Staffing with a Product Design Engineer
One of the great benefits of hiring a contractor or firm for a product design engineer is the speed at which you can scale up your staff or scale down.
We all know that hiring new employees can be time consuming, challenging, and sometimes not fruitful. If a business makes a successful hire, it now spends time and money on training and human resources administration. What if you just need to staff up for one special project?
A contract product design engineer can be hired by the project, by the hour, or by any number of arrangements. There does not have to be a commitment like hiring a new employee, and you do not pay when they are not working directly on the project.
The downside to hiring an outside product design engineer is that you are not developing a new skill inside your business. This tradeoff works just fine for very specialized development, or when you need more capacity than you have now. Alternatively, a firm may be hired while a business is developing its internal product design engineering team.
Expertise with a Product Design Engineer
Often in new product design, the team must learn many new skills to reach their goal. As discussed above, this can be a worthwhile investment to develop talent in the business, but it is also costly and time consuming. When hiring a product design engineer or a firm, you can choose one who already specializes in the field required. Most product design engineers have focus areas that vary from a specific industry such as food service equipment or sporting goods, to materials such as stainless steel sheet metal or injection molded plastics.
Hiring an expert means you will move your project towards completion much more quickly. Your team will not spend time learning things about a new material or industry. In general, this will save time and overall, it will save dollars.
The flipside is this – real expert product design engineers can be expensive. Since they offer such a valuable service of already possessing the knowledge and tools to develop a specific idea, they tend to charge a premium.
Product Design Engineer – Individual Contractor or Firm?
There are many great individual contract engineers. They often come at a less expensive price by the hour than a firm since their overhead is generally lower. There are some situations where this is acceptable.
Alternatively, a firm will have a team. Multiple product design engineers can discuss and overcome challenges effectively. They can review each other’s work to avoid costly mistakes. Likewise, engineering firms may have multiple disciplines such as mechanical and electrical engineers on staff, or prototyping capabilities. Strong engineering firms may also have a project manager and other resources which help keep projects running successfully on time and on budget.
Expense when hiring an outside Product Design Engineer
The benefit of hiring an outside product design engineer is that you can budget for them as an expense against a project. Their contracts can be negotiated, and payment is only for work completed. You do not pay them before the project, and you do not need to pay them after. When a contract is completed, there is no continued obligation to keep them on the payroll.
On the other hand, contract product design engineers are typically more expensive by the hour. While the expense can be easily justified for the right talent, there are ways for cost to get out of hand.
The first is that a client continues to change its requirements during the project. While they think they are just minor changes to the scope, they are either more significant changes than understood, or there are too many of them. This scenario is not exclusively the fault of a client. An outside product design engineer and a business should work as a team. It is equally the engineer’s responsibility to see and contain scope creep as it is the responsibility of the hiring business.
Each change adds a bit more work, suddenly a 3 month project goes on for over a year and the contract product design engineer has logged the equivalent hours of a full time employee. To avoid this situation, we recommend that both the hiring business and the contract product design engineer develop a clearly defined scope of work and strictly adhere to it.
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Hiring an outside product design engineer can benefit a business greatly. A strong contract product design engineer or firm will already have experience in an area where you need it the most. Best of all, you can hire them by the project.