The vacancy for an extra engineer has been open for months. Three applications, one interview, and the one suitable candidate eventually chose an employer within cycling distance. Meanwhile the order book keeps growing: delivery dates slip, work preparation is waiting for drawing work and the senior engineers are structurally putting in evenings.
Anyone in that position usually gets a single piece of advice: keep recruiting. By all means do. But there are three levers you can pull yourself as a team lead or CAD manager to increase engineering capacity without adding anyone: winning back wasted hours through automation, dividing work more sensibly and outsourcing selectively. In this article we walk through all three, including a calculation that shows how much capacity is hiding in click work at an average team. A toolbox like Thundercad plays the lead role in the first lever; the other two mostly take organisation, not budget.
Why waiting for that one candidate is not a plan
The job market for mechanical engineers is structurally tight, and everyone is fishing in the same pond. A vacancy that stays open for months is not bad luck but the normal picture. Meanwhile, every month of waiting means: a team plugging the gap with overtime, projects slipping and quotes you should really be turning down.
Overtime feels like free capacity, but it is not. The error rate climbs, the appetite for improving anything disappears, and your best people are the first to start looking around. That makes the gap bigger instead of smaller. The sober conclusion: keep the recruitment running, but stop treating the vacancy as the only plan. A large share of the hours you are looking for is already inside your team; it is just being spent on the wrong things.
Lever 1: win back the wasted hours
Spend a day looking over an engineer's shoulder and keep a tally of what happens: exporting drawings to PDF and DXF one by one, retyping iProperties, hunting for folders in the file explorer, waiting for a large assembly to open, preparing print sets for the shop floor. All of it necessary, and none of it requires an engineering degree.
Now do the maths, with assumptions you can adjust yourself. Say you have six engineers, each losing an average of forty minutes a day to this kind of click work. Together that is four hours a day, twenty hours a week, and around nine hundred hours over a working year. More than half a full-time position, in other words, already on your payroll but spent on work a computer does faster and with fewer mistakes. The full calculation, including the hidden cost of all those interruptions, is in what repetitive work really costs your engineering team.
The good news: precisely this work can be automated without a big project. Take issuing a drawing package. Exporting sixty drawings to PDF and DXF by hand easily costs two minutes each: two hours of concentration-draining click work per package. With Batch Publish you select the assembly, pick the formats (PDF, DWG, DXF or STEP) and run the complete set through in bulk, in combination with Vault as well. Meanwhile the engineer does the work you actually hired him for.
Curious how many hours are hiding in your team's click work? Run the Thundercad tools alongside your own projects for a month and measure the difference.
Try 30 days freeLever 2: put the work in the right chair
The second lever costs no software, only an honest look at who does what. In many teams, senior engineers still produce every drawing themselves, gather documentation on their own and personally check every export. Not because they have to, but because it grew that way. The question is simple: which tasks in the department genuinely require the most expensive chair?
- Drawings and detail views of fully developed modules: excellent work for a junior, with the senior as reviewer.
- Compiling export sets, print work and completing documentation: most of this can move to work preparation.
- Configuring variants of standard frames: a junior plus a good work instruction.
- Design decisions, customer meetings and risk assessment: this is and remains senior work, and this is where you want the freed-up hours to go.
The effect is twofold. The seniors get hours back for the work that calls for their experience, and the juniors learn faster because they are doing real work instead of watching. Do budget for handover time: in the first weeks, delegating costs more than it delivers. Plan that investment explicitly, otherwise it dies at the first deadline.
Lever 3: outsource, but selectively
The third lever is external capacity, and it only works when you deploy it within clear boundaries. A drawing package for a fully developed module, as-built documentation after delivery, or the translation from design to production drawings during peak load: those are packages with a clear start and end, which you can hand over and check properly. Your core design, and anything that needs daily alignment, stays in-house.
Whether outsourcing succeeds stands or falls with what you hand over and how you check the result. How to organise that without it becoming a full-time job is described in outsourcing drawing work without losing your grip; read it before the first package goes out the door.
How to start this week
- Measure: have the team track for one week where the non-design hours go.
- Automate the biggest item first; in practice that is almost always exporting and issuing.
- Shift: list which tasks can move from senior to junior or to work preparation, and hand one over every week.
- Define which package you will place externally at the next peak, including the handover set and the review moment.
- Evaluate after a month: how many hours did each lever deliver, and what is next on the list?
None of these levers makes recruiting unnecessary, and it does not have to. But in many teams a solid share of the missing hours surfaces this way, without an agency and without waiting. And if that one candidate does sign after all: he starts in a department where the dull work is already automated. That shortens the onboarding, and during the interview it happens to be a fine selling point too.
Frequently asked questions
How much click work is normal for an engineering team?
It differs per company, but teams that actually measure it rarely end up below half an hour per engineer per day; exporting, printing, retyping metadata and searching are the fixed items. Measure it for a week with a simple tally sheet, and from then on you calculate with your own numbers instead of assumptions.
Does this work for a small team of two or three engineers as well?
Especially there. In a small team there is nobody to delegate to, so every lost minute counts double. Automating export and issuing work does not depend on team size either: issuing a drawing package in bulk saves a one-person department an afternoon just as surely as a team of ten.
What does it cost to get started?
Mostly some measuring time and a bit of discipline. The automation side you can explore without obligation: Thundercad runs 30 days free alongside your own projects, so you can establish with real work how many hours are on the table at your company.