The first question clients ask us is whether they can outsource drawing digitisation without losing their grip on the file. The answer is yes, and it works best when we take over the whole package rather than loose sheets. We take old paper sets, scanned PDFs and as-builts that were partly drawn by hand, and convert them into usable DWGs or Revit models.
Our team drafts, and we leave the engineering to you. That keeps the division of roles clear: your project lead keeps the decisions on content, and we deliver the drawings.
We work from our own office with our own licences, so you do not need to free up workstations or software. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and the work goes through at least three layers of review before it comes back to you. We respond to an enquiry within 1 to 2 working days. If you would like to see how we work first, give us a small first job and then judge our speed and accuracy.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The cost side of outsourcing drawing digitisation
We can charge by the hour or agree a fixed price per project, and we decide that together with you. For a stack of scans with a lot of repetition, a fixed project price is often the obvious choice. If the material is messy or not yet complete, we prefer to work on an hourly basis. We only record pure working hours. If a drafter stops for five minutes to get a coffee, the clock stops. That sounds minor, but across hundreds of drawings it makes a noticeable difference to the final bill. What mainly keeps costs down is the quality of what you supply.
A sharp scan with legible dimensions takes us less time than a crooked printout that has been partly updated by hand. Repetition works in your favour. Once we understand the pattern of a set, the volume moves faster. In a piping diagram where a valve in 90 and in 110 keeps coming back, we build the component smartly once. After that, we place it everywhere without redrawing it. In work like that, we save at least seventy per cent of the time. You pay no ongoing payroll costs with us.
There is no prepaid hours card and no monthly hours subscription. If one of our people drops out through illness or holiday, we replace them and the work continues. We only produce an estimate after we have seen a representative part of the set. We look at the number of sheets, their condition and the degree of repetition, and that gives us a realistic estimate. We let you know when a batch needs more time than expected, so your project lead does not face a surprise afterwards.
Scaling up capacity without fixed payroll costs
Our team is already in place, and we deploy whatever the project needs. For a small round of revisions, one drafter is enough. If your drawing office hits a peak, we bring in as many drafters as needed from our large, variable team. That scaling up costs you no recruitment process and no weeks of onboarding. We work in our own environment with our own licences, so you do not have to set anything up. Our drafters all have more than ten years of CAD experience, without exception. The core of the team has around twenty-five years of experience combined.
Sam, our team leader, directs the CAD team and keeps the technical side and project supervision under control. He has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years and ran his own design practice in the Netherlands. When something is urgent, we add people straight away instead of creating a queue. We did exactly that on a deadline that could not move. Our team worked evenings and weekends at the time, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours. The work also carried on during Sam's planned holiday. We absorb absences ourselves.
Illness or holiday on our side is not your problem, because we put someone else on the set. Because we work with fixed agreements and your CAD standards, a replacement picks up the file quickly. A small job is fine too. If need be, we start with a small package of sheets, so you can assess our speed and accuracy before the volume goes up. As soon as the volume drops again, we scale back down just as easily.
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.
How the process works when we digitise your drawings
The process starts with a conversation in which we go through the project. You supply the details and usually the existing drawings that need revising. With digitisation work, that is often a folder of scans, old printouts and the odd paper original. We also ask about your drawing conventions and standards, because we stick to them. Think of layer structure, fonts, stamps, use of scales and file naming. Then we start, even if not every detail is settled yet. We deliver in batches. A first batch goes back to you, your project lead reviews it and gives feedback, and we incorporate that into the rest. That way a systematic error surfaces on sheet three and not on sheet eighty. The rhythm of check-ins differs per client. Some want to catch up every two days, others are happy with a weekly moment.
That mainly depends on how urgent the work is. Files go back and forth by email. On larger projects, we work with software you can log in to and follow the project. We are in touch every day by email, phone and meetings. We visit you or you come to our office, although we carry out the work remotely. At Firefly, we received as-built material in which the drawings had been printed incorrectly and were partly drawn by hand. We worked it out ourselves instead of calling the client all the time, and still delivered it neatly. The intellectual property of everything we make belongs to you, and we will sign an NDA on request.
Who should consider outsourcing drawing digitisation
We work for engineering firms, architecture practices, contractors and manufacturers. The people at the table are managers, team leaders and owners, and they all have the same problem. The trigger is almost always capacity: too little time, too few drafters, or a peak your own team cannot handle. At an engineering firm, the focus is usually on old project files that are needed again today.
An extension to an existing building calls for a usable digital base, and there is none. At an architecture practice, it is more often about a filing cabinet full of sheets that nobody dares to touch any more. Contractors come to us with revision material from the site, such as marked-up printouts and notes in the margin.
Manufacturers usually have part drawings that are stuck in an old format and no longer match the rest. In all these cases, your own drafting team can handle the work technically. The hours simply are not there. A drafter who spends three weeks tracing old sheets is not working on the live project in the meantime. That is why we take over precisely that repetitive part. We draft, and we leave engineering, calculations and permits to you. That division keeps responsibility where it belongs.
Our clients are in the Netherlands and that is where our focus lies. Because we work fully remotely, your location makes no difference to the turnaround time. We launched this service last year because a client asked for it. Since then we have offered it as a standard service, and for Firefly we have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings. If you want to know whether this works for your file too, send us a few representative sheets.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing drawing digitisation
Hand your drawing digitisation 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.