Business services

As the marketplace and economy continue to evolve, many engineering companies have turned to outsourcing for cost efficiency.

Tough economic times have forced companies to quickly re-invent the way they approach the critical development and design of their new products, a change that promises significant improvements in efficiency and quality that will shape the future of product development worldwide.

The sad fact is that many companies, especially smaller ones, can no longer afford to perform all of their engineering in-house. So they keep the engineers that are central to their core business , and they outsource the rest.

There are exciting developments driving new product and industrial design in aerospace, automotive, energy and other precision-focused manufacturing and fabrication sectors. Many of these have been spurred by the economic challenges of the last years, but we believe the trend to focused outsourcing for specialized engineering solutions we are seeing will ultimately be responsible for a whole new dimension in manufacturing.

This trend, while originally fueled by economics, is now gaining traction because of the other, unexpected benefits. Clients are telling us they have been able to reduce or eliminate their internal engineering staff and are seeing not only more cost efficiencies as a result, but access to outside talent and capabilities that are making a real difference for them from a quality perspective.

This seems to be a real sea-change in attitude. It is having a similar impact in all types of technical outsourcing categories.

We are convinced that the old one-stop-shop model will disappear and be replaced by a ‘team’ approach to engineering and design. The network will become the option of choice because it can provide best-in-class services in all disciplines without any real disadvantages.

What all this amounts to, then, is a new paradigm in product development that was evolving even before the current economic troubles. The old business model was ‘Do everything in-house, which evolved into Outsource the non-critical functions to a one-stop shop. Today, this has further evolved into Outsource the non-critical engineering functions to a tight network with specialized functions. The net result is better products through better utilization of the best resources.