Your Outsourcing Strategy Comes Down to Product Goals
Designing or adapting new products requires a concerted effort to find the best engineering team for the job. Today’s market is oversaturated with options, including freelancers, staffing agencies, and project-based engineering firms.
However, you can find the right outsourcing model for your business. Use this guide to understand the most common approaches you’ll encounter when exploring product design and development services, understand the value they provide, and how to decide which one will make the biggest impact for you.
If you discover that Finite Engineering’s full-service product design approach meets your needs, talk to our team.
Making a Strategic Decision About Your Product Design Partner
A well-designed product is a win for your business on all fronts. Design excellence allows for more efficient manufacturing, less risk in the field, and differentiation from your competitors. Products that are poorly designed will eat into your profits throughout their entire lifecycle.
Choose a product design team that best fits your business, and you can avoid costly errors and watch your products succeed. Product design and development is an upfront, strategic move that affects your products’ value.
Therefore, success depends on who you bring to the table during the design phase. Make outsourcing your product design engineering services a quality decision based on your specific goals, and your products will achieve the outcomes you’re looking for.
Find out how Finite can help you reach your product design goals. Contact us today.
Four Common Outsourcing Models for Product Design
Most businesses have four realistic options for sourcing product design work:
- Hourly freelancers work for narrow, well-defined tasks such as creating a specific 3D model or a drafting deliverable. They often aren’t well-positioned to handle the full product development and design process.
- Engineering-as-a-service platforms are available to match you with a network of freelancers. You gain access to a wider pool of talent, but you also have to take on the project management yourself, which, for many businesses, defeats the point of outsourcing.
- Technical staffing and placement agencies supply contractors who work on-site as part of your team. This can be useful when you need ongoing capacity, but your business will still have to handle management.
- Project-based engineering and design firms bid on a defined scope and deliver a dedicated team that owns the outcome. This is the Finite Engineering model, and it is typically the strongest fit for full product design, including new product development, custom product development, and complex redesign work.
If you’re ready for the Finite approach to product design, take the next step by contacting our team.
Product Design Is Not Like Other Outsourced Engineering Work
Product design at Finite Engineering includes a robust series of steps. A sustained effort, built on many interconnected, consequential decisions, ensures a product is ready for manufacturing and success in the field.
Product development and design also require creativity, exploration, testing, and refinement. A project-based model operates under the premise that a good design requires a careful, measured approach.
Finite Engineering’s services include these design phases:
Stage 1: Discovery & Research. We define the problem using first principles, understand the customer’s needs and environment, and confirm project feasibility.
Stage 2: Design Requirements. We translate the problem into measurable engineering requirements that become the acceptance criteria for every later stage.
Stage 3: Concept Development. We generate and evaluate design concepts, test fundamental assumptions with early calculations, and select a final concept with the customer.
Stage 4: Detailed Design. We develop the concept into full 3-D models with materials, tolerances, and interfaces defined, iterating with analysis throughout.
Stage 5: Analysis & Validation. We formally validate the complete design using hand calculations and FEA against the Stage 2 acceptance criteria.
Stage 6: Documentation. We produce the fabrication-ready deliverable package: drawings, BOMs, specifications, and compliance documentation.
Stage 7: Prototype Build & Testing. We test design assumptions with state-of-the-art virtual prototyping capabilities. When engaged, we can work with you and our partners to support and monitor the first prototype build.
Stage 8: Production Refinement & Release. We incorporate prototype lessons into the final design and release the production-ready package for manufacturing.
This process prepares your heavy equipment and machinery for the best performance possible, whether you leverage these products for your own processes or they benefit your clients.
Low-cost design support from a single, temporary, or freelance engineer can become expensive quickly. Our time-tested approach avoids the exponential risk of late-stage design changes.
Choose Finite Engineering for product design.
Your Manufacturing Strategy May Inform the Outsourcing Method You Choose
Manufacturers generally operate along a spectrum of approaches to building. At one end, every product is engineered specifically for the customer’s order. At the other end, products are built to a standard specification and kept in stock. In between, a manufacturer might utilize an assemble-to-order workflow, where a set of standardized components is combined into different configurations based on a customer’s specs.
Your manufacturing operations can determine the kind of outsourced support you choose:
- Engineer-to-order businesses spend significant engineering hours on every order. This is often unavoidable if you make highly customized products, but it puts constant pressure on in-house engineers who are burdened with day-to-day work. An outsourced partner can take on the strategic work that the internal team cannot get to, such as redesigning a product for faster manufacturing.
- Businesses that rely on assemble-to-order manufacturing consider what parts of their product can be standardized or require customization. They create a system where orders can be assembled quickly without engineering them out of thin air. This is specialized custom product design work. An outsourced team with experience in this kind of work can deliver the design support that the internal engineering team can benefit from.
- Build-to-stock businesses need different design support. The emphasis is on designing a product that will be produced at volume to certain specifications. A team that can concentrate exclusively on improving product designs that are repeatable and high-performing is effective for this type of manufacturing.
In each of these scenarios, freelance and temporarily staffed engineers are likely unable to provide the sustained effort that a project-based, effectively staffed consultant can handle. These manufacturing approaches demand the kind of sustained effort that a project-based product design and development partner is built to handle. Even on-site engineers from staffing agencies find that they end up putting out fires, not strategizing more effective ways to customize, redesign, and improve products, even if this was the original intent.
Choose Finite, a Product Design Partner You Can Grow With
Businesses with major growth goals often require more than one-time engagements. Instead, they need a strategic, consistent engineering firm that has experience with their products, knows their industry, and can quickly jump in as an extension of their team for a long-term engagement.
Consider what Finite Engineering brings to the table as North America’s go-to engineering source:
- Cross-industry experience: Our team brings a fresh perspective to familiar problems. Because we’ve solved design challenges across many industries, we often see solutions that an in-house team, or a specialist focused on one market, might miss.
- Capability: The best product design and development partners also offer validation, finite element analysis (FEA), reverse engineering, documentation, and more. A freelance partner whose scope centers around a single service is likely not the right fit.
- Project management: We take the project off your hands, while providing transparent communication the whole way. You can watch our progress, understand milestones, and resolve open questions at any time. Partners who require extensive oversight take you away from focusing on other priorities.
- OEM experience: We understand engineer-to-order, assemble-to-order, build-to-stock environments and more, so we can design products that fit your operational needs.
- Track record: Clients who return for derivative products, product families, or ongoing work do so because of the trust we establish and the results we deliver.
We look forward to serving as an outsourced partner that helps OEMs and businesses develop new and custom products, along with mechanical engineering services to ensure existing equipment is field-ready.
If our approach aligns with your need for robust product development that protects you from equipment risk, reduces stress on your internal engineering team, and positions you for success, we’re ready to help.
Contact Finite Engineering to discuss your next project.
