For most companies, the decision to outsource technical drafting only comes up once work has already been sitting untouched for a while. The revision round on a set of DWGs slips week after week, the as-built folder keeps growing, and the drafters you do have are tied up in a project that takes priority.
What goes wrong then is rarely spectacular. Details are drawn in later than planned, changes end up in a mailbox instead of in the drawing, and the set that goes to site differs from what has actually been built.
We are OutsourceCAD, and we take over exactly that part. What we do is drafting and modelling, not engineering. The work is done remotely from our own office, on our own licences, to the standard you supply. Our clients are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers in the Netherlands, and the trigger is almost always the same: too little drafting capacity at the moment it is needed.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
How it works when you outsource technical drafting
It starts with a conversation. In it, we go through what is there, what needs to be finished and in what order. You supply the details and usually also existing drawings that need revising. Barry, our project manager, is the first point of contact for new enquiries, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side, so there is one fixed line rather than a changing cast of people. Our response time on a new enquiry is 1 to 2 working days. Sufficient information is all we need to start.
We do not deliver a complete set in one go. We work in stages, send them back, collect feedback and process it before the next part goes out. That rhythm varies by client: on one project we meet every two days and on another weekly, depending on how quickly it needs to be done. Files go back and forth by email. For larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we use software you can log into to follow the project.
Day-to-day contact runs through email, phone and meetings, and when it helps we come to you or welcome your drawing team at our office. If you are considering outsourcing technical drafting, you usually want to see how we work before a large package is handed over. That is fine. A short or small first assignment is enough to judge our speed and accuracy. After that we scale up when the project calls for it, and back down again when the peak is over.
An as-built package that was half drawn by hand
Firefly once supplied as-built material in which the existing drawings had been printed incorrectly and partly added to by hand. Poorly legible, messy, and contradictory in a number of places. That kind of package is exactly the work that stays on the shelf in an in-house drawing office, because it is slow and nobody likes to start on it. We worked it out ourselves instead of calling the client about every ambiguity. Where something did not add up, we reconstructed it from what could be derived from the rest of the set, and only asked when there was genuine doubt.
The result was still a clean, usable set. We have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings for Firefly. What we take from that above all is how we handle unclear source material: reconstruct first, ask only then, and bundle questions instead of asking them one at a time. There is a second lesson too. For a deadline that could not move, the team worked through evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, even during a planned holiday of Sam, the team leader.
That is not a standard rhythm and we do not sell it as one, but it shows what happens when a date is fixed. For anyone weighing up whether to outsource technical drafting, that is often the heart of the question: will the work carry on when things get tense? Our experience is that this question can only really be answered once the first assignment has been delivered.
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.
Outsourcing technical drafting within your own standard
We work to your drawing conventions, not our own. You provide them: the layer structure, file naming, the title blocks used, line weights and the way dimensioning and annotation are set up. If there is no documented standard, we derive it from the set supplied and present our findings before we continue. That takes little time at the start and prevents half a set from having to go back through the layer structure later. We work in our own environment on our own licences, not in yours. That saves you setting up workstations, accounts and access rights. Exchange takes place in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP files, and in practice in any common CAD format. Our core software is Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, plus Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a limited extent Dynamo and Vault.
We always work with the latest versions, and if you are on an older version we align the exchange format with it before any volume is produced. The whole point of outsourcing technical drafting is that the delivered files slot straight into the existing set. A drawing that is correct in content but sits in a different layer structure still costs your drawing office time to put right. That is why, for us, the standard is not a formality up front but the first thing we pin down. If in doubt, we submit a small part of the set before the rest follows, so the fit has been tested in practice.
Three review layers on outsourced technical drafting
Every piece of work goes through at least three review layers before it goes back. A drafter produces the work, a second team member checks it, then Sam as team leader reviews it, and Barry checks it last. In practice this keeps the number of errors to a minimum. That set-up was not designed to impress, but because outsourced work carries an extra risk: the checker is not sitting next to the drafter and cannot just look over their shoulder.
What the second layer mainly catches are the small things that arise in volume. A revision carried through incorrectly, a symbol used differently on one drawing than on another, a dimension that was not updated after a change.
Sam looks at the technical coherence of the set and at whether the drawing matches what you supplied. The final check is deliberately less technical and more focused on completeness: whether everything is included, whether the numbering is right and whether the correct version has been sent. Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and the core of the team has around twenty-five years of combined experience.
Sam has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years, ran his own design firm in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer. We do not promise error-free work, because that does not exist in drafting at this volume. What we do organise is that errors are found before the set lands on your desk.
Frequently asked questions about outsourcing technical drafting
Hand your technical 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.