If you cannot get your technical drafting done in-house, you have roughly three options, and they differ more than they seem to on paper. Hiring a freelancer gives you one pair of hands, which works fine for a clearly defined job but grinds to a halt as soon as that person is ill or the volume grows.
Taking someone on permanently solves a structural need, but not this quarter's peak, because recruiting and training take time and payroll costs continue once the work drops off.
The third option is handing the work to a team that is already in place. With our large, variable team we scale up or down per project, replace someone during illness or holiday and log only genuine working hours. What we do is drafting and modelling, so no engineering and no calculations. Below you can read when outsourcing makes sense, how the costs are built up, which clients deal with this and how a project runs in practice.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
When outsourcing technical drafting makes sense
Outsourcing is not the right move in every situation, and we would rather say so beforehand than afterwards. It works well with volume and repetition. A series of sheets that largely follows the same grid, a revision round on an existing DWG set or drawing up variants of a component that has already been designed can be handed over without you losing control. It also works well when the demand is temporary. A peak lasting a few months does not justify a vacancy, but it does justify extra hands. And it works well when your own drafters are needed for the work where their project knowledge really counts.
There are also cases where technical drafting is better kept in-house. Work that keeps changing direction because the principles have not yet been fixed costs more in handover than it gains in capacity. The same applies to drafting that relies heavily on unwritten knowledge about a specific project, where the drafter pops into the project leader's office ten times a day.
You cannot replicate that with a meeting every two days. That is why, in a first conversation, we always ask how stable the principles are. If they are still shifting, we suggest outsourcing the stable part and keeping the rest in-house. In practice, a split like that delivers more than a job that has to be revised halfway through, and it keeps the hours predictable. A small first job helps here too, because it lets you see our pace and accuracy before a larger package is handed over.
The cost of outsourced technical drafting
With us, an estimate starts with the material you supply, not with an assumption. We look at the state of the existing files, the number of sheets, how many of them actually differ from one another and how complete the drawing conventions are. Those four points almost always determine the range. You can pay by the hour or at a fixed project price. For a clearly defined job with predictable content, a fixed price is easy to set. For work where you only find out how much lies underneath once you start digging, hourly billing is fairer, because a fixed price would inevitably include a margin that you end up paying yourself.
We log only genuine working hours. If someone steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the clock stops, and waiting for an answer does not go on the timesheet. What keeps costs down is largely in your own hands. Clear CAD standards save correction rounds. Source files rather than scans save investigation work. A single point of contact who can answer questions in one go saves waiting time.
Repetition actually works in your favour with us, because where the work repeats we build parametric components that can be placed in a single action after the initial setup, with a material schedule that updates automatically. There are no ongoing payroll costs, and we do not work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription, so you never pay for idle capacity. We only give an estimate after we have seen the set, because without sight of the material every estimate remains a guess. If you are considering outsourcing technical drafting, it is best to send the documents along with your request straight away.
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 hand over technical drafting
The people we talk to are managers, team leaders and owners of engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers. What unites them is not the sector but the moment they call. That moment almost always comes just after winning a contract, when the schedule is drawn up and it turns out the drawing office cannot carry it. Sometimes there is a structural shortage of drafters, sometimes it is a peak the in-house team cannot handle, sometimes a departure that was never filled. The question they ask is rarely whether the drafting can be done. It is whether it will be finished on time and be correct without one of them having to stand over it. A team leader who has to check corrections every day has not gained capacity, just moved it.
That is why the checking sits on our side. Every piece of work passes a second drafter, Sam, our team leader, and Barry, our project manager, before it is sent. Clients also weigh up what happens when things go wrong. During illness or holiday we replace someone and the work carries on. When a deadline could not move, the team worked evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, and the work continued even during a planned holiday of Sam's. Our clients are based in the Netherlands and that is where our focus lies too, which keeps consultation practical. We started this service last year because a client asked for it, and have offered it as a standard service ever since.
From first conversation to delivery
It starts with a conversation in which we go through the project. You then supply the details, usually together with existing drawings that need revising. We go through that material before anyone starts drawing, because that is where most time can be won or lost. We bundle our questions, so one meeting is needed instead of five separate phone calls.
We schedule the first delivery early and deliberately keep it small. That series is meant to test whether our reading of the drawing conventions is right, whether the layout fits and whether the level of detail is what you expect. If something is not right, we correct it before the rest goes the same way, which avoids a correction round across the whole set.
After that, the work continues in parts, with feedback on each delivery. The rhythm of consultation depends on the pace of the project: every two days on one project, weekly on another. Day-to-day contact runs through email and phone, and we either visit you or you come to our office. On larger projects we work with software you can log into to follow progress.
For standalone AutoCAD drafting, delivery is by email, including the source files. Intellectual property in everything we draw belongs to you, so nothing you might need later stays with us. We work in our own environment with our own licences. We respond to a new request within 1 to 2 working days, and we can start as soon as we have enough information to draw.
Frequently asked questions about technical drafting
Let us handle your technical 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.