- Balancing Engineering Resource with Demand
- Buying Engineering Services
- Where to Find Engineers When You Need Them
- How to Meet Automotive, Military and Aerospace Specifications
Where to Find Engineers When You Need Them
Whether it was your customer or your head office, when a decision to automate a process has been made the onus is now on you. With the depleted ranks of your once mighty engineering staff busy with everyday issues should you hire full timers? Contractors? Bring back retirees? Hiring full timers for 6 months of work is not a nice thing to do. Contractors are expensive, and can be terribly slow to learn and quick to leave with no forwarding address. Retirees would be great, except that they like being retired and have no desire to work 60 hour weeks to meet the deadline.
What to do? I suggest hiring an engineering services company.
An engineering services company provides mechanical, electrical or other support on an as needed basis. The good engineering services company maintains a highly experienced full time staff in an office stocked with the latest CAD software and computers. Typically a single phone call can have one or more engineers redirected to your project within a week. The engineer will quickly become familiar with your project and become an extension of your existing design team. The engineer will typically utilize the service company's computer and software assets. You will not have to maintain these costly assets. The solid modeling and rendering capabilities of current CAD software allow whole assemblies to be easily reviewed for approval via CAD or Microsoft office files. Communication via e-mail, phone and fax eliminates the necessity of having someone work continuously at your site.
Billing for engineering services is typically performed in a manner similar to working with any supplier. A price proposal is requested for a specified project. Upon agreement, a P.O. is issued. When the project is complete the service company sends an invoice. There is a cash flow savings when working with a service company relative to a contract engineer who must be paid weekly.
There are many advantages that an engineering service company provides, but the biggest is a means to truly match your engineering resources with their demand. An engineering service company can be turned on and off as often as necessary. And when they are turned on you will get the engineer that is already familiar with your design team and past projects. Unknown contactors with long learning curves can become a thing of the past.
Most importantly, your anxiety about finding engineers who will get the project completed can become a thing of the past.
Michael K. Costen
Principal Engineer ASR Corporation
