The decision to outsource 2D drafting rarely starts with a strategic choice; it starts with a full week in the drawing office. There is a folder of floor plans that needs updating, a revision round on existing DWGs lands on top of it, and the two colleagues who were supposed to pick it up are stuck on a project that cannot slip.
The result is familiar. The simple drawings get pushed to the back, the changes pile up in the mailbox, and when the set has to go out, a lot of work still has to be done in a short time.
We are OutsourceCAD, and we take over that flat, repetitive part. We draft and model, nothing more, because engineering is not part of our work. Our clients are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers in the Netherlands, and around the table sit managers, team leaders and owners who are facing a capacity problem. We work from our own office, on our own licences, to the drawing conventions you supply.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Scaling up as soon as you outsource 2D drafting
We have a large, variable team and deploy as many drafters per project as the work requires. The team is already in place, so for us scaling up means deploying what the project needs rather than first going out to find someone. When it is urgent, we add people straight away. That is exactly the difference from your own team, where a peak cannot be solved by planning harder. A drawing office of four people cannot temporarily become eight. An outsourced team can, and after the peak it can just as easily go back to two.
What benefits clients most is that there are no ongoing payroll costs attached. We only bill genuine working hours. If someone steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the clock stops, which means you pay for drafting and not for attendance. If someone on our side is off sick or on holiday, we replace that person and the work carries on. With an in-house employee in the same situation, the work stops while the costs continue.
Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so a changeover within the project does not mean anyone has to be trained in the trade. What does take time is the project standard, and we pin that down at the start so every drafter who joins follows the same conventions. Without that, differences creep in between what one person and another produce, and that is exactly what makes a large set unusable.
Outsourcing 2D drafting compared with a freelancer or an in-house drafter
A freelancer is one person. That works well as long as the scope stays small and nothing gets in the way. If the job grows, there is no second pair of hands, and if the freelancer drops out, the work stops. With us there is a team behind it, so we scale up when volume increases and provide cover when someone is away. There is another difference that weighs more heavily in practice.
A freelancer delivers their own work, and checking it falls to you. With us, every piece goes through at least three review layers before it goes back: the drafter produces it, a second team member checks it, Sam as team leader reviews it next and Barry as project manager checks it last. A new permanent employee is a different story. That choice works when the work is structural and runs for years. For a peak or a temporary project, the recruitment time alone is often longer than the project itself, and after that you have a fixed cost that does not move with your order book.
Outsourcing 2D drafting sits right in between: capacity that can be switched on and off without a recruitment process and without an ongoing commitment. We do not claim it is always the better choice. For work that sits close to design decisions, someone in-house is more logical, because coordination then matters more than the number of sheets drawn. In the first conversation we therefore split the package into what goes out and what is better kept in-house.
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.
One fixed point of contact and an agreed meeting rhythm
For a new enquiry, Barry is the first point of contact. As soon as the project gets into the substance, Sam, the team leader, takes over the technical side and remains your fixed line. You therefore deal with one person and not with a changing series of drafters, even when more people are working on the project in the meantime. The process starts with a conversation in which we go through what is there and what needs to be finished. After that we deliver in stages. Each stage goes back, we collect feedback, process it and move on to the next part. That prevents a wrong assumption from only becoming visible at final delivery, when it affects half a set. We agree the rhythm per project. With a tight schedule we meet every two days, with calmer work weekly.
Email, phone and meetings carry the day-to-day contact. Files go back and forth by email, and on larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we use software you can log into to see for yourself where the project stands. The work is remote, but the contact does not have to be. We come to you or you come to us, depending on what the project needs. In practice that proves most useful at the start, when the drawing conventions and expectations still need to be set clearly. What remains later in the project is usually brief feedback per partial delivery and the occasional phone call about a detail missing from the source material.
Getting started with outsourced 2D drafting
As soon as enough information is available, we get started. In concrete terms that means three things: the details of the work, the existing drawings that need revising or supplementing, and your drawing conventions. You provide the latter. If there is no documented standard, we derive it from the set supplied and present our assumptions before any volume is produced.
We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, followed by a conversation in which we go through the project. What delays the start in practice is almost never our schedule, but incomplete source material. A set missing the latest changes costs more time later than supplying them at the start would.
Many clients begin with a small first assignment. That is a sensible route, because a defined part of the set, delivered within your own standard, shows how quickly and accurately we work without a large package being handed over straight away. A short assignment is fine too; we set no minimum size. We charge by the hour or per project at a fixed price, agreed together, and we do not work with a prepaid hours card or a monthly hours subscription.
The intellectual property rights to everything we draw belong to you. What we mainly want to see in a first conversation is the size of the set and the state of the source material supplied, because together those two determine most of the lead time. If you are considering whether to outsource 2D drafting, the fastest way to judge what it will deliver is to go through the documents together once.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing 2D drafting
Hand your 2D 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.