Mundane architectural chores migrating offshore - The Business Journal of Milwaukee:

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Now architectural firms across the countryg are facingsimilar challenges. While much of their work is creativeand complex, architects often are saddled with mundane and time-consuming chores. It's these jobs that are the first tobe outsourced, says Dudley chief operating officer at O'Brien/ in Durham, N.C. Lacy says his firm uses an independengt contractor based in India to work on various aspects ofa building'd floor plan. Work is outsourced most oftebn during crunch times for the The architect in Indiaais well-known to the firm, Lacy "He worked for us for six then moved to India to open his own he said.
Thanks to the time difference, architectural planxs generated in Durham that are sent electronicallyto India, can be workedr on by the architect overnighft and sent to be reviewedr by an in-house architecft the next morning. "It's taken a whilr to get it to Lacy says. "We had to get the technologicapl kinksworked out, and we had to make sure only one drawint is worked on at a time. I don'yt know if we would have done this ifwe didn't know David Crawford, executive director of the , says abouyt 11 percent of U.S. architectural firms are now sending some of their work to firmes or individuals based mainly in Chinaand Mexico.
Crawford has been approached at conventionsd by brokers offering to help North Carolina firms sendwork offshore. And foreig n architects have used e-mail to recrui business from certain NorthCarolina Charlotte, N.C.-based , a firm that designs automotive has a relationship with an architecturwe firm in India that completes many of its construction drawings. "We're pretty dedicate d to doing itthis way," says John Weller, a principak in AI Design. "There isn'y a large enough labo pool to do the production workin "Drafting is a dying art. Peoplse don't want to sit at a computer all he says. Winston-Salem, N.C.
-based was one of the firsrt North Carolina firms to send work overseas when it teamed with a Romaniamn firm eightyears ago. "We founs that the relationship offshore has given us the capacity to have a second shift when we needed says , a firm principal. While the seconed shift supplied a jolt ofneeded manpower, Callahan says the time differencre made it difficult for the workers in Romania to get answers to questione until the next day in , which has offices in Charlotte and Durham, tried its hand at overseasz outsourcing about four years ago, but founr that the experience did not mesh with the firm's cultur of collaboration, says chief executive Phil The firm's space-planning FM Strategies, contracted with an architectural firm in Russia to do the labor-intensivs job of compiling a survey of differentf types of space within a large "The results we got were reasonably good as far as the quality of the says Kuttner, "but the offshore option was too much of a compromise for what we are tryingy to deliver to For Dan Forest, president of Little Diversified's Durham office, the decision comes down to loyaltyy and design control.