companies in greenhouse construction often work in AutoCAD, and that package is not smart at building up components such as valves in piping systems. If you need a valve in 90 and in 110 there, you draw it by hand from scratch every time. With a smart family, it is placed in a single action, and in that kind of work that saves at least seventy per cent of the time.
In cabinet work, a carcass or a front behaves no differently, because there too it is all about variants on a fixed build-up. We can clean up or rebuild existing families and templates. Which makes more sense depends on the state of the set. If a family set is very messy, with duplicate and half-working variants, rebuilding is sometimes faster than repairing. We review the library first and then explain what we would do. If it does not pay off, we say so too, because for a component that only occurs once, the set-up never pays for itself. We make that assessment in advance, not halfway through, so no hours go into a component nobody places a second time.
File formats and versions in our drafting
Our main software is Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, supplemented by Inventor and Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault. Which package we choose depends on what happens to the drawing after us. If the project runs in a model, we keep the model structure intact and generate the sheets from it. If it concerns separate production sheets for the workshop, AutoCAD is often the quickest route.
We use Rhino where the shape is freer than straight cabinet logic allows, and Inventor where components are heading into production. Exchange takes place via DXF, DWG, STEP and the Revit formats, and in practice we handle any common CAD format a client sends us.
STEP is often the bridge between packages, so geometry from another system still arrives on our desk in a usable state. We always run the latest versions. If your drawing office runs on an older release, we agree in advance which version we deliver in, so nobody receives a file that will not open locally. For us, fitting in with your existing set means more than choosing the right format.
We adopt your title block, place geometry on the layers that already exist, follow your naming and use the symbols and hatches that apply in your archive. We work in our own environment with our own licences, so you do not set up a workstation for us. A test file in the first week removes most of the uncertainty.
Frequently asked questions about kitchen manufacturing drafting outsourcing
Let us handle your kitchen drafting
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.