When you outsource drafting for refrigeration engineering, lead time is often the deciding factor. An installation company wins an order, installation is already scheduled and the drawings need to be ready sooner than your own drawing office can manage. That is when we scale with you.
With our large, variable team, we scale with each project, from a single drafter to as many drafters as needed, without a recruitment round first. Our team is already in place and everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so the only start-up time is in the project itself.
For urgent work, we add people straight away and divide the set across more hands. We draft and model, and leave engineering, calculations and structural decisions to you. We respond to a new enquiry within one to two working days, and we start as soon as we have enough information. A short first assignment is welcome, so your project leader can test our speed calmly before more work follows.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The drafting we produce in refrigeration engineering
Most of the work we receive is 2D drafting in AutoCAD. Specifically, that means floor plans with equipment layouts, piping schematics, sections, detail sheets and the associated sheet layout with stamps. We also model in Revit or Rhino when a plant room has to work spatially and the views need to come from the model. Revisions to existing DWG sets form a steady stream, because installations change and the drawing almost always lags behind. We also take on as-built drawings, including the investigative work involved when a dossier has been partly maintained by hand.
In addition, we build parametric Revit families, meaning components that adapt to a different size or a new situation. We create such a component once, and after that it is placed in a single action wherever it is needed, while the material schedule updates automatically. In piping work, that delivers the biggest gains. If you need a valve in 90 and in 110 in AutoCAD, you draw it by hand every time, and with a smart family that saves at least seventy percent of the time. We tailor the output to each assignment, because one client only wants source files while another also wants a complete plot set.
We deliver in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format. What we deliberately do not do is engineering, calculations, structural advice or permits. Our craft remains drafting and modelling, in high volumes and with the same precision a drawing office delivers itself. We stick to that boundary consistently, even when a client would like to add more to our plate.
Clients who outsource drafting in refrigeration engineering
The companies that approach us are engineering firms, manufacturers, contractors and architectural practices, as well as other companies with a lot of technical drafting. Around the table sit managers, team leaders and owners, people who are held accountable for the schedule themselves. Their problem is almost always capacity. There is an order, an installation date has been committed to, and the drawing office simply does not have those hours free. Sometimes there is a structural shortage of drafters, more often it is a peak the in-house team cannot handle alongside its regular work.
Hiring staff does not solve that, because a new employee only becomes productive months later and then stays on the payroll, even in a quiet period. We fill that gap without changing your staffing. You pay no ongoing payroll costs, and in case of illness or holiday we replace someone ourselves so the work carries on. Our clients are based in the Netherlands and our focus is on the Netherlands, so communication takes place in the same language and during the same working hours. We launched this service last year because a client asked for it, it worked well, and we have offered it as a standard service ever since.
For Firefly, we have completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings. What that partnership shows is that we keep working independently and do not hand back every ambiguity. That is exactly what a team leader looks for when hiring in capacity, because supervision costs them the very time they want to win back. We are happy to sign a non-disclosure agreement if a client values one.
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.
The process from first conversation to final sheet
Everything starts with a conversation in which we go through the project. You supply the details and usually also existing drawings that need a revision round. We look at how that set is structured, which layers and stamps it contains and which drawing conventions apply. We receive that standard from you and we stick to it, even when our team is used to doing things differently. If information is missing, we bundle our questions and ask them in one go. We then deliver in stages. That is not a formality, because feedback on the first sheets prevents a wrong assumption from still running through fifty sheets further on. After each partial delivery, we collect comments, process them and move on to the next block. The rhythm varies per client, from a meeting every two days to a weekly update, depending on how urgent the work is.
Day-to-day contact runs by email and phone, and where it helps we meet in person, at your premises or at our office. For one-off drafting jobs, files go back and forth by email. For larger projects, we work with software you can log into to follow progress yourself. We work in our own environment with our own licences, so nobody needs to arrange accounts or workstations. The intellectual property of everything we produce belongs to you, including the source files. When the project comes to an end, we hand over the complete set with no files held back and no locked components.
Checking drafting work before it leaves our office
We never deliver work that has only been seen by one person. Every drawing passes through at least three review layers. The drafter finishes the sheet, a second team member checks it in full, then Sam, our team leader, assesses the technical side, and finally Barry, our project manager, gives it a last check. Sam worked in Iran for seven years, has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, ran his own design firm in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer as well.
Because he comes from hands-on practice himself, he quickly spots when a detail works on paper but cannot be built during installation. Thanks to this set-up, the number of errors stays minimal in practice.
The errors we mainly stop this way are the ones that multiply. A deviating layer name, a wrong stamp field or a piping detail resolved differently on sheet four than on sheet forty costs more hours afterwards than the original drafting. In sets with a lot of repetition, something like that immediately carries through the whole series. That is why we pay just as much attention to consistency between sheets as to the individual sheet.
On top of that, the partial deliveries act as a safety net, because you review early on while any misunderstanding is still small. We do not guarantee zero errors, because no firm can deliver on that. What we do organise is the review process that keeps the chance of errors as small as possible, and that stays in place even with a tight schedule. If you want to read along yourself, we send you the interim result as soon as a block is finished.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing drafting for refrigeration engineering
Hand your refrigeration 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.