Companies that outsource production drafting rarely do so for convenience. The reason is lead time. There is a series of shop drawings that has to be finished, your own drawing office is full and the planning will not budge. We absorb that by scaling up per project. Our large, variable team scales with each project, from a single drafter for a small assignment to as many drafters as a large series requires.
The team is already in place, so scaling up involves no recruitment time and no month of onboarding.
When something is urgent, we add people to an ongoing series immediately. We draft and model, we do not do engineering, and that very boundary makes high-volume, repetitive work easy to plan. A production series often consists of dozens of variants on the same principle. That is exactly the kind of work where a parametric set-up pays for itself. Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so an extra drafter is up to speed with your standards in no time.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Parametric working makes outsourced production drafting scalable
Outsourcing production drafting pays off most when the work repeats itself, and that is where we use parametric Revit families. A parametric family is a smart component. The component is built once and then adapts to a new situation or a different size, without having to be redrawn. The material schedule updates along with it. If the component changes, the schedule changes automatically, so there is no separate list to maintain alongside the model. The effect is easy to see in greenhouse construction. Companies in that sector often work in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not smart at building components such as valves in piping systems.
If you need a valve in 90 and in 110 there, you draw it by hand every time. A smart family makes it possible to place it in a single action. In that kind of work, we save at least seventy per cent of the time. That is exactly the calculation that counts in a production series, because the saving per component multiplies by the number of times it recurs. We can clean up existing families and templates or rebuild them.
What is wisest depends on the state of the existing set. If a family set is very messy, rebuilding is sometimes quicker than repairing, and we put that to you beforehand rather than afterwards. Parametric working is not an end in itself. For a short series without repetition, a straightforward drawing is finished faster, and then we simply do that. We decide what works out faster in a specific case after looking at the existing set and the number of variants.
Software, versions and formats when you outsource production drafting
Our main software for outsourced production drafting is Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino. Inventor and Grasshopper also come into play, and to a limited extent Dynamo and Vault. We always work with the latest versions, so no time is lost on files that will not open or on features missing from an older release. If you supply files in an older format, we sort that out at our end. Files go back and forth in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format.
We agree the delivery format in advance, because it determines how we build the model. More important than the software package is the standard. We work to your drawing conventions, which you provide to us. We adopt layer structure, naming, title blocks, hatching and text sizes exactly as they appear in the existing set. As a result, the work we add does not stand out from the work that was already there.
We work in our own environment with our own licences, not in yours. So no workstations or licences need to be freed up and no access to internal systems needs to be granted. For large projects we have software you can log into to follow the project. For standalone AutoCAD drafting, delivery is by email, because an extra environment saves no time there. If your drawing office works with its own library of blocks and title blocks, we would be glad to receive it at the start.
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.
What outsourcing production drafting delivers in practice
When you outsource production drafting to us, we deliver 2D drawings and, where needed, 3D modelling. In practice, this involves production sets made up of many similar sheets. Think of part drawings, assembly drawings, elevations and sections, floor plans, detail sheets and the associated material schedules that update from the model. We also produce as-built drawings and process revisions to existing sets. When a production series is ongoing, the latter is often the largest part of the work, because a change to one component affects a series of sheets that all need updating. We deliver the output in the agreed format. That may be a DWG set, a Revit model, a series of STEP files for the machine side or a PDF set for the shop floor. The intellectual property of what we make belongs to you, so the files can be used further without restriction.
What we do not deliver is engineering. We do not make calculations, advise on structural design or handle permits. We draw up what has been decided on substance, and if we come across something in the material that does not add up, we report it rather than filling it in ourselves. That boundary is deliberate. It keeps responsibilities clear and avoids discussion about who signs off on what. If a production series produces a new variant halfway through, we include it in the same set rather than creating a separate file for it. That way there is a single source for the shop floor. We also deliver in parts, so work preparation can start on a first batch before the series is complete.
Three review layers before a drawing leaves the office
Every drawing we deliver passes through at least three review layers. A drafter draws, a second team member checks that work, Sam, our team leader, then checks it, and Barry, our project manager, reviews it last. That keeps the number of errors minimal in practice. With production drafting, that is no luxury. An error in a part drawing rarely stays on one sheet, because it carries through into the assembly, into the bill of materials and ultimately into what is made on the shop floor.
The review therefore focuses not only on dimensions, but also on whether your drawing conventions have been applied consistently.
A wrongly chosen layer or deviating naming is barely noticeable on a single sheet and all the more so across a hundred sheets. That is why we deliver in parts. The first partial delivery is intended to establish whether the interpretation is right, before the rest of the series is carried on in the same direction. We process the feedback on it and then continue. The meeting rhythm differs per client, from every two days to weekly, depending on how quickly things need to move.
Sam holds the technical line. He has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, still works as an engineer and directs the CAD team. The core of the team has around twenty-five years of combined experience, and everyone who works for us has worked with CAD for more than ten years. In case of illness or holidays we replace someone, so both the pace and the review line stay intact.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing production drafting
Hand your production 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.