CAD Outsourcing Problems and Suggestions

If your an architect or an engineer thinking of outsourcing your drawings, you have been confonted with the question some point in time, and that question is "how do i find a good provider of cad services?" Probably most probably what most comes to mind is go to search engines and type in "cad services". Yes going to search engine is a smart idea but you will be surprised to know that nowadays isnt the strategy of choice.it has a shortcomings, and that is search engine is ranked a site on how a good website is, not how the websites company is.After all for the most part websites are like ads.

Now you tell me, if an ad is good, does it mean the company being advertised is good? of course not. What you need are the opinions of users, users that actually used the cad services. that way you'll see the good, the bad, and the ugly. Say about 10 years ago, being find the opinions of others would be a pipe dream but today is a reality. You can do it, and you can do it easily.How? by going to user forums. If your into engineering, go to engineering forums. If your in architectural, go to architectural forums.ask about cad services and get the naked truth.

Here are the url of the good engineering forums.

www.eng-tips.com
www.engineeringforum.org
www.engineersedge.com

and believe me engineers love to talk, ask me im one of them. and here the url of the good architectural forums

architecture.about.com
arch.designcommunity.com
www.topix.com/forum
construction.com/community

What you have to do is choose some of the forums, register for them, then ask the question "can anyone recommend a good cad service based on first-hand experience?". gather about 10 service provider names using this method then carefully evaluate this 10 companies by messaging them and evaluating the responses you get. rank the providers and keep only the top 3.

Divide your cad work amongst this 3 providers,of course if you don't have volume requirements, maybe you can use them in rotation but always have more than one provider on hand.