Ditt Officemakers: Building a Same-Day Test-Fit Service with laiout

Ditt chose laiout because the bottleneck in their business was never creative judgement, it was drafting speed. A designer already knew how a floor should work within a few minutes of seeing a brief. The ten hours went on redrawing that judgement into a compliant, presentable layout, and every subsequent change (a different headcount, a different desk-to-meeting-room ratio) meant redoing much of that work by hand. Ditt needed a platform that could turn a floor plate into multiple, code-compliant layout options in minutes rather than hours, and that a designer could operate live in front of a client rather than behind a screen days later. laiout matched that brief directly: upload a floor plate, generate a layout, adjust spatial mix and headcount, and see the output update immediately, all without leaving the room. The decision was also commercial. Design and build firms increasingly compete on responsiveness as much as design quality, and clients now expect to see options in a meeting rather than wait a week for a follow-up. laiout gave Ditt a way to answer that expectation without adding headcount, and turned what used to be a cost centre (hours of unbillable drafting per prospect) into the foundation of a paid advisory service, Smart Moves, that Ditt now sells in its own right.

Each test-fit took roughly ten hours of manual CAD work, which made it impossible to turn around more than one or two client briefs in a day. Design work happened away from the client, so there was no way to explore options live in a meeting or on-site visit, and every version had to be presented after the fact rather than discussed in real time. Because layouts could not be adjusted quickly, small changes such as a different headcount or spatial mix meant a fresh round of drafting rather than a quick edit. This slowed Ditt's ability to respond to tenant briefs, and in a market where design and build firms increasingly compete on speed, delays risked costing them work to faster-moving competitors.

Manual CAD drafting. A designer built each test-fit layout individually in software such as AutoCAD or Revit, working from a client brief to a single finished option. There was no way to generate multiple scenarios quickly or adjust a layout live, so every change in headcount, spatial mix, or client requirement meant starting the redraw largely from scratch.

laiout took Ditt Officemakers from producing one test-fit layout a day to producing roughly ten in a single hour, a tenfold gain in output from the same design team with no additional headcount. Designer Karlo Jodic sums up the change directly: "I used to spend 10 hours per test-fit, now I do 10 of them in one hour." That efficiency translated into a genuine service-level shift for clients. Where a full set of options for a 1,000 sqm floor once took a full morning to produce, the same output now takes about half an hour, complete with fit-out costs, and Ditt can respond to a new tenant brief within a week rather than the weeks that used to be standard in the industry. In one instance, generating several layout scenarios live during a site visit gave a landlord enough confidence in the space to lease a previously vacant floor within a month, a commercial outcome directly attributable to the speed and clarity laiout made possible. Beyond the raw time saved, the bigger business impact is what Ditt built on top of it: Smart Moves, a client-facing advisory service that did not exist before laiout, and that now generates revenue in its own right rather than sitting inside the cost of winning new business. The hours reclaimed from manual drafting have gone into higher-value design and client-facing work instead.

Karlo Jodic, Designer, Ditt Officemakers "I used to spend 10 hours per test-fit, now I do 10 of them in one hour."

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