CAD Services

CAD services providers exist in the thousands (ask Google, they'll tell you), so how do you choose a good one?

"Ask friends and acquaintances" is the usual answer, and there is a lot of truth to this. But more often than not, your friends and acquaintances are likely to be mild rivals, so they would naturally be reluctant to divulge what might be a trade secret, namely the identity of their CAD services providers.

But there are places where friends and acquaintances will be more forthcoming: Professional forums. But not the forums centered on CAD services... you need to talk to users of CAD services, who tend to be people in the engineering and architectural professions.

If you need engineering CAD services, go to an engineering forum. If you need architectural CAD services, go to an architectural forum.

For names of engineering and architectural forums, go to The Magnum Group's Blog post.

Once you have gone to the forums and gotten the names of some good CAD services providers from helpful forum members, you have to evaluate the firms.

Of course, you could save yourself all the trouble and just popo over to The Magnum Group straightaway :-) ...

This involves messaging each of the services providers and carefully studying their responses. Questions similar to these are what you should ask yourself:

• How long did they take to respond to your message?
• Was their response to the point?
• Did they express keenness to work for you?
• Did they provide adequate contact details about the CAD services you asked about?
• Do they have qualified professionals on board?
• Do they work with your drafting platform (AutoCAD, MicroStation, whatever)?
• Do they have experience in engineering CAD or architectural CAD, or whichever CAD services are applicable to you?
  

Once this is done, you have to verify their technical competence. The best way to do this is to send them a trial project and to study their performance. Examine their output and verify things like:

• Did they understand your overall concept?
• Did they use the correct drafting style (layers, line width, line types, dimension style, font, label formatting, template, filename, xrefs, et al)?
• Were all the dimensions correct?

Then comes the price issue. Prices for CAD services are frequently expressed on a per page basis for 2D, sketch to CAD work. Some sample prices are (Sheet size : Price) :

A: $50 B: $70 C: $95 D: $115 E: $140

Expect the price to be higher if the detail is more dense or if analysis of any kind is involved. Expect it to be less for less detail.

This is just an overview of how to choose a good CAD services provider --- all the steps are spelled out in The Magnum Group's Blog posts on the subject. It's expert information, and it's free!

Enjoy the guidelines,

Technorati tags:CAD Services, CAD drafting services