If you are considering whether to outsource drafting for kitchen manufacturing, you will first want to know who does the work and how we organise it. With us, a permanent team does it, not a rotating pool and not an intermediary. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and the core of our team brings around twenty-five years between them.
Sam, our team leader, directs the CAD team, oversees the technical side and supervises the project from start to finish.
Barry, our project manager, picks up a new enquiry first, so you know straight away who you are dealing with. We provide drafting and modelling, but not engineering. We leave calculations and structural decisions with you, because that is where they belong. We carry out the work from our own office, in our own environment and with our own licences. Clients are welcome to visit and we also come to them, but the work itself is done remotely. We focus on the Netherlands and respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
From first conversation to partial delivery in kitchen manufacturing
The process starts with a conversation in which we go through the project. You explain what is there, what schedule is attached and how your production is set up, and we keep asking questions until we have the full picture. We then receive the documents, usually existing drawings that need revising, supplemented with dimensions, cabinet build-up, material choices and a drawing convention. In kitchen manufacturing, that often includes a site survey report or a series of photos of the existing situation. We work out as much as possible ourselves before we call, because a drawing office that spends all day answering questions gets nowhere.
On an as-built file for Firefly, we were supplied with material that had been printed incorrectly and was partly drawn by hand, and we unravelled it ourselves until we had a neat set. Next, we divide up the set and deploy the number of drafters the volume requires. We deliver in stages. We deliberately schedule the first partial delivery early, for example a few complete cabinet plans, so the project lead can see whether our approach is right before there are two hundred sheets.
We process their comments and only then continue drafting. We match the meeting rhythm to the pace of the project, so every two days on a tight schedule and weekly on a calmer project. Day-to-day contact runs via email and phone. When you outsource drafting in kitchen manufacturing, this way of working prevents an incorrect assumption, about a plinth finish for example, from running through the entire order. At the end, we deliver the complete set in the format you use.
Software, versions and formats for kitchen manufacturing drafting
Our main packages are Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, supplemented by Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a limited extent Dynamo and Vault. For kitchen projects, the focus is usually on AutoCAD for the 2D set and on Revit or Rhino as soon as 3D modelling is needed. Our licences are always on the latest version, so we rarely run into version conflicts. If you deliberately work in an older release, we save back to it so your own drafters can open the file without any hassle. We deliver files in DWG and DXF, in Revit formats and where necessary as a STEP file, and in any other common CAD format.
More important than the package is how well the work fits into your existing set. We adopt the layer structure, naming, title blocks, hatching and block names you already use, because a drawing that is correct in content but does not fit into your archive still creates work later. We build blocks and components that keep recurring in a smart way. In Revit, we create parametric families, in other words components that adapt to a different size or situation. Nobody then draws a cabinet carcass or a handleless front in several widths by hand again, because the part is placed in a single action and the material schedule updates automatically.
If the part changes, the schedule changes. When you outsource drafting in kitchen manufacturing, a set-up like that saves at least seventy per cent of the time on repetitive work. If the existing family set is very messy, we clean it up or rebuild it, depending on which is quicker. We assess that case by case and tell you honestly what we see.
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.
Scaling capacity without bringing the drafting to a standstill
Our staffing moves with the project. For a single order, we assign one drafter; for a large project fit-out, we bring in as many drafters from our large, variable team as are needed. We do not have to recruit that team, because it is already there and we simply decide who works on what. If an urgent request comes in, we add people straight away rather than putting you in a queue. Conversely, we scale back down as soon as the peak is over, without any costs carrying on. That is because you pay no fixed payroll costs, no holiday days and no idle time between two orders with us. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work carries on. Because several team members work on a project, a replacement does not have to read up from scratch, and Sam, as team leader, keeps hold of the common thread.
That is exactly the difference from a single self-employed professional, who drops out with no backup. When a deadline cannot slip, we push on too. Our team has previously worked evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, to meet a delivery date, and the work carried on as normal even during a planned holiday of Sam's. We do not use that kind of effort as a standard recipe, but it shows what we do when it really matters. What scaling up mainly achieves in kitchen manufacturing drafting is that your own drawing office does not grind to a halt. Your permanent drafters keep the work that relies on production knowledge, and we take over the volume and the repetitive part.
Getting started with outsourcing and what we need
We can start as soon as we have enough information to continue drafting independently. In concrete terms, that means the existing files, the dimensions, the design starting points and your drawing conventions. A sample sheet from a previous project helps us enormously, because from it we take in one go the style, layers and detailing you are used to. If something is missing, we ask and never make anything up.
A short job is perfectly fine with us. Many clients start with a limited set, such as one kitchen layout with the associated details, to judge our speed and accuracy before handing over an entire flow of orders. We do not ask for a long-term commitment for this, and we do not work with a prepaid hours card or a monthly hours subscription.
We charge by the hour or a fixed price per project, and we only bill pure working hours. The intellectual property of everything we draw belongs to you, including the families and templates we build along the way. Our clients have not asked for a non-disclosure agreement so far, but we are open to an NDA and will sign it before the first file reaches us.
We do not need access to your network, because we work in our own environment. First contact is by phone or through the contact form on our website, followed by a conversation in which we go through the project. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days. If you are seriously considering outsourcing drafting for kitchen manufacturing, you will know where you stand after that conversation.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing drafting for kitchen manufacturing
Hand your kitchen 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.