When you outsource drafting temporarily, the first question is always where to draw the line. What comes to us and what stays at your own office? In practice, our clients almost always split the work at the same point. They keep the design, the coordination with their client, the detailing choices and everything that heads towards permits or calculations.
The detailing, the repetitive work and the updating of existing sets come to us.
That makes sense, because that is where the volume lies and where a drawing office gets stuck. Modelling and drafting are our trade; engineering is not. For the duration of a peak, we deploy as many drafters from our large, flexible team as the work requires, and then we scale back down. Everyone on our team has more than ten years of CAD experience. We follow the drawing conventions you supply and work remotely from our own office, with our own licences.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The repetitive drafting we take on temporarily
The work that gets left behind first is almost never the hardest work. It is the work with the most repetition. A construction set in which the same detailing recurs on dozens of sheets, a change to a facade build-up that has to be carried through everywhere, a series of sections that differ only in dimensions. Packages like these require no design decisions, but they do require a lot of hours, and a busy drafting team does not have those hours to spare. For us, this is exactly the work that runs well, because we can put several people on it side by side.
The biggest time savings come from two things. First, the scale effect: once the first drawing in a series is in the right form, the next ones go faster, and the longer the series, the bigger that advantage. Second, removing context switching. An in-house drafter who jumps between meetings, client questions and drafting all day simply never gets round to a series of forty sheets. We do nothing else. We see this most clearly in greenhouse construction.
There, someone in AutoCAD draws the same valve in 90 and then in 110 by hand every time, and that happens throughout the entire piping schematic. Work like this is ideal to outsource temporarily, because the brief is clear and there is little to decide along the way. We do ask for the standard up front, so the series is right first time. A correction that comes after sheet forty costs more than all the preparation put together.
What we deliver when you outsource drafting temporarily
Our foundation is 2D drafting. We deliver floor plans, sections, elevations, detail sheets and standard details, and we process the revision rounds that follow. Where the project calls for it, we model in 3D and build the associated components. We regularly produce as-built drawings, even when the material supplied is far from ideal. At Firefly, we received a file with drawings that had been printed incorrectly and partly updated by hand, hard to read and messy. We worked it out ourselves instead of constantly phoning about it, and still delivered it neatly.
We have since completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings for that client. We deliver the output in a way that lets your own team carry on with it immediately. That means source files, not just a PDF-style export, and a folder and naming structure that matches what is already there. The intellectual property of everything we produce belongs to you, so no dependency on us remains once the peak is over. We deliver in batches. A batch goes back, we collect feedback, make adjustments and move on to the next part.
With temporary work this matters even more, because there is no room to redo an entire series at the end. Every package also goes through at least three review layers before it leaves our office. A drafter produces the work, a second team member checks it, then Sam, our team leader, reviews it and finally Barry, our project manager, checks it. With temporary support, that keeps you out of rework.
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.
Parametric work that shortens drafting for good
Part of the time saving does not come from drafting faster, but from building smarter. We create parametric Revit families, in other words smart components. Such a component adapts to a different size or a new situation, so we build it once and after that it is placed in a single action, without anyone redrawing it. The material schedule updates automatically: if the component changes, the schedule changes without manual work. The practical example we come across most often comes from greenhouse construction. Companies there work a lot in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not smart at building components such as valves in piping systems. Anyone who needs a valve in 90 and in 110 draws it by hand again every time. With a smart family, it is a single placement.
In that kind of work, this saves at least seventy per cent of the time, and that advantage remains after our temporary support has ended. We clean up existing families and templates or rebuild them. Which works out better depends on the state of the set. If a family set has become clogged and very messy over the years, rebuilding is sometimes faster than repairing, and we will say so plainly. We only assess that once we have looked at the set. Our clients often combine both tracks: we take over the ongoing production and meanwhile build the components that make the next project faster. We deliver those components as source files too.
Software, versions and file formats
Our main software is Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino. We also work in Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a limited extent in Dynamo and Vault. The package we use follows from your project, not from our preference. If production runs in AutoCAD, we draft in AutoCAD and do not propose a migration during a peak, because that is exactly the wrong moment to change a way of working.
If there is a Revit environment, we build on the templates and families that already exist. We always work with the latest versions, so a file opens on both sides without conversion hassle. Exchange takes place via DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice via any common CAD format.
Files usually go back and forth by email. On larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we work with software that you can log into to follow your project. For standalone AutoCAD drafting we stick to email, because a portal for a short series helps no one. We work in our own environment with our own licences, so you do not have to free up seats or arrange access to your systems.
Fitting in with the existing set is mainly a matter of agreements: layer structure, hatches, title blocks, revision numbering and naming. We receive those from you and we follow them. If there is no such standard, we set it down together in the first conversation. From then on we stick to those agreements, even if we would do it differently ourselves, because the set has to suit your firm and not us.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing drafting temporarily
Hand your peak 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.