Companies that use an external technical drawings service rarely do so as a luxury. Usually there has first been a period in which the work sat waiting in their own drawing office. The consequences of that are fairly predictable. Revisions pile up, a set falls behind the actual situation and nobody knows for certain any more which version is the latest.
The technically difficult work gets priority, so the repetitive part keeps getting pushed back until it cannot be pushed any further.
At some point a fixed date comes into view and it all has to be done in a short time after all. Then come the overtime hours, and overtime is the most expensive way to finish a drawing set. We take over exactly that part. We draft and model; we do not do engineering, so technical responsibility stays where it belongs. Our team is ready to go, works remotely from our own office and scales with whatever the project needs at that moment.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Who needs a technical drawings service
Demand for our technical drawings service comes mainly from engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and also from companies where technical drafting is a fixed part of the process. The people we talk to are managers, team leaders and owners. The problem they bring to the table is almost always capacity: too little time, too few drafters, or a peak their own team cannot absorb. How it shows up differs by type of company. At an engineering firm, it is often a project that was won while the drawing office was already full.
At a manufacturer, it is more likely to be production drawings and variants that have to be kept up to date at a fast pace. At a contractor, it is the as-built file, where the situation on site differs from the drawing and that difference has to be incorporated before the file can go out. What these situations share is that the work is not complicated, but it is extensive. That is exactly where an in-house drafter makes the slowest progress, because they keep interrupting it for something more urgent.
We take on a package like that in one go and work through it without anyone from your side needing to sit alongside every day. Our clients are based in the Netherlands and our focus is on the Netherlands too, so consultation happens in the same language and within the same working day. In practice that makes more difference than it seems on paper, because a question about a detail can be answered the same day rather than a set sitting idle for a day waiting for an answer.
Why a technical drawings service calls for checks
Outsourcing work means someone is looking at a set they did not set up themselves. That is where errors arise, which is why we have a fixed review structure around it. Every piece of work passes through at least three review layers. A drafter draws, a second team member checks that work, then Sam, our team leader, checks it and finally Barry, our project manager, looks it over once more. So several people who had no hand in a drawing look at it.
That keeps the number of errors minimal in practice. What these checks mainly stop are not spectacular blunders, but the small things that become expensive later: a layer that does not match the standard, a dimension taken from an outdated revision, a detail updated on one drawing but not on another. Points like these cost many times more on site than they do in the drawing office. Sam still works as an engineer himself, so he recognises the kind of error that causes problems further down the line. We also deliver in parts, so you can check the work early yourself.
A wrong assumption then surfaces in the first part rather than only at final delivery, when it runs through the entire set. With the Firefly material, the existing set had been printed incorrectly and partly drawn by hand, and was hard to read and messy. We worked it out ourselves rather than calling about it every time, and still delivered clean work. That attitude is part of the checking: first reconstruct what was intended yourself, and only knock on the door when an assumption really cannot be confirmed.
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 cost of a technical drawings service
With us, the cost of a technical drawings service is based either on hours actually worked or on a fixed price per project. Both are possible, and we decide in advance together with you which it will be. For a sharply defined package with a well-organised set, a fixed price is the obvious choice, because the size can be estimated in advance. For work whose size only becomes clear during the project, such as a revision round on material in poor condition, hourly billing is fairer for both parties. We log only genuine working hours. If a team member steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the clock stops. That is strictly regulated, but it is the only way a timesheet stays meaningful. We do not work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription, so nothing keeps running in a quiet month.
What keeps costs down is mainly the way the work is set up. Building repeating components intelligently takes time up front and saves time again and again afterwards. A complete and legible delivery of material saves investigation work, and that investigation work is the biggest hidden cost in this field. Clear CAD standards also prevent a set from having to be converted afterwards. The absence of ongoing payroll costs counts too, because nothing keeps running on our side outside the job. We only draw up an estimate after we have looked at the material supplied, because an estimate without sight of the state of the set means little. To do that, we go through a representative part and gauge the size of the work against it.
Outsourcing compared with a freelancer or a permanent drafter
There are roughly three ways to add drafting capacity, and they differ on points that only become visible later. A new permanent drafter is the heaviest step. Recruitment and training take months, and after the peak that person is still on the payroll. If they drop out through illness or holiday, their work stops while the costs continue. A freelancer is quicker to arrange, but it is still one person.
If they drop out, all the capacity disappears, and there is rarely any check on their work. Scaling up with a freelancer is also difficult, because a second and third person have to be found and trained all over again.
With us it is different. With our large, variable team we deploy what the project needs, from one drafter for a small job to as many drafters as a large project requires, and when something is urgent we add people straight away. If someone on our side drops out, we replace them and the work carries on. You keep one point of contact instead of a collection of separate contacts who all need to be brought up to speed individually.
Ownership of everything we produce passes to you. We also work in our own environment with our own licences, so no workstation or account needs to be set up on your side. If you want to see how it works out first, you can start with a short job and decide on that basis whether more follows. We have deliberately kept that threshold low, because a drawing office only hands over work once it has seen the result.
Frequently asked questions about our technical drawings service
Let us produce your technical 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.