When you outsource drafting for work preparation, it is usually about one recognisable package: a stack of existing DWG files that need a round of revisions, a series of details that recurs for every house or unit, and an as-built file that still needs tidying up before it goes into the archive.
We take that work off your hands. We draft and model; we do not do engineering and we do not make calculations. That leaves a work preparation engineer time for planning, purchasing and coordination with the site, while the drafting package runs through us.
We work entirely remotely from our own office, with our own licences and according to your drawing conventions. It is outsourced drafting in high volume with a lot of repetition, and that is exactly where our strength lies. Our large, variable team scales with each project and grows immediately when a peak calls for it. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, and we then go through the documents with you in a conversation.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Scaling up with a large, flexible team for work preparation
For almost all of our clients, capacity is the reason they come to us. The order book fills up, a project comes in that was not planned, and your own drawing office is already at the limit of what it can handle. We absorb that with a team that is already in place. We do not need to recruit anyone or train anyone in the trade, because everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience. For a small job, we assign one drafter, and for larger packages we bring in as many drafters from our large team as are needed.
When it is urgent, we add people straight away rather than stretching the schedule further. When things quieten down again, we scale down just as easily. Work preparation pays no ongoing payroll costs with us, because there is no permanent staff on the payroll that keeps running in quiet months. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work carries on. For a work preparation engineer, that is a real difference from an in-house drafter who is at home with flu while the delivery date stays put.
We do not work with a prepaid hours card or a monthly hours subscription, so there is no obligation left hanging after the peak. We have now completed more than twenty projects for Firefly and delivered hundreds of drawings, and those volumes call for exactly this kind of flexible staffing. We keep the core of the team on a project the same, even when people join temporarily, so that the agreements made do not have to be explained again every week.
The difference from a freelancer or a permanent drafter
When drafting capacity runs short, a work preparation engineer broadly has three options. Hire someone, bring in a freelancer, or hand the package to a team like ours. Hiring means recruitment, onboarding time and fixed costs, and that is hard to justify if the workload mainly comes in peaks. A freelancer is quicker to arrange, but there is one person on the job. If that person goes on holiday or moves on to a better-paid assignment, the drafting comes to a standstill.
With us, there is a team behind it. Someone else always checks the work, someone can always step in, and knowledge of the project stays within that team rather than with one individual. A second difference lies in checking. A solo drafter delivers their own work without a second pair of eyes, whereas with us every drawing passes through at least three review layers before it leaves the office. A third difference is scalability.
A freelancer cannot suddenly start a revision round with five people at once; we can. To be fair, we do not sit at a desk in your building. We work remotely in our own environment, so if you value having someone physically working in your drawing office, you will make a different choice. In practice, we find that most work preparation engineers are perfectly happy with this as long as communication runs smoothly and deliveries are correct. Otherwise, it differs little from in-house capacity: the intellectual property belongs to you and we draft to your standard.
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.
Working with work preparation: point of contact and meeting rhythm
Outsourced drafting stands or falls on coordination. So we keep it simple. Barry, our project manager, is the first point of contact for a new enquiry, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side and remains your fixed contact. So the work preparation engineer has one line of contact and does not have to find out which drafter is working on which sheet. We agree the rhythm per project. On a tight schedule, we meet every two days; on a calmer project, a weekly check-in is enough. Day-to-day contact runs via email, phone and short meetings, and we come to you or welcome you at our office. For one-off AutoCAD work, files go back and forth by email. On larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we use software you can log in to and follow the project's progress yourself.
That saves you having to ask how far along it is. We deliver in stages and gather feedback after each stage, because a correction on ten drawings is cheaper than the same correction on a hundred. Sam directs our CAD team and is responsible for the technical side and project supervision, with more than fifteen years of background in architecture and a past as owner of a design practice in the Netherlands. As a result, he speaks the language of work preparation and does not need everything explained. We do ask for clarity on priorities: if five packages come in at once, we want to know which one is needed on site first. You decide that order, and we carry it out.
Getting started with outsourced drafting in work preparation
We start as soon as the information we need is in. That sounds vague, but in practice it is a short list. We need the project details, the existing drawings we will continue working on, and your CAD standards or drawing conventions. A template and one representative drawing help enormously, because from them we derive the layer structure, naming and sheet layout.
If there is no written standard, we reconstruct the conventions from the set supplied and submit them for confirmation. The process always begins with a conversation in which we go through the project. We respond to an enquiry within 1 to 2 working days.
After that, the pace depends mainly on how complete the material supplied is, because a clean set goes faster than a file that is half hand-drawn. A short job is fine. We like to start with a small, self-contained block so that work preparation can judge our speed and accuracy before a larger package follows. Both arrangements are possible: an hourly rate or a fixed project price, and we decide together what fits best.
We only bill pure working hours, so the clock stops when someone steps away from their desk. Clients have not asked us for a non-disclosure agreement so far, but we are open to an NDA if your work preparation department uses them. The intellectual property of everything we draw belongs to the client. A phone call or the contact form is all it takes to schedule the first conversation.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing drafting for work preparation
Hand your work preparation drafting 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.