Choose the Right Engineering and Design Services Model for Your Business Needs
Businesses like yours that require product development and mechanical engineering support find themselves in a challenging position. Team members with legacy engineering knowledge are headed toward retirement. New talent on your team may find themselves uncertain about specialized engineering and design services, or end up swamped with existing tasks and projects that require immediate attention.
Under these difficult circumstances, you must consider various engagement models. Outsourced models allow you to assign a critical project that has been on the back burner or that existing teams can’t or don’t have the time to solve. However, the success of these outcomes depends on your needs.
Whether you’re looking for manufacturing engineering consulting services, industrial engineering, or any other equipment-based engineering service, knowing your options helps you find the right team for your business.
Hourly-Rate Freelancers
An individual engineer who offers a targeted service, such as 3-D modeling, is typically billed by the hour. These individuals take over single tasks with a narrow scope when you don’t have the resources to tackle them on your own.
A freelancer may be beneficial only for a very specific task. However, if you require more expertise than they can offer, it may be more cost-effective to consider outsourcing to an engineering team that can offer a more comprehensive skill set, including the individual task that the freelancer can handle.
Engineering-as-a-Service Platforms
Online marketplaces connect you with a network of freelance engineers. Although your chosen freelancers may have experience, you may need to coordinate multiple freelancers for work on a complex project, such as full-scale product development.
When cobbling together a fragmented group of engineers, no single freelancer takes ownership of the project, and you have to serve as the project manager to ensure project completion. This may not be feasible for you from a resource perspective. You also run the risk of a breakdown in quality as the project moves from engineer to engineer.
Technical Staffing, Hybrid Staff, or Placement Services
This solution depends on trusting a “temp” agency to supply individual contractors who operate like in-house personnel. They sit in on meetings and work on projects like a member of the internal team. Although the upside of this service is a dedicated engineer on-site, your business is often responsible for shouldering recruitment, onboarding, and oversight when this can be avoided with another service model.
Project-Driven Engineering and Design Services
A project-based engineering service team bids on a specific engineering project and dedicates a robust team to solving the challenge. This team offers a solution for a defined challenge with the help of their individual and collective strengths. These engineering service teams are an effective choice for niche solutions, as well as full-scale product development. If your business has a clear project scope and budget, these teams provide accountability by managing themselves, providing transparent updates on their progress, and ensuring exceptional deliverables.
Project-based teams:
- Provide their own tools, software, and resources in their own office.
- Serve as an extension of your team.
- Possess a range of industry experience, which demonstrates their versatility and vast playbook of solutions.
- Offer additional value as new projects arise, as they’ve already been trained.
Which Engineering Service Model Delivers the Most Growth for Your Business?
Businesses define growth in different ways. If your company’s goal is to troubleshoot and repair equipment to avoid downtime, your return on investment is uptime and a reduced risk of equipment failure. However, if you plan to roll out a new product offering to make inroads in a new market, growth may look significantly different.
The best outsourced engineering service for your business depends on your scope, budget, and objectives. An hourly specialist may be able to help with a small but specific need. Staffing services may be useful to ensure you have enough engineering support onboard as needed, or you want to have a hand in the freelancer’s alignment with your team through training and management efforts.
However, project-based firms may offer the most value overall. For example, if you need manufacturing engineering consulting services, specialists on a project-driven team can tackle technical projects, like finite element analysis. Alternatively, you can tap a larger portion of their team for complex, long-term, or ongoing engineering services, such as industrial equipment development. Your business can also hire this team again without having to repeat the onboarding process, especially if you deal with derivative products, a product family, or another similar engineering challenge.
Project-driven engineering and design services offer growth at scale without requiring overhead management and oversight.
