If you need to deliver quickly, you will notice that lead time drives structural drawings costs just as much as the size of the set. That is why we scale up per project. An assignment often starts with one drafter, and as soon as the volume or the schedule calls for it, our large, variable team scales with it, bringing in as many drafters as are needed.
The team is already in place, so we do not need to recruit anyone before the first sheet goes into production.
When things are urgent, we add people to a running project straight away. That is not a theoretical option: when a deadline could not slip, our team worked evenings and weekends to deliver on time. When the volume drops again, we scale back and the invoice moves with it. We draft and model; we do not produce calculations or give structural advice. Below we explain when outsourcing pays off, how we build up the costs and how a project with us runs.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
When outsourcing structural drawings pays off
Outsourcing is not the right answer in every situation, and we would rather say so straight away than halfway through a project. There are situations in which your own drawing team is better off keeping the work. If a project is full of decisions that have not yet been made, more time goes into coordination than into drafting, and working with us will not make you any faster. Work that is completely intertwined with your own engineering is also often better kept in-house. After all, we draft; we do not calculate and we do not give structural advice.
Where we do make the difference is when you are short of capacity. A peak in the drawing office, a project that turns out bigger than budgeted, a revision round on an existing DWG set that has to be squeezed in: that is exactly our kind of work. The same applies to high volumes with a lot of repetition, where the same connection or component keeps coming back in a different size. That is where we reduce structural drawings costs the most, because we set up such a component properly once and then derive the rest.
A third situation in which we often step in is a schedule overrun. If the in-house team is falling behind and a date is at risk, we can join the running project without anyone having to be recruited first. At the same time, we are honest about the limits of our role in such a project. If the bottleneck is not drafting hours but decision-making, extra drafting capacity solves little, and we say so in the first conversation rather than after the first invoice.
How structural drawings costs are built up
We bill in two ways, and both are common with us. On an hourly basis, we only charge net working hours, so if someone steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the clock stops. We do not round up to half-days and we do not add a start-up surcharge per file. The second option is a fixed project price, which works once we can properly assess the size in advance and the scope no longer moves. Which option makes sense is something we decide together, and we record that choice before the first sheet goes into production.
We do not work with prepaid bundles of hours or a monthly hours subscription, because those arrangements disconnect the invoice from the work delivered. In practice, four things noticeably bring structural drawings costs down. Complete input saves the most, because every missing underlay leads to questions and waiting time. A documented drawing standard also helps, because then our team does not have to decide sheet by sheet how something should look. Repetition in the set works in your favour, especially when we can handle it with smart components.
A realistic pace helps too, because urgency requires extra staffing and extra coordination. In addition, you pay no ongoing payroll costs with us, and in the event of illness or holidays we replace people so the schedule does not slip. We do not quote an amount on this page, because a serious figure only emerges once we have seen the documents and discussed the scope.
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.
Clients who keep a close eye on structural drawings costs
The companies that approach us about this are engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers. More broadly: organisations with a lot of technical drafting work and too few hands to get through it. The person at the table is usually a manager, a team leader or the owner, someone who has to keep an eye on both the schedule and the budget. Their problem is rarely about content and rarely a question of craftsmanship. It is about time, staffing and a date that is getting closer while the pile is not getting any smaller. A team leader sees two of their drafters off sick in the week a set has to be finished. A project lead discovers that the revision round on existing sheets is three times larger than expected. An owner does not want to take on a permanent employee for a peak that will be over in four months.
In all these cases, the question of structural drawings costs is not just about a rate, but about whether the work can be completed on time at all without adding a permanent salary. We absorb that without you having to arrange workstations or licences, because we work in our own environment. Our clients are in the Netherlands and our focus is on the Netherlands, so meetings take place within the same working day. A client asked for it, so we started offering this service last year, and since then it has simply been part of our standard offering. For Firefly, we have now completed more than twenty projects and delivered hundreds of drawings.
From first conversation to partial delivery
A project with us always starts with a conversation about the project itself. In it, we go through what is already there, which documents are available, which part you will keep in-house and what the deadline is. We respond to a new request within 1 to 2 working days, so you will not have to wait long for that conversation. We then provide a list of what we need: the existing drawings or model, the drawing conventions and layer structure, the dimensioning requirements and a description of the required output.
Usually these are existing drawings that need revising. As soon as we have received enough information, we can start on the first drafting work.
We always deliver in stages. A first batch of sheets goes to you, we gather feedback, make adjustments and then carry on. This way of working keeps structural drawings costs under control, because a wrong assumption stays limited to a few sheets rather than an entire set. The meeting frequency differs per client and ranges from every two days to once a week. Barry, our project manager, is the first point of contact and Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side, so there is one familiar face attached to the project.
For one-off drafting jobs, files go back and forth by email. For larger projects we use software that you can log into to follow progress. Every sheet passes through at least three review layers before delivery, and you hold the intellectual property of the work delivered.
Frequently asked questions about structural drawings costs
Let us handle your structural drawings
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.