Prefab construction drafting outsourcing usually lands with us at the moment your own drawing office gets stuck. The reason is almost always the same: an order that turns out bigger than budgeted, a deadline that moves forward, or a vacancy for a drafter that has been open for months.
Your project leader looks at the schedule and sees that detailing the elements is the bottleneck, not the design. We take over that detailing work. Our team is already in place, so we do not need to recruit anyone and can join a live project at short notice.
We draft and model, and we explicitly leave engineering with you. The work is about volume, repetition and accuracy, exactly the type of assignment we are set up for. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and the core of the team has around twenty-five years of practice between them. We answer every enquiry within 1 to 2 working days.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The repetitive side of prefab construction drafting
In prefab work, a large share of the hours goes into repetition. The same wall type recurs in thirty elements, the same junction detail comes back on every floor, the same opening appears in half the panels. If you keep drawing that by hand, you pay again every time for work that has already been done once. We take on that volume and first work out which components genuinely differ and which only vary in size. That analysis often shows that a set of dozens of drawings comes down to a handful of basic components. A drawing office that tackles this itself loses most of its time comparing variants that in the end hardly differ from one another.
We capture that comparison once and build the rest of the set on it. From that point on it goes quickly, because we set up the component properly once and then only place and adjust it. An example from our own work shows how big that difference is. Greenhouse construction companies often work in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not smart at building up components such as valves in piping systems.
As soon as a valve is needed in 90 and in 110, it gets drawn entirely by hand again. In that kind of work, a smart set-up saves at least seventy per cent of the time. The same logic applies to prefab elements, hollow-core slabs, wall panels and facade modules. For clients outsourcing prefab construction drafting, that is where the direct gain lies: fewer hours on the same work and a set that stays internally consistent. We point out that opportunity in the first conversation, so you know where the time goes.
Parametric Revit families in outsourced prefab drafting
We build parametric Revit families, in other words smart components that adapt to a new situation or a different size. We create a component once and then place it anywhere without drawing it again. If the component changes, the material schedule updates automatically. That last point matters more in prefab work than in many other disciplines, because the schedule feeds straight through to purchasing and production. A manual list that lags behind the drawing costs money on the shop floor.
We keep the parameters limited to what the project really needs, because a component with dozens of settings quickly becomes unusable in practice for the drafters who have to keep working with it. Building from scratch is possible, and so is cleaning up existing families and templates. Which works out better depends on the state of the set. If a family library has become clogged over the years with variants, duplicate parameters and unclear naming, rebuilding is sometimes quicker than repairing. We present that trade-off with a short rationale, and the choice stays with you, because it is your library.
If a company works mainly in AutoCAD, that does not put parametric working out of reach. In that case we set up the repetitive components so that placing and adjusting becomes a single action instead of a drafting job. Alongside Revit and AutoCAD we work with Rhino, Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a lesser extent with Dynamo and Vault. We always work with the latest versions, in our own environment with our own licences.
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 the delivered prefab set contains
A delivery from us is a coherent set, not a collection of loose files someone still has to sort out. It contains the element drawings, the associated plans and elevations, the details at the required scale, and, where we have built a model, the model itself. With parametric work we also supply the families, including the parameters you can use to develop them further yourself. The material schedule comes from the model, not from a separate list that lives alongside it. We match file formats to the follow-on process: DXF, DWG, Revit formats or STEP, and in practice we handle any common CAD format. For a production line we choose a different format than for an estimating department, and we ask that question in advance. Whatever you use for naming, layer structure and title blocks, we adopt exactly from your own drawing conventions.
We ask for those conventions before the first drawing is opened. We deliver in stages, usually per element type or per building section. That way your project leader can review while the rest is still in progress, and nobody has to make major corrections at the end of the project. Every partial delivery first goes through our own review. A drafter produces the work, a second team member checks it, Sam, our team leader, then reviews it, and Barry, our project manager, checks the delivery. Thanks to those layers, errors stay to a minimum in practice. The intellectual property of everything we produce belongs to you, so the set can go on to the factory, purchasing or a supplier without restriction.
Scaling up when you outsource prefab construction drafting
Our large, variable team scales with each project, from one drafter for a small assignment to as many drafters as a large project requires. The team is already in place and we deploy what the project needs, so scaling up involves no recruitment process and no months of onboarding. When it is urgent, we add people straight away, after which Sam divides the work and organises the peer review.
His career spans more than fifteen years in architecture and seven years of work in Iran, with his own design firm in the Netherlands, and he still works as an engineer. He directs the CAD team and is responsible for the technical side and project supervision.
Barry is the first point of contact for a new request, after which the technical side passes to Sam. So you keep a consistent point of contact and do not have to deal with changing contacts. If someone on our side is off sick or on holiday, we bring in a replacement and the work continues. You pay no ongoing payroll costs and are not tied to a subscription or prepaid bundle. When the peak subsides, we scale back without any notice period.
We charge by the hour or per project at a fixed price, and we discuss in advance which option fits. The hours we bill are net working hours. A short assignment is fine, and we can also start with a small first package so you can judge our speed and accuracy for yourself. That way, companies outsourcing prefab construction drafting keep their permanent staffing geared to the average rather than to the peak.
Frequently asked questions about prefab construction drafting outsourcing
Hand your prefab 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.