The question behind outsourcing drafting for electrical engineering is almost always the same: can an external team take over the volume work without your own CAD standards suffering? Our answer is yes, on one condition: we draft according to your conventions, not our own.
We ask for your drawing protocol, a sample sheet and your symbol set in advance, and we adopt them in full. We then take over the production side, meaning the floor plans with cable routes, the panel layouts, the schematics and the endless series of near-identical sheets that a project leader rarely wants to draw personally.
Our team consists of drafters with more than ten years of CAD experience, led by Sam, our team leader, who still works as an engineer. We do not run calculations and we do not design installations, because that remains your domain. We make sure the drawings are correct, complete and returned on time. What remains for your own drawing office is reviewing and pushing ahead.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The repetitive side of electrical engineering drafting
Electrical drafting involves a large share of repetition, and that is exactly where we deliver the gains. Think of an apartment complex in which eighty homes get the same distribution board layout, each with its own sheet number and its own cable list. Or a commercial hall in which the light fittings and socket outlets recur identically in every bay, with only a shift in the grid lines. Sheets like these take an experienced drafter little thought but many hours, and those hours come out of the work your own drawing office is really needed for.
We pick up that volume and keep the pace high because we can put several people on it at the same time. A second source of repetition is the revision round. As soon as the installer on site deviates from the drawing, every affected sheet has to be updated, including the symbol list, the legend and the cross-references between sheets. We process those changes systematically, sheet by sheet, rather than only where the comment was made.
That prevents a dossier from slowly falling apart. The third category is clean-up work. A file that has passed through five pairs of hands often contains duplicate layers, stray blocks and text that is no longer on the correct layer. We straighten out a set like that and bring it back to the structure your firm uses. For you, this means the tedious, time-consuming part lies with us and the substantive part stays in-house. That precise split is the reason most firms bring us in.
The electrical drafting we deliver
Our work starts in 2D and ends wherever you want it to. We draw installation floor plans with cable routes, cable trays and the positions of light fittings, switchgear and connection points, plus the associated sheet layout and cross-references. We detail panel layouts and elevations of distribution boards based on the data your firm supplies. We redraw schematics according to the structure specified, using the symbols and codes from your standard. Where a project runs in 3D, we model in Revit and take into account the space other disciplines occupy, so a cable tray does not run through a duct.
Processing as-built information is a standard part of what we do, even when the material supplied consists of poorly legible printouts with handwritten corrections. We work that out ourselves and only come back with questions when there is a genuine decision for you to make. We deliver our output in DWG and DXF, in Revit formats and in STEP where appropriate, supplemented by print-ready PDF sets per sheet layout. We also supply the material schedules and item lists that follow from the model. What we do not do is engineering, so we do not determine cable cross-sections, produce calculations or advise on installation choices.
You supply the design parameters and we turn them into a set the contractor can read without asking questions. That separation keeps the roles clear. It also allows us to focus entirely on speed and accuracy in the drafting. We agree in advance, in the intake meeting, which sheets we take over and which your firm keeps.
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 Revit families for electrical engineering
Much of the time saved comes not from drafting faster but from building smarter. We create parametric Revit families, in other words components that adapt to a new situation or a different size. Without such a family, a drafter has to draw a distribution board that comes in three widths three separate times. With a parametric family, we build it once and then place it anywhere, with the correct size as a setting. The material schedule updates along with it, so if the component changes, the schedule changes automatically. That not only saves hours, it also removes a source of errors, because nobody copies an old variant that has since become outdated. How big the effect can be is clear from our work in greenhouse construction. There, companies working in AutoCAD redrew every valve in 90 and 110 by hand each time, whereas a smart family places it in a single action.
In that kind of work, it saves at least seventy percent of the time. For a firm with a lot of electrical engineering in its portfolio, the same gain is within reach, especially for standard components that recur in dozens of projects. We can clean up an existing family set or build a new one. Which is wiser depends on the state of what is there. A set that has become clogged over the years with variants and loose copies is sometimes faster to rebuild than to repair. We make that trade-off together with you, after going through the existing set. Any family we build remains your property and can therefore be used in every future project.
Software and formats when you outsource drafting
We work in our own environment with our own licences, not in yours. That saves hassle with access, accounts and administration, and it means we can start as soon as the files arrive. We draft mainly in Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino. On top of that come Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a limited extent Dynamo and Vault. We always run the latest versions, which matters especially on Revit projects where you stick to a particular version.
If a firm deliberately stays a version behind, we agree on that in advance, so no files are created that they can no longer open. We deliver files in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format.
Fitting in with an existing set is business as usual for us. We adopt the layer structure, line styles, block names, stamps and naming scheme from the material we receive. If documentation is missing, we derive the conventions from a representative sheet and briefly present those assumptions to you. For one-off AutoCAD drafting, files are simply exchanged by email. For larger projects, we use software you log into to follow progress, as we do on greenhouse construction projects.
The intellectual property of everything that leaves our hands belongs to you. If you are looking for a partner to outsource drafting for electrical engineering, you can test with a small package whether this fits into your own workflow. If fitting in with the existing environment proves difficult, both sides will see that within a few days rather than after months.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing drafting for electrical engineering
Hand your electrical 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.