Provide For a Learning Curve When You Outsource CAD Drafting
Posted: Friday, March 24, 2006
by Lucky Balaraman
LuckyBalaraman
This article is intended for engineering or architectural companies that are planning to find a vendor to whom they can outsource their CAD drafting requirements.
No matter how experienced the vendor may be, they will have to take time ascending a learning curve. This can take up to 100 hours of drafting if there are many unique style criteria.
Style criteria that cannot usually be automated are:
(1) The points in drawings where these should be placed:
o Dimensions
(e.g., inner dimensions or outer?)
o Leaders
(e.g., at boundaries of areas or within them?)
o Leader
text (e.g., at the edges of the viewport, near the image or either?)
o Layer
assignment for the various elements of the drawing (unless the elements and
their layers are preprogrammed into the drawing platform, as in Architectural
Desktop ®)
(2) Positioning criteria such as:
o The
vertical distance from image to title and from title to subtitle
o The
vertical distance between stacked images in the same drawing
The
assignment of elements in the drawing to appropriate layers usually involves the
most learning on the part of draftsmen. This is because frequently this
assignment requires specific domain knowledge.
By
way of explanation, if the drawing were an HVAC layout with separate layers for
fresh water pipes, hot water pipes and cold water pipes, the draftsman would
have to understand the overall working of the particular system to know the
layer associated with each section of pipe.
This
is alright if the draftsman has hundreds of hours of exposure to HVAC, but such
individuals are rare in the CAD drafting services landscape. The outsourcer
would have to contract with a more expensive, specialized CAD drafting service.
In effect, the outsourcer must pay for the
learning curve either with time or with money. But as described above, it
is a necessary and inescapable phenomenon!