If you want to rent an Inventor drafter, you usually have a specific pile of work in mind. A series of parts that someone needs to model, an assembly that has to be drawn up, or a set that no longer matches reality after changes on the workshop floor. That is the kind of work we take on.
We draft and model; we do not do engineering and we do not carry out calculations. Every one of our drafters has more than ten years of CAD experience and works from our own office on our own licences.
We follow your drawing conventions and deliver in the formats your supply chain can handle. The process starts with a conversation in which we go through the documents and decide which part of the work suits us. After that, we deliver in stages, gather your feedback and carry on. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, even if it is only an exploratory question. And we will tell you honestly whether the work suits us or whether you are better off keeping it in-house.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
When it makes sense to rent an Inventor drafter
Outsourcing is not always the right answer, and we would rather say so beforehand than afterwards. It works well for volume, for repetition and for work with a clear brief. A series of variants of the same part, a revision pass across dozens of drawings or an as-built file that needs to be checked properly: that is where we bring speed when your own team no longer can. It also works well during a peak. The drawing office is running at full capacity, another project comes in, and nobody wants to take on a permanent employee who will have nothing to do in four months.
Outsourcing makes less sense for work that is still very much in flux, where decisions change every day. Coordination then costs more than the drafting itself, and you are better off keeping it with your own people for a while until the direction is settled. The same goes for work that is closely intertwined with engineering, because we do not do that. We do not run calculations and we do not give structural advice. If you are unsure where that line lies, we go through it in the first conversation and tell you honestly where we add value.
A third consideration is the standard. If it is fixed internally and we can get hold of it, we can start drawing to those conventions almost immediately. If it is missing altogether, it first takes some time on both sides to pin it down. In that case, we prefer to take on a small part first and present it to you, rather than producing a hundred drawings straight away based on an assumption. That way, any difference of opinion surfaces early.
The cost side of renting an Inventor drafter
The work is billed by the hour or per project at a fixed price. We decide together which arrangement fits best, and that mainly depends on how precisely the scope can be defined upfront. A well-defined job with a known number of drawings and a clear standard lends itself to a fixed price, because both sides then know where they stand. Work that is still changing we prefer to bill by the hour. With a fixed price, a margin for uncertainty would inevitably creep in, and you would end up paying for that margin without anyone benefiting from it.
We only bill actual working hours. If a team member steps away for five minutes to get a coffee, the clock stops. That sounds strict, but it is the only way to deliver a timesheet nobody argues about. What further keeps costs down is the input you supply. Complete documents, a clear standard and usable source files save us detective work, and detective work is the most expensive part of drafting.
Repetition also lowers costs, because the more often a part recurs in the same form, the less time each subsequent version takes. You carry no ongoing payroll costs with us, because we only deploy what the project needs and take people off as soon as the volume drops. We do not work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription. For an estimate, we go through the documents together and point out which parts will take the most time. If the scope turns out smaller along the way, we bill fewer hours rather than the amount that was once mentioned.
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.
Who we do this drafting work for
We work for engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly for companies with technical drafting work. The people at the table are managers, team leaders and owners: people who see for themselves what is piling up and who can make a decision about it. The reason is almost always the same. There is too little time, there are too few drafters, or a peak comes along that the in-house team cannot handle. Sometimes there is also a vacancy that simply will not get filled, and then renting a drafter is just faster than waiting. We are based in the Netherlands and our focus is on the Netherlands, so discussions take place in the same language and within the same working day. We started this service last year because a client asked for it. It went well, and we have offered it as a standard service ever since.
For Firefly, we have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings, including a file in which the existing drawings had been printed incorrectly and were partly drawn by hand. We sorted that out ourselves instead of calling the client every day, and still delivered it neatly. We do not have public reviews yet, and we are not going to make any up. What we can offer is a small first assignment on which a new client can judge our speed and accuracy. In practice, that says more than a page of stories about ourselves. If that first job goes well, we expand to more volume and more people. If it does not, it ends there with no further obligation on your part.
From first conversation to delivery with our Inventor drafter
The process starts with a conversation. We go through what is there, what needs to be finished, which standard applies and when it has to be ready. You then supply the details, usually together with existing drawings that need revising. We review those documents first and let you know if anything in them does not add up or cannot be traced.
As soon as we have enough information, we start. We deliver in stages, because sending back a complete set in one go is awkward for both sides. With a partial delivery, your project lead sees early on how we apply the standard and can adjust course before the rest goes the same way.
We incorporate the feedback and then move on to the next part. The rhythm of meetings differs per client. On one project we speak every two days, on another weekly, depending on the pressure on the schedule. Day-to-day contact runs via email and phone, and we visit you or you come to our office. Before a set leaves our office, it has passed through at least three review layers. A drafter draws, a second team member checks, Sam, our team leader, reviews it and Barry, our project manager, gives the final sign-off.
When a deadline could not slip, we have previously worked evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, to deliver on time. Even while Sam was on a planned holiday, the work simply carried on. You can get in touch by phone or through the contact form on our site.
Frequently asked questions about renting an Inventor drafter
Let us handle your Inventor drafting
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.