Structural steel detailing is the final step before metal fabricators can begin bending, shaving and welding steel to bring your vision to life. Whether remodelling a domestic balustrade or erecting the skeleton of a new manufacturing plant, fabrication drawings must be faultless to avoid unnecessary delays and costs to your project. Here are 5 ways of outsourcing this whole process to a consultant like Restoric Design can benefit your project.
Help your firm’s bottom line
To produce fabrication drawings in-house you will need, at the very least, a license for reliable software such as Autodesk’s Advanced Steel and a sufficiently experienced, qualified CAD Technician. These are considerable upfront costs to your business even if you can secure a package discount on your software.
While outsourcing steel detailing may be an additional cost to your project, it can easily save money for your business overall, depending on how often you undertake steel detailing. Outsourcing your detailing means you can invest your firm’s valuable resources into software and staff that generate the most value to your clients.
Access a pool of wider experience and expertise
Outsourcing your steel detailing requirements to a firm like Restoric Design means putting your needs into experienced hands. Restoric’s Managing Director, Tristan, and Senior CAD Technician, Thomas, alone have vast and diverse portfolios of steel detailing to draw upon.
A reputable CAD consultant can be infinitely more knowledgeable than an in-house technician, from the nuts and bolts of liaising with a steel fabricator to merging complex requirements of architectural and mechanical drawings. If your firm is tackling its most complex MEP design project to date, the right consultants will have worked with dozens of companies in the same position.
This can give you confidence your CAD technician will ask all the right questions, and the final product will uphold the standards and professionality your firm has worked so hard to build while working with project stakeholders.
Offer the reliability of accreditations, without the cost
A consultancy like Restoric ensures CAD technicians are at the top of their game, with a broad range of experience and specific areas of expertise – and that they understand and work to the highest industry standards and relevant ISO standards. Keeping technicians trained and processes to ISO standards incurs costs and additional record keeping; working with a reliable CAD outsourcing firm can ensure you deliver projects to this standard at a considerable saving to your business, such as Quality Management System (QMS) and environmental standards.
Simplify your project workflow
Accurate fabrication drawings must bring together your Architectural and Structural Engineers’ drawings flawlessly; even on a smaller project, producing them in-house will inevitably involve the input of at least half a dozen professionals, including your external steel fabricators.
Outsourcing your steel detailing means rather than finding time to get all your busy colleagues into one room, doubtless with dozens of emails to follow, you can place your requirements in the hands of your consultancy. Once that decision has been made, you will save significant time by liaising with one contact rather than several – and when further queries arise from your colleagues, you can drop them at your consultant’s door.
Save your company’s IT resources
CAD outsourcing company IT infrastructures will be configured almost exclusively for CAD software – meaning that you can save considerable resources ensuring installations do not affect existing software and software downtime during projects for patches and new releases.