If you go looking for a technical drafter on a self-employed basis and cannot find anyone, you usually see the same thing happening in your own drawing office. The repetitive work gets pushed back, because the urgent drawing always comes first. Details stay open until the construction phase demands them after all.
An as-built file only comes into view just before handover, after which a week has to cover what could have been spread over months. Meanwhile, your most experienced drafters spend their hours on work that demands the least of their expertise, and that loss never shows up on an invoice.
OutsourceCAD takes over that part of the work. We provide outsourced CAD drafting, meaning 2D drafting and, where needed, 3D modelling, as-built drawings and revisions, usually in high volumes with a lot of repetition. Engineering is not part of our service. Our large, variable team scales with each project, and all work goes through at least three review layers before it goes to the client.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Repetitive work a technical drafter on a self-employed basis clears
The part of a drafting package we take over most often is the part that requires little thought and costs a lot of hours. Part drawings that are made again for each variant. Detail sheets that come back in almost the same form on ten projects. Schematics in which the same components are repeated in different sizes. A piping schematic from greenhouse construction shows clearly where those hours go. If you need a valve in 90 and then in 110, you draw that component by hand in AutoCAD every time, because that package is not smart at building up components like that.
On one sheet it is not so bad, but across an entire project it really adds up. The gain, then, is not in drawing faster but in drawing less often. We set up recurring components properly once and then use them everywhere. Where possible, we do this with parametric Revit families, and in that kind of work it saves at least seventy percent of the time. Where it is not possible, we get the gain from routine and division of work. Several drafters with more than ten years of experience work in parallel to the same pattern, while the review layers ensure the result remains one set rather than a collection of loose drawings.
For you, this means the repetitive volume no longer competes with the work where your own people make the difference. That is precisely why people look for a technical drafter on a self-employed basis for packages like this. The difference with us is that we do not hang the volume on one person's diary, but spread it across a team that works on the same type of work all year round.
Parametric working and Revit families instead of manual drafting
A parametric Revit family is a smart component. The component is built once and then adapts to a new situation or a different size without having to be redrawn. When we place such a component in a model, it is there in a single action, even when the dimensions differ. The material schedule updates along with it. If the component changes, the schedule changes automatically, which saves the manual check that is otherwise always needed when something changes late in the project.
We build such families from scratch or clean up existing families and templates. We decide which is more sensible based on the existing set. If a family set is very messy, rebuilding is sometimes faster than repairing, and we say so when that is the case. A self-employed technical drafter who works only in AutoCAD rarely gets round to this kind of set-up, simply because it falls outside day-to-day drafting. With us it is part of the service, and the same people then do the production work.
Alongside Revit, we use Rhino and Grasshopper for form work that is hard to capture in fixed components, and to a limited extent Dynamo and Vault. We do not choose parametric working on principle, but based on how often a component recurs and how many variants will be added during the project. If a detail occurs only twice, building a family is wasted effort and we simply draw it. We make that call at the start, so you know where the one-off time investment lies.
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 from technical drafting on a self-employed basis
The set we deliver is built on your drawing conventions, because you give them to us at the start. It contains the drawings themselves, in DXF, DWG, Revit formats or STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format requested. For model work, the model is included, along with the families used and the set-up that lets them adapt. Where a material schedule is linked to the model, that link remains intact after delivery. We do not deliver everything in one go at the end. A first batch goes out early so your project lead can check whether the starting points are right, and only then do we continue. Your downstream process is the reason we work this way. A set that goes to work preparation must be readable there without any changes. A set that goes towards production must match the way it is read there.
By asking about this at the outset, we avoid drafting that is technically correct but not usable in practice. After delivery, the intellectual property belongs to you, so your team can open, change and pass on everything. We do not hold back any files, and you do not become dependent on us to carry on. If you want an additional revision later, you can come back to us for it, but that is not a condition we attach to the first assignment. Files go back and forth by email, and on larger jobs we work with software you can log into to follow the project. That way, the status of the set can be checked at any time without having to ask for an interim report.
Scaling up without searching for a self-employed technical drafter
With us, capacity is not a promise but a matter of allocation. A project starts with as many drafters as are needed, and on a larger job we add as many from our large, flexible team as the scope requires. Those people do not come from outside, they are already in the team. That difference becomes noticeable the moment a schedule shifts. With an individual self-employed technical drafter, doubling the work means a second person has to be found, trained in and brought up to the same standard.
With us, it means Sam, our team leader, adds someone who already knows the agreements that have been made. Absence is handled the same way. In the event of illness or holidays, we replace someone so the work carries on, and you pay no ongoing payroll costs during that period.
When a deadline could not slip, we worked evenings and weekends with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, even during a planned holiday of Sam's. Scaling up without loss of quality only works when there is a review structure underneath it. A drafter draws, a second team member checks that work, Sam then reviews it as team leader and Barry signs it off as project manager. As a result, the number of errors stays minimal in practice, even when more hands are working on the same project.
We do not work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription, so scaling up does not require you to commit in advance to volume that may never materialise. Scaling down works just as well, and in practice that happens regularly when a peak is over and your own team can cope again. You keep one point of contact in both directions, because Barry starts things off with a new request and Sam then takes on the technical side and project supervision.
Frequently asked questions about a technical drafter on a self-employed basis
Hand your repetitive 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.