With our working drawings service, you only pay for genuine working hours. That is not a slogan but a billing rule. If someone steps away for five minutes to get a coffee, the clock stops, and what remains is the time that actually went into the drawing. We charge by the hour or at a fixed price per project, and we decide together with the client which model suits best.
For a set that can be clearly defined, a fixed price is the obvious choice.
For work whose scope only becomes visible along the way, an hourly rate is fairer for both sides. What we do not do is work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription, because then you are paying for availability rather than for drafting. There are no ongoing salary costs either, because the team is on our payroll, not the client's. We draft and model, we do not do engineering, and the work is done remotely from our own office for companies in the Netherlands.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
The repetitive side of having working drawings made
Working drawings are rarely intellectually demanding, but they are often extensive. Most of the hours go into operations that keep recurring, with a dimension that shifts and little else that differs. That is exactly the part that gets shelved in your own drawing office, because it is never more urgent than whatever comes in that day. We take on that part. Not because it is interesting work, but because it needs to get done and we have the people for it. In a series of detail sheets that largely resemble one another, the gain is not in drawing faster but in setting things up more smartly.
We first look at which components recur, how often that happens and in which variants. Then we decide whether it pays to build those components properly once. One example from our own work comes from greenhouse construction. Companies there often work in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not smart at building components such as valves in piping systems. A valve at 90 and at 110 has to be redrawn by hand by the drafter every single time.
With a smart component, it is placed in a single action. In this type of work, that saves at least seventy per cent of the time. Not every assignment lends itself to this, because with one-off work the set-up does not pay for itself. We say so, rather than automatically choosing the heaviest route. If you have working drawings made by a team that knows this kind of volume, you mainly pay for the first sheet and less and less for the hundredth.
Smart components in our working drawings service
Parametric Revit families are what we call smart components. Such a component adapts to a new situation or a different size, so it is built once and can then be placed anywhere without redrawing. The material schedule is linked to it. If the component changes, the schedule changes automatically, so the list and the drawing do not drift apart. In practice, that last point is often a bigger advantage than the drafting time saved, because a list maintained by hand sooner or later falls behind.
We can clean up existing families and templates or rebuild them. Which route is more sensible depends on the state of that set. If a family set is very messy, with variants that have accumulated over the years, rebuilding is sometimes faster than repairing. We give that assessment once we have reviewed the set and before any hours are spent. Besides Revit, we also work in AutoCAD and Rhino, with Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a limited extent with Dynamo and Vault.
So working parametrically does not automatically mean a firm has to switch to different software. If the project runs in AutoCAD, we stay in it and look for the gains in blocks and a consistent structure. If you need working drawings for a product line that keeps coming back in different sizes, this approach benefits you most. For a single project with entirely unique components, it is a waste of time.
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.
What the delivered working drawings include
We deliver the drawing set in the format you continue working in, so DXF, DWG, Revit formats or STEP, and in practice any common CAD format. The sheets use the client's layer structure, with the title blocks, hatching and annotation used in the existing set. To achieve this, we ask for a sample sheet and the drawing protocol, if there is one, at the start. With modelling work, the associated information comes from the model, including the material schedule. For a revision, we also indicate which sheets were affected and what was changed. The set is meant to be used straight away, not cleaned up first. That sounds obvious, but it is exactly where outsourced drafting often falls down. A set that is technically correct but deviates from the internal convention still costs work preparation hours.
Because we deliver in stages, the first batch also serves as a check on that convention. If something deviates, we adjust it in one go across the ongoing work. The intellectual property of everything we produce belongs to the client, including the families and templates we build along the way. So you can reuse them internally on projects we are not involved in. If anything changes after delivery, we can pick it up without needing an ongoing agreement. That way, having working drawings made remains a completed assignment rather than a commitment that quietly carries on.
Capacity and cover for your working drawings
How many people we put on a project follows from the work itself. For a small assignment that may be a single drafter, and when the volume or the deadline calls for it, we deploy as many drafters as needed from our large, flexible team. The team is already in place, so scaling up involves no recruitment process and no months-long onboarding period. When something is urgent, we add people rather than stretching the schedule further.
The core of the team has around twenty-five years of combined experience, and everyone who drafts for us has been working with CAD for more than ten years. Absence is usually the point at which outsourcing proves its worth.
If someone on our side falls ill or goes on holiday, we replace that person and the work carries on. You do not notice it in the schedule and you do not pay for it either. That is possible because the work runs in our own environment, according to set agreements, and because a second team member has always already looked at the file. A handover is therefore short and does not take days. What has been agreed is recorded and does not exist only in the head of a single drafter.
Your point of contact stays the same, even when someone is swapped internally on the drafting. Once a project is completed, we scale the capacity back down, because there is no contract underneath that carries on automatically. A short assignment is fine, and if you want to test how we work first, you can start with a limited set. That way, having working drawings made lets you keep control of your own staffing without having to hire anyone.
Frequently asked questions about our working drawings service
Hand your working drawings 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.