You have two options when you need engineering services. Hire internal engineering staff or hire an engineering consultants.
Hiring Internal Engineering Staff
Pros
- Dedicated staff to your project
- Control work prioritization
- Directly oversee engineers
- On-site engineering staff
Cons
- High upfront and recurring costs: Salary, Benefits, Workspace, Software, Workstation, and Training
- Costs stay constant regardless of workload
- Projects have significant variance in engineering demand depending upon the phase
- Staffing up quickly during high demand leads to wasting money during low demand.
Hiring Engineering Consultants
Pros
- Scale the number of staff working on your project with demand
- Gain access to advanced engineering software without paying for the high cost licensing fees
- Have highly trained engineers with substantial experience in your needed service drive development
- Hire temp engineers on-site based on your projects demands
- Reduce upfront costs while developing a project
- Test the market with an engineered product prior to needing to hire in-house permanent staff.
Cons
- Reduced control over engineers day to day work priorities
- Decrease in engineering brainstorming with other in-house teams
Developing & Testing an Idea
Hiring an Engineering Consultants can help gain access to highly trained and skilled engineers without the need for building an in-house team prior to testing product/market fit. Outsourcing engineering allows you to control critical design and performance decisions while focusing on other critical business aspects such as testing ideas, attaining customers, and finding funding.
Focus on What Drives Success
While skilled engineering may be critical to your business, what’s even more critical is finding product/market fit. You can have the best engineered product in the world, but if there is no market it will never sell. Hiring engineering consultants allows you to focus on testing the market by talking to your potential customers to learn what features really matter. Once you learn what features are the most critical to potential customers we can then build out your vision.
Only Pay For Engineering When You Need It
Hiring an internal engineering team can be costly if they aren’t be utilized all year long. Most companies go through product development cycles where there are high peaks and low lows for engineering demand. If you only use internal engineering staff then you need to staff for the peaks which continue costing you during the lows. Hiring Engineering Consultants allows you to staff your team to reflect your project demands which substantially reduces engineering staff overhead during times of low demand.
Own Your Intellectual Property
As Engineering Consultants, we typically sign an non-disclosure agreement (NDA) prior to starting any work on your project including quoting. This way you don’t need to worry about losing your intellectual property due to hiring consultants. All intellectual property generated as a result of hiring ASR is under your ownership. As Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Consultants we work on projects ranging from consumer products to aerospace defense products.
ASR is a mechanical and aerospace engineering firm that specializes in engineering design and analysis. If you are in need of design for manufacturing & assembly services then contact us today to speak to one of our experienced engineers or for a free quote.