How Autodesk Delivers Client Software in 60 Days With One Consultant
Software development consulting, rebuilt: one Autodesk consultant delivers production client applications in 60-day engagements, cutting 25% from every estimate.
25%
Taken off the estimate on every project
2x
One consultant delivers what previously needed two people
60 days
From engagement start to a delivered client application
- Founded
- San Francisco, 1982
- Investors
- NASDAQ
- Website
- autodesk.com
One person can do the job of two with Reflex, so it cut our cost in half.
Meet Autodesk, a global leader in design and engineering software, whose products, including AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, and Fusion 360, serve architecture, manufacturing, construction, and media. Behind the products sits Autodesk Consulting: the team that enterprise customers hire to make their project data and workflows work together.
Consulting is a delivery business. The customer pays in advance, the contract defines the outcome, and the calendar does not move. This is the story of how one consultant changed the economics of that business.
Sixty days to deliver, and no team to staff
Autodesk Consulting serves enterprise customers who need to move project information between design and construction: the documents, drawings, and formal project questions that decide whether work proceeds. The engagement called for a cloud application connected to the customer's existing systems, and the contract allowed 60 days to deliver it.
Paolo Serra, a Principal Implementation Consultant at Autodesk, was tasked with the project. The conventional path required a staffed development team, and one was not available in the window. Missing the delivery would mean losing the customer's confidence, on engagements where contracts run into the millions.
It normally requires multiple people to get an app up and there was a lack of resources available in the time frame we needed.
From Excel attachments to a live client dashboard
Until then, the working answer had been spreadsheets: export the project data into Excel files and send them to the customer. The information was out of date on arrival, requests moved through email threads, and every update meant another manual export. Turning a spreadsheet into an application, one the client could open and trust, was precisely the job.
What the engagement changed, side by side:
| Excel handoffs | The application Autodesk built | |
|---|---|---|
| What the client sees | Static files, stale on arrival | A live client dashboard of project data |
| Documents and requests | Attachments and email threads | Managed in one place, with clear status |
| Effort per update | Manual export and resend | Updates flow from the connected systems |
| Team required to build it | A staffed development team | One consultant |
For how to run the build-or-buy decision on your own tools, see our build vs. buy framework for internal software.
One consultant, every hat
There was one more constraint: everything Autodesk ships must use the company's certified design system, so the application had to look and behave like an Autodesk product, not a prototype. Reflex let Paolo meet that standard while connecting the application to the customer's data sources with Python he already had, wiring in Autodesk's own sign-in, and hosting it on the company's existing cloud infrastructure.
I am able to wear all the caps at once: Solution Architecture, UI/UX, front-end and back-end.
The application was delivered within the engagement, and the delivery model held: no development team was staffed, and the client received working software instead of spreadsheets.
The consulting math
The economics repeat on every project. Working prototypes appear in days rather than weeks, which changes how quickly a client and a consultant reach agreement on what is being built.
The time from ideation to prototype is shorter than traditional web dev, which is a massive win when you need to get to shared understanding of the product you are building.
And the estimates themselves shrink, without shrinking the margin.
A couple of weeks of work can be skimmed off the estimate for an average 60 day project by using Reflex meaning we were able to focus on exceeding customer expectations.
One consultant covering the work of two, 25% off every estimate, and the saved time reinvested in the client relationship: that is what reduced software development costs look like in a services business.
Productized consulting: one build, four clients
The first project did not stay a one-off. The team builds a solution tailored to one customer, strips out what is specific to them, and delivers the foundation to the next. Four projects have shipped this way, each for a different customer:
- A content management platform that moved Autodesk's consulting delivery from in-person sessions to a digital experience
- The design-and-construction data application, managing documents and formal project requests
- An information registry with digital delivery of project artifacts
- An analysis dashboard that reads a company's local data, draws conclusions, and links to the relevant Autodesk services
That is productized consulting in practice: expertise captured once as software, then resold as a foundation rather than rebuilt from a blank page.
Why Autodesk chose to build with Reflex
The requirements pointed one direction. The work had to meet Autodesk's certified design standards, connect to systems the team already ran, and ship inside a contractual window that ruled out staffing a team. Building with Reflex meant one consultant could deliver the whole application in Python, meet the design standard, and leave behind code the practice reuses on the next engagement.
How it was built
This section is written for your technical team. In short: Autodesk's certified design system, existing Python services, and Azure hosting all carried over.
View the technical details
Autodesk requires products to build on Weave, the company's internal fork of the Material UI React library. Reflex's React wrapping let Paolo bring Weave components directly into the application, with validation and clearer errors added at the wrapper layer.
Wrapping the React component in Reflex allowed us to catch and prevent common issues, enforce standardization and raise more descriptive errors. The result is that instead of days it takes hours to be productive with the same design system.
The team built the interface from reusable high-level components, including a custom wrapped Treeview for file directories, a wrapped ModelViewer for 2D drawings and 3D models through the Autodesk Platform Services Viewer, and filterable data tables. The application connects to the customer's data sources using Python the team already had, authenticates through Autodesk's identity system, and is self-hosted on Autodesk's Azure infrastructure.
Before choosing Reflex, Paolo evaluated Mesop and FastUI, which could not use the required React components, and Streamlit, Taipy, and Dash, which offered neither the design flexibility nor a workable path to the certified component library.
From one consultant's framework to the practice's delivery model
What began as a way to hit one 60-day deadline is now how the team delivers: rapid application development on a common foundation, with each engagement adding to the library the next one starts from.
Everything I was able to accomplish was because of the framework and unparalleled support and promptness of the Reflex team.
This delivery model is also how Reflex works with enterprise customers directly: one engineer, a defined outcome, and software the organization owns. See how we work.
Frequently asked questions about software development consulting
How much does it cost to build a custom application for a client?
The largest cost is usually the team. In Autodesk Consulting's experience with Reflex, one consultant delivers what previously required two people, which cut delivery cost in half, and roughly two weeks of work came off the estimate for an average 60-day project. Cost scales with the size of the team and the amount of rework, and both fall when one person can carry a project end to end.
How long does it take to build a custom application?
Autodesk Consulting delivers production client applications within 60-day engagements, with working prototypes in the first days rather than weeks. Faster prototypes matter beyond the timeline: they get the client and the consultant to a shared understanding of the product early, which is where most schedule risk hides.
Can a consulting team deliver a client application in 60 days without a frontend team?
Yes. At Autodesk, a single Principal Implementation Consultant delivered a production application, covering solution architecture, interface design, frontend, and backend, within the engagement window and in the company's certified design system. The same model has since delivered four projects for four different customers.
How do consulting firms productize their services?
The pattern at Autodesk Consulting: build a solution tailored to one customer, strip out what is specific to them, and reuse the foundation for the next engagement. Software makes the expertise repeatable; each project starts from the accumulated library instead of a blank page.
PSA software manages the practice. What builds the client deliverables?
Professional services automation covers staffing, time, and billing; it does not produce the software a client engagement promises. For the deliverables themselves, Autodesk Consulting builds custom applications with Reflex, which lets one consultant deliver production software that meets the company's design and infrastructure standards.
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