The decision to outsource Revit drafting usually comes up after one of three triggers. There is a peak your own team cannot handle, there is a deadline that cannot move, or a vacancy has been open for months without being filled. In all three cases the problem is the same: there is work and there are no hands.
Recruiting takes months, onboarding then takes more time, and a temporary worker who does not know your standard delivers little in the first few weeks.
We are OutsourceCAD, and we fill exactly that gap. We draft and model, and engineering is not part of our work. Revit is one of our core packages alongside AutoCAD and Rhino, supplemented by Inventor, Grasshopper and to a limited extent Dynamo and Vault. We work remotely from our own office, on our own licences, to the drawing conventions you supply. Our clients are based in the Netherlands.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The repetitive part that goes out when you outsource Revit drafting
What we take on is rarely the most complicated part of a project. It is the high-volume part: working up models, generating and updating drawings, processing revision rounds and building components that come back dozens of times. That work is straightforward in content and takes the most hours. That is precisely why it stays on the shelf in a busy drawing office, because urgent and complex matters get priority. High volume with a lot of repetition is also where the biggest time savings lie. Detailing that is set up properly in one place and then applied across the whole set saves more than speeding up individual drawings.
The same goes for cleaning up a model structure that has become clogged over the years: the first days produce little that is visible, and after that everything that follows goes faster. We do not make that choice ourselves. We present where we see gains, and you decide whether it is worth it within your schedule. What we do not do is engineering.
We do not make calculations, give structural advice or handle permits. We set down that boundary in the first conversation, together with the question of which part of the work goes out. For most clients that is a relief, because it avoids any debate about who decides what when things get busy. A short assignment is fine too, so you can first hand us a defined part. We can start as soon as we have enough information, and we respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days.
Parametric families and outsourcing Revit drafting
We build parametric Revit families: smart components. Such a component adapts to a new situation or a different size, so it is made once and can then be placed anywhere without redrawing. Because the material schedule is linked, the schedule changes automatically as soon as the component changes. In practice, that last point is often more important than the drafting gain itself, because a schedule that is maintained by hand sooner or later falls out of step. An example from our own work makes it concrete.
Greenhouse construction companies often work in AutoCAD, which is not smart at building up components such as valves in piping systems. Every valve in 90 and in 110 that is needed there goes onto the drawing by hand again. With a smart family it is in place in a single action, and in that kind of work it saves at least seventy per cent of the time. We both clean up and rebuild families and templates. The state of the existing set determines which choice is wiser.
If a family set is very messy, rebuilding is sometimes faster than repairing, even if throwing things away feels illogical. We present that trade-off with a brief rationale, because the choice affects not only this project but also the next ones. We use Dynamo to a limited extent when an operation repeats across many elements and carrying it out by hand would take a disproportionate amount of time. We also use Vault to a limited extent, and only when you already work with it yourself. Every component we build goes to you, so your team can carry on with it independently.
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 delivered set and what comes next
What is delivered is agreed at the start. As a rule it consists of the model, the drawings that come out of it, the families and templates used or adapted, and the associated schedules. We deliver in stages rather than all at once at the end. Each stage goes back, we collect feedback, process it and move on to the next. That means your own team can already continue with one part while the rest is still in progress. The follow-on process determines what the set needs to look like. If the model goes on to work preparation, the organisation of views and sheets and the numbering matter more than presentation. If material goes to a manufacturer, what counts most is whether the exchange files open without problems. We deliver in Revit formats, DXF, DWG and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format.
We always work with the latest versions and align the format when you are on an older version. Before a stage goes back, it has passed at least three review layers: a drafter produces it, a second team member checks it, Sam as team leader reviews it next and Barry as project manager checks it last. The intellectual property of everything we make belongs to you, including the families built along the way. They remain usable under your own management afterwards, even if no follow-on assignment comes. On larger projects you can log into the software in which the project runs and follow progress yourself. For standalone assignments we stick to email, because setting up a project environment for a handful of sheets costs more than it delivers.
Scaling up with outsourced Revit drafting
With our large, variable team we scale up or down per project to whatever the work requires. The team is already in place, so scaling up means deploying what the project needs instead of starting a recruitment process first. When it is urgent, we add people straight away. That is the difference from the vacancy that has been open for months: we do not solve a staffing problem, we make sure the work keeps going in the meantime.
If someone on our side is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work carries on. You pay no ongoing payroll costs, and we only bill genuine working hours. If someone goes to get a coffee for five minutes, our time recording stops.
With Revit work, though, scaling up takes more preparation than with standalone drafting. Several people working in the same model does not automatically go smoothly, so we split the work into parts that can be produced independently and merge them in a controlled way. The drawing conventions also need to be tight, otherwise differences arise between what one person and another produce. That is why we pin them down before more people join. Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so no training in the trade is needed.
What takes time is getting to know the project, and we limit that by keeping one fixed line of contact with you and concentrating project knowledge with Sam as team leader. We also keep track of which parts of the model were made by whom, so a handover within our team does not involve any searching. You can reach us by phone or through the contact form on the website.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing Revit drafting
Hand your Revit 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.