For start-up and smaller construction teams, company size and operational budget will, sooner or later, nudge them toward outsourcing. Among the phases of build projects, one of the most strategically suited for outsourcing is CAD work: drawings/drafts, renders, models.
These processes are labor intensive, time-consuming, and skill-demanding; and if small-operation and/or start-up home builders tackle them in-house, odds are the results will not be very pretty. They could be setting themselves up for heaps of expenses and stretches of overtime hours that leave them unable to focus on the far more critical task of getting clients in the door and keeping them coming back—not to mention sending their friends and acquaintances to you so they too can get their build projects on your calendar.
CAD outsourcing benefits your company three ways: guaranteed accuracy and precision, shorter turnaround time, and reduced costs.
However, whether you get to fully enjoy these benefits depends on how you work with your CAD outsourcing company. That is, whether you enable them to do their best work for you.
How exactly do you make that happen?
Keep these three things in mind: communicate, collaborate, connect.
Communicate
Unsurprisingly, for an industry where multiple service providers or contractors (as well as subcontractors), experts, consultants, and stakeholders are involved at varying phases of any given project, communication is gold
With CAD outsourcing, communication issues can arise in the form of either miscommunication or lack of communication. You can’t afford either.
Empower your outsourced CAD team with accurate and sufficient information.
Your CAD outsourcing company should be attuned to your projects the specific requirements, the structural details, the materials. Right from the start, when you hand over an home builder CAD project, see to it that your outsourced CAD team has all the data they need to do the job you need them to do.
While it’s true that their comprehensive experience may give CAD outsourcing professionals a finely tuned sense for any given project, they can’t always operate on instinct and guesswork, no matter how accurate their guesses are. Besides, if you keep making them fill in the blanks, you’ll be making them spend unnecessary extra time on one project. And if they have to keep asking you for missing details, that will most likely translate to time wasted or delay, especially if you fail to promptly get back to them.
Create an accessible communication channel.
To ensure that good communication happens throughout every home builder CAD project’s cycle, ensure that you have a communication channel (a dashboard perhaps), where your outsourced CAD team can ask questions or clarify specific details and get prompt reply from a designated resource person from your company, especially if your outsourced team is working slightly different hours.
Give and solicit regular feedback.
This should be a requirement. This helps you avoid making the same mistakes moving forward, and it makes it easier to stay on the same page. This is also one way to put the communication channel to good use.
Collaborate
You can’t go wrong with a collaborative relationship with your outsourced team. It creates trust, and trust facilitates openness and communication. That in turn allows for inspired troubleshooting and sharing of ideas, and it should encourage your outsourced team to be more involved, and treat your outsourced CAD projects with that bit of extra care that can go a long way throughout the entire build project.
One way to enhance your collaboration is by sharing resources, trying out new tools and software together, working on an experiment outside of a specific project. These undertakings can strengthen your individual businesses, and may even result in innovations.
Connect
Forge a meaningful professional connection with your CAD outsourcing company. If you are already communicating and collaborating splendidly, then you are well on your way to establishing a strong professional connection.
To take things farther, you can do site visits and get-togethers, if logistics allow. Conversely, you can arrange for your outsourced team to visit your own HQ, spend an hour to talk shop face-to-face. You never know what comes up, and where it can take your working relationship next.
If your CAD outsourcing company is based on the other side of the country, or in another country, and you’re getting good work from them since day one, you will want to keep working with them. It only makes sense, therefore, to establish a relationship and enhance your collaboration. That’s why a site visit even just once a year will be a great investment. You can talk to the team that has been delivering great home builder CAD projects for you and tell them face-to-face how much you appreciate them.
In a competitive and relatively unpredictable industry such as construction and homebuilding, respect-based human connections will surely stand your business in good stead, like helical piling on sandy soil.
Ready to fully enjoy the benefits of home builder CAD outsourcing? Reach out to us—let’s talk about how we can help you take your business where you want it to go.
