CAD Services and the Shrinking Economy

The global financial crisis is on, and is playing at an economy near you. CAD services providers have not been spared because of a domino effect… when demand goes down there is less development of residential and commercial spaces, which means there is less need for architectural drawings and so less need for CAD services.

Contracting demand also results in cuts to R & D budgets, which means less demand for engineering drawings. Again, this leads to less demand for CAD services.

Fortunately we are affected very little by these mechanics (so far!). The primary reason for this is that our largest customer is building part of the Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as a large hospital in France. Both these projects are funded mainly by the French government. It is unlikely that the French government will stop work on France’s largest airport or on a major hospital (there would be an enormous political backlash if it did).

A secondary reason is that much of our other business is from Scandinavia (we provide CAD services to some large furniture manufacturers there), which has not been as severely hit by the recession as the US and perhaps the UK.

The motto of the story is to always have a client base that is distributed evenly across the continents… and this holds good regardless of which business you are in, not only the CAD services business!

Technorati Tags: CAD services, CAD project team, outsource CAD, archirectural drafting

CAD Services: How We Organize a Project

I thought it might be worthwhile to provide a pictorial example of the team that we deploy on a typical medium-sized CAD project.  The diagram illustrates the structure of the team that is currently working on one of our active projects.  Please spend a few moments looking at it, after which I will explain what is not obvious.

The best way to explain aspects of the team is in terms of its hierarchical layers. So here goes.

First some points of overview:

• The lower down in the diagram a team member is, the more quality inspection he does
• Above the drafter level, members are involved in administrative tasks such as monitoring timely completion and answering drafters’ technical questions

I will now describe the primary functions of each level, starting with the drafters’ level.

One might say that the drafters’ level is the most important.  It is primarily responsible for quality.  That is because, as concerns quality, it is not our primary intention to create a quality control system that catches all defects.  It is our intention not to introduce defects to start with. 

Although we continuously train our drafters to create drawings with zero errors, we nevertheless check their work 100%.  And this checking is done by the Checkers.

The two Project Leaders:

• Train the drafters in the skills required for the particular customer’s domain
• Farm out work to the drafters as and when it is received from our customers and inform the drafters how long they should take to finish each drawing
• Inspect work at a 30% sampling level
• Package the drawings and send them to the customer

That QC Manager samples the drawing at a 10% rate, and monitors correct packaging and timely dispatch of the drawings.

The Architect provides answers to architecture-related questions that any other members of the team may have.  He also samples the work at a 10% rate.

The Senior Manager has overall responsibility for the project.  For this particular project, all communication with the customer is done in his name.  He communicates regularly with the customer on the status of the work and emails or holds video conferences with the customer to clarify issues which cannot be clarified at TMG. He also samples the work at a 1% rate.

Considerable redundancy is deliberately built into the team structure in anticipation of team members taking days off for personal reasons.

The net result is that the work proceeds in a predictable, orderly fashion, deliveries are made on time and the defect rate is as close to zero as possible.

We commit to you that if you send us a project , we will give it the same amount of care that we give this one!

Have a nice day,