What I learned watching CAD professionals send files to clients

I’ve been sitting inside a civil engineering firm for about a year. Most of what I’ve built grew out of noticing how people actually do their jobs. The CAD delivery process is one of those things.

Here’s what a senior CAD designer does when a PM asks for a deliverable to go out.

She opens each DWG. Runs AUDIT. Runs PURGE. Detaches xrefs. Strips Civil 3D objects so the client can open it in plain AutoCAD without proxy warnings. Inserts the firm’s legal disclaimer on a stamped layer. Saves as AutoCAD 2018 format. Zips everything. Drafts an email. Hits send.

A normal package is six to fourteen files. That’s a chunk of someone’s afternoon. Every week, every PM, every project.

That was the obvious problem. Once I started watching closer, I noticed four more.

The four things that weren’t on my list when I started

Delivery was a patchwork. Multi-gigabyte ZIPs through Outlook when they fit. SharePoint links and other share-by-link workarounds when they didn’t. Sometimes the client opened a three-week-old version because the new one was buried in their inbox. The PM had no record of what landed, who opened it, when.

The disclaimer was inconsistent. Leadership updated the wording once a year. Some PMs had the new version in their template, some had the old, some had the wrong project’s disclaimer because they’d copied the wrong file. Nobody owned keeping it current across every PM’s working files.

Internal markup leaked to clients. CAD techs use their own naming for working layers — JT-REVIEW, WIP-NOTES, things like that. They freeze them before delivery. Sometimes they forget. When the client turns on all layers to look at something, they see the firm’s internal back-and-forth.

Civil 3D objects broke for the recipient. The firm uses Civil 3D. Most of its clients have plain AutoCAD or a free DWG viewer. Open the file there, surfaces and pipe networks show as proxy objects with warnings. Client emails back asking for “the dumb version.” PM goes back to the CAD tech. Another export cycle starts.

None of these are exotic. Every AEC firm I’ve talked to since has the same five problems. They’ve normalized them as the cost of doing business.

What I built

A desktop app the PM installs once. They drag in CAD files, optionally drop in PDFs or supporting documents, fill in project and recipient details, click Send. That’s the PM workflow.

The app hands the bundle to a cloud platform. The platform queues it. A headless Civil 3D processor does the actual cleanup — audit, purge, detach xrefs, strip Civil 3D intelligence, insert the firm’s current disclaimer, save as a universal AutoCAD format.

The client gets an email with a download link. They click. They get a folder named {Firm Name}_{Today's Date} with the CAD files in a CAD Docs subfolder and any supporting PDFs at the root.

What changed for the five problems

• Delivery happens through a tracked download link. The firm sees who downloaded and when.
• One disclaimer, always current. Lives in the firm’s admin. Update it once, every future delivery uses the new version.
• Working layers stripped by convention. The CAD team prefixes their working layers with &. The processor finds every layer starting with &, erases the entities, purges the layer. The team adopted the convention in about five minutes.
• Civil 3D intelligence stripped automatically. Same step a tech does by hand with File → Export → AutoCAD DWG, just run on every file.
• Audit trail for every job. Who uploaded, when the worker processed it, when the email went out, who downloaded. Pulled up from any job, any month back.

What’s running

A senior CAD designer reviewed the output against several real Civil 3D projects — surfaces, pipe networks, pay item references. Her review:

“It exploded things and did everything we would have done.”

That was the validation I cared about.

Looking back

The whole point of this build was solving the time suck and the frustration — on both ends of the delivery.

For the client, the change is concrete. No more SharePoint links to manage. No more splitting a big package across multiple emails because the attachment limit got hit. Just one named ZIP, cleaned and ready to open.

Internally, the audit trail removes the worst question in any firm: “did we send that?” Every job is searchable by who got what, when, and from whom.

The working-layer fix almost became a settings page — PMs choosing which layers to strip on each job. I dropped that and worked with the CAD team to land on the & prefix instead. One rule, no UI, no per-project setup.

PMs don’t want to learn features. They want their delivery to go out. The closer the workflow is to “drop, click, done,” the less retraining the firm has to do.

Learn more about AECFirmAI Companion →

If your firm has a similarly stuck process — the kind everyone groans about but nobody fixes — tell me about it.