topic Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department? in Revit MEP Forum

Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

dmiller_SCE — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 16:01:53 GMT

All I am curious about how other companies operate related to Revit/ BIM projects specifically. Does your company maintain a “Drafting Department” whose sole purpose is red to black and nothing else? I see several companies

abandoning this concept and relying on engineers and designers to design/ draft when working with Revit. I am just curious how others are set-up with the pro and cons of your company structure related to this.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

s.borello — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 16:41:47 GMT

Our company in transitioning to Revit and BIM... we have assigned a Revit champion to lead the charge, we will add like minded people to the Revit team as we progress. Our Revit modelers are not engineers.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

hmunsell — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 17:25:39 GMT

We do not have an official “Drafting Department”, but each discipline does still have a handful of “drafters”. Our drafters are pretty much limited to AutoCAD and MicroStation work. We have tried teaching some of our drafters Revit but most of our drafters, along with the people suppling them with work, are older staff. They have had a lot of issues adapting to a BIM workflow. some of our younger drafters are learning Revit and moving towards being more Designers than Drafters.

On most projects the Architects and Engineers do their own work now. Junior staff typically do the work of drafters now. As they get more experience, they get more responsibility. Our biggest hurtle has been that sheet/set composition is not taught in school anymore. The drafters know how to layout a sheet and make a set look good, the kids coming out school don’t. the December 2015 AUGIWorld had a good article on it.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

Anonymous — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 07:11:12 GMT

we have a separate Drafting Department for our company where we do all the required families for our company and load it in a cloud based network so with the login id they can download what they want. And i'm one of the drafter in my company. Is there anyone who knows how to enter into Autodesk for full time work.?? I want to grow in knowledge with much bigger task.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

dmiller_SCE — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 11:50:13 GMT

@s.borello is your Revit champions primary role to do red to black type work with the Revit development secondary filler work, or is their primary function managing and developing Revit standards/ content.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

dmiller_SCE — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 11:56:11 GMT

@hmunsell What percentage of jobs does your company do in Revit? You indicated that the ones who are trying to learn Revit is moving more toward designer roles. Have you seen good results with this type of transition or better results toward having the junior engineers do most of the Revit modeling work?

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

s.borello — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 15:29:38 GMT

All of the above.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

hmunsell — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 16:03:41 GMT

Revit Usage: we try to do ALL incoming projects in revit. in come cases the client has such a strict standard that we can not use revit. revit can export to DWG, but these clients check the DWG's when delivered. they look for specific block names, text styles and layer naming conventions where revit categories are not that specific. it takes too much time to fix these DWG's after there exported to warrant using Revit.

transitioning Drafters: that all depends on the drafter. i have a "Revit for Drafters" training that i developed to teach them prior to doing any Revit work. we have several individuals that it currently seems to be working very well. others we have trained just cant get out of "Drafting Mode". several departments have had good success, but it can be very time consuming for someone to manage. all work for these drafters needs to go thru a Coordinator of some kind to make sure there being given work appropriate for there level of skill.

Jr Architect/Engineer: this has worked well when properly applied. i have developed training for each discipline, Arch, HVAC, Struc, Elec, Process, I&C, and several others. any new staff is supposed to go thru training prior to being put on a revit project (regardless of how well they claim to know revit). after training, the Jr staff needs to be paired with a more Sr. staff on there first project or two. this gets them acclimated to our processes and the St staff can guide and evaluate there progress.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 02:55:43 GMT

@hmunsell R u Team lead.???

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

hmunsell — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 03:23:10 GMT

Im not any specific discipline. Im the person that supports all the Team Leads, BIM Coordinators & BIM Staff. I also do all the Corporate BIM & CAD training.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 03:39:00 GMT

I need a person like you as my trainer.....I love to learn MEP and structure..as i have done 2 years in Architecture Scan to BIM works..Now am working as drafter for all the services.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

RobDraw — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 14:50:37 GMT

As you have already noticed, the traditional drafter is an evolving role. With Revit, one not only needs to know good drafting practices and standards, they need to be able to design and coordinate with all trades.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

dmiller_SCE — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 15:07:39 GMT

@RobDraw Yes, I agree that the role "Drafter" is ever-evolving, and I feel that it has evolved to the point that a "Drafter" is, unfortunately, becoming a remnant of past practices. With the advancement of modeling software and BIM, one needs to have a deeper understanding of the exact system that is be modeling as well of the entire process beyond one's discipline; no longer are we just putting lines on paper. I started as a drafter many years ago, and I am just curious how others are evolving the role of Drafters at their respective companies. I hope to use this information that is being provided in this thread to help guide my company on our transition.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

pkolarik — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 16:42:30 GMT

@dmiller_SCE wrote:
@RobDraw Yes, I agree that the role "Drafter" is ever-evolving, and I feel that it has evolved to the point that a "Drafter" is, unfortunately, becoming a remnant of past practices. With the advancement of modeling software and BIM, one needs to have a deeper understanding of the exact system that is be modeling as well of the entire process beyond one's discipline; no longer are we just putting lines on paper. I started as a drafter many years ago, and I am just curious how others are evolving the role of Drafters at their respective companies. I hope to use this information that is being provided in this thread to help guide my company on our transition.

If the definition of a "drafter" is simply a "redline picker-upper", then we got rid of those years ago. It has nothing to do with Revit or BIM, it's just the mindset that we want all our cadders to be able to actually think about/be knowledgeable about the content they're putting on paper / in the model. It wasn't a choice that was offered to the employees; you had to adapt, period.

Now with the introduction of Revit (we still do both Revit and AutoCad stuff every day) it's even more important that the "designers" be able to understand what they're putting on paper.

Bottom line is we have no use for someone who is only capable of picking up redmarks made by someone else. (fresh out of college kids usually will start out that way, but they're expected to not remain that way indefinitely.)

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

dmiller_SCE — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 17:08:27 GMT

@pkolarik I am referring to a drafter as a position whose only responsibility is to pick up red to black style comments. Currently, my company is trying to maintain this type of position and workflow even on Revit Projects. I feel that this workflow is not effective when doing Revit and that it is almost impossible to redline something to the point that a lesser experienced individual could model in Revit with minimal questions towards the original designer or engineer. I am encouraging my company to either invest in the needed training or education required to advance the drafting positions into more of a designer role. Alternatively, we completely redo current workflows to where the drafters become fewer but are in a more of a supportive type role. The Drafter is more like technicians that support the designers and engineers by creating sheets, families, schedules, etc. with the modeling done by experienced designers or junior engineers under the supervision of senior engineers. I agree with your statement about no use for individuals who are only capable of performing red-line type work.

Re: Does your Company Maintain a Drafting Department?

duke.windsor — Thu, 19 May 2022 22:26:50 GMT

When I started, I brought Revit to the company. Started with myself and 12 sales reps. It’s been a struggle getting the company to understand the need for staff vs the 3-5 day turnaround time requested.
I hire only REVIT drafters that are farmiliar with AutoCad. & Lumion.

After four years I now have 10 CAD Designers. But still behind in production and staff. I should have at least 15 Staff to keep up with demand.