If you are considering outsourcing drafting by the hour, you mainly want to know who does the work and how it is organised. We work with a permanent team of drafters who all have more than ten years of CAD experience, led by Sam, our team leader. He has well over fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years, had his own design practice in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer.
We allocate the work within our own office, draft in our own environment with our own licences and deliver in the format you use.
We draft and model, nothing more, because we leave engineering and calculations with you. On an hourly basis, we record only net working hours. If someone goes to get a coffee for five minutes, our time recording stops. We respond to a request within 1 to 2 working days and then go through the project by phone or in a meeting. What we draft remains your property, including the source files we deliver.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Scaling up capacity when you outsource drafting by the hour
Our staffing adapts to the assignment. We start small where possible and, with our large, flexible team, scale up to as many drafters as the volume requires. We can do that because the team is already in place. We do not need to recruit anyone, onboard them or arrange a licence before the work can get going. In urgent cases, we add people straight away, after which Sam reallocates the work. Conversely, we scale down just as easily once the peak has passed. That is exactly why firms outsource drafting by the hour instead of hiring someone: the costs follow the work rather than the calendar.
If one of our drafters drops out through illness or holiday, we put someone else on it and the project continues. So you do not carry that risk. Because we record your drawing conventions at the start, a colleague can take over the file without reopening the whole discussion about design criteria. In practice, your project leader hardly notices the switch.
We track hours per person and per component, so it stays clear where the time goes. If a component clearly runs differently from our estimate, we tell you during the project and not only on the invoice. We do not work with prepaid hour bundles or monthly hour subscriptions, because they fit poorly with work that comes in waves. That way, a drawing office keeps a peak under control without being left with a structural commitment.
Outsourcing drafting by the hour versus a freelancer or an in-house drafter
A new permanent drafter costs recruitment, onboarding time, a workstation, a licence and then ongoing wage costs, even in the quieter months. With us, you only pay for the hours we actually spend on your drawings. The difference from a single freelancer lies elsewhere. A freelancer supplies a pair of hands; we supply a team with an internal review structure. Our work goes through at least three review layers before it goes out: the drafter produces it, a second team member checks it, Sam as team leader reviews the technical side and finally Barry, our project manager, goes over it.
A self-employed professional checks their own work, and with large series that is a real risk. Moreover, a freelancer drops out when they are ill or start another job, whereas we cover internally. Knowledge building also differs. What we learn about a client's standard and drawing conventions remains available within our team, even when a different drafter is on the job. At the same time, we are honest about the limits: if a firm has ongoing work for a full-time person who sits next to the structural engineer every day, an in-house employee makes more sense in the long run.
Outsourcing drafting by the hour is especially strong for peaks, clearly defined packages and repetitive work that your own team would rather not do. We launched this service last year at a client's request, and it has been a fixed part of our offering ever since. A firm torn between the two routes can compare them side by side on a clearly defined package. We will also tell you where our approach is less suitable, because that saves disappointment 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.
A fixed point of contact and a clear meeting rhythm
For a new request, Barry is usually the first point of contact. As soon as it gets technical, Sam takes over that part. That gives you a fixed line, and you do not have to explain to a different drafter every week what the intention is. We agree the rhythm per client. With a tight schedule we meet every two days, on calmer projects weekly. Day-to-day contact runs by email, phone and meetings, and we generally send files back and forth by email. On larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we work with software that you can log into to follow the project's progress. For standalone AutoCAD drafting we stick to email, because an extra environment only adds noise there. We deliberately deliver in batches. Your project leader then sees early on whether our interpretation is right, gives feedback, and we process it before the next batch goes out.
That prevents a deviation from quietly copying itself through a whole set. Visits are possible in both directions: we come to you or you come to our office. The work itself stays remote, because our people draft in our own environment. If you outsource drafting by the hour, that is convenient, because you do not have to set up a workstation, licence or network access. Our focus is on the Netherlands, and that is where our clients are based. We also think it is important that a project leader can reach us without going through a formal procedure. If our drafters have doubts about a dimension or a design criterion, we collect those points and raise them all at once instead of letting them trickle in one by one.
Getting started with outsourcing drafting by the hour
We can begin as soon as we have enough information. In most cases, that means the existing drawings or source material, the details that are still missing, your firm's CAD standards and a picture of the required output and schedule. If the standard is not written down, we derive the conventions from the set supplied and put our assumptions to you for confirmation. We then assign the drafters and the work starts.
Many clients first give us a small assignment to assess our speed and accuracy. We think that is sensible, because both sides then know after a short period whether it is working. So a short assignment is fine, and there is no minimum order. We work in Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, as well as Inventor, Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault, always on the latest versions.
Supply and delivery can be in DXF, DWG, Revit formats, STEP and in practice any common CAD format. Working on an hourly basis is possible, but a fixed project price is also an option if the scope is clear. We decide in the first conversation which form fits best. Everything we produce remains your property, including the source files. We have not yet signed a non-disclosure agreement because clients have not asked for one, but we are open to an NDA.
A phone call or the contact form is enough to get the conversation going. In that conversation, we go through the material, identify what is still missing and indicate what staffing the work needs. If it turns out that an assignment is poorly suited to outsourcing, we simply say so. It does us no good to start a project that mainly generates coordination time.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing drafting by the hour
Hand your hourly drafting work 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.