The speed technology has afforded the business world today has created many opportunities for companies to expand and develop, but it has also presented significant obstacles.
When your company is trying to create a design, there are countless tasks to keep up with, different iterations to create, and so much more. In-house engineers can only do so much, and they are typically tied to a large number of other projects and responsibilities that can hinder them from properly contributing to the design project.
In many situations, it makes financial and practical sense to outsource your CAD services. Below are a few of the many examples of the benefits of outsourcing your CAD services and how they can be a great boon to your company, whether it’s reducing cost, improving your product, or protecting your company.
One of the biggest benefits of outsourcing your CAD services is that you can find extremely highly qualified candidates, and they can create some of the highest quality content around.
If you have a department of 20 engineers who can all do the CAD drafting and design required, you have a good field to choose from. But imagine you expanded your search to 20,000 engineers from all corners of the globe who have experience, some of which may have created a similar project or worked in the field you are designing for.
When you expand your field of search and allow for the countless outsourced engineers that are available, you will likely be able to find designers that are more capable than those with whom you were originally working.
Cad Crowd alone has thousands of qualified individuals to search for in the United States only. Looking through our hiring page, you can find any number of freelancers with different skills and competencies, as well as different levels of experience to help complete your tasks.
Resources like this expand your experience base exponentially, because a small company with 20 employees can still capitalize on the work and effort of tens of thousands of designers, all without the major financial investment that hiring full-time engineers would require.
Focusing on the task at hand is a major issue when you are creating a product or running a business. Like we discussed earlier, an in-house engineer at your company will probably be pulled in hundreds of different directions as they are trying to finish a project.
A staff engineer will have to worry about maintenance, production, and much more all while they are trying to finish the design for a new product. These other tasks can delay a project and reduce quality.
By outsourcing your projects and using dedicated CAD drafters, freelance industrial designers, and designers, you can get focused effort on your design projects.
Studies have shown that, in spite of its popularity, multitasking is not truly an efficient practice. There is scientific evidence that shows that multitasking is not a true activity. In the end, it just stretches people too far and distracts them from their main priorities.
If you have engineers and employees focusing on the day-to-day activities as well as the design, you are going to get a poorer quality design and things will fall through the cracks.
With the ability to dispense your projects to those who can focus on them, productivity will increase and allow your employees to focus their efforts on the issues they are most suited to deal with. By doing this, the quality of the respective portions of the projects will improve and you will be able to accelerate the work that is completed.
One of the greatest benefits of working with people on a per-project basis, such as contractors who receive compensation for each drawing they design, is that they are extremely motivated to complete the project quickly. There are a number of ways in which using product design freelancers will increase your productivity and accelerate the completion time for your projects.
First, as I mentioned earlier, they are motivated to complete the drawings because they work on a per-project basis. They will get paid when the project is complete, and then they’ll be able to work on the next project in their inbox and receive pay.
In this way, they will want to complete each project as quickly as possible so that they can earn as much money as possible. For a freelancer, one of the perks is that there is no limit to how much they can earn if they are willing to work quickly and efficiently and get the projects completed rapidly. That benefits them, but it also benefits you.
Secondly, related to the earlier point about focusing on projects, they can complete these tasks more efficiently because they are dedicating their time, energy, effort, and resources strictly to the task at hand – the design.
RELATED: Benefits of outsourcing your product design
Doing that allows them to throw their energy into a project and expedite its completion. It also allows your in-house staff to complete their tasks more quickly because they are able to focus on their own jobs and complete the tasks they are being paid for without having to worry about designs and CAD drafts.
Finally, there is another benefit to using a freelancer that isn’t offered by in-house engineers and employees that allows you to turn projects around faster.
They have a more flexible time-frame. These consultants are not restricted by a 9-5 work schedule, and in many cases, are in different time zones.
This flexibility in working hours and time zone can allow you to get projects completed on off-shifts and around the clock, which helps drive efficiency and allows you to complete projects more quickly than before.
Related to my last point, another great benefit of outsourcing your CAD services is that you can transition to a 24/7 working model, instead of being confined to a 40-hour workweek.
First of all, as many freelance CAD workers are in different time zones or even countries, you can have skilled engineers working on your projects long after you have shut down your office for the day.
If you have a group of consultants working from Japan or, in my personal ideal situation, a villa in Italy, you can generate around-the-clock productivity without the added overhead of office space and facilities.
Even without the other added benefits of outsourcing these duties, this alone would make the use of consultants a smart financial decision. You will enable your production team to have designs and information the minute they step into the office.
This allows them to maximize their own efforts and take care of their own relevant duties and priorities when they are on the clock, instead of worrying about someone else sending them plans and data or making it themselves.
Even if the consulting designers are not working from a foreign country, they will still afford you the opportunity to upgrade to constant working time.
Many freelance designers relish the opportunity to either put in extra hours or to set their own schedule. For instance, some of the more seasoned veterans may prefer to work a 16-hour day on Monday to crank through their projects and achieve their deliverables as quickly as possible so they can get on to the next project. Meanwhile, a young, 23-year-old, fresh-faced engineer may prefer to work from 7 PM until 3 AM and sleep until noon.
These freelancers set their own schedule, and that flexibility works to your advantage. You get all of these perks without having to open your office 24 hours a day, and you have the flexibility of not having to hire full-time individuals for these specific tasks.
An added, and often overlooked benefit of hiring freelance designers is risk management. Using outside consultants and staff will give you some mitigation in the event there are issues or things don’t work out as planned, and they do so in several ways.
Primarily, these consultants are responsible for the work they do, and they have put their own seal of approval on their drawings. If there is an issue, or a customer is dissatisfied with the work, your company will not be held entirely responsible for the problem, because a separate individual performed the work, and you will be sharing the responsibility with that individual or organization.
Another opportunity for risk mitigation is that you can hire multiple consultants for the price of one full-time employee. Not only do you further spread out your risk, you open the door to checks and balances.
With three or four individuals working concurrently on projects, not only can they each accomplish portions of the task, driving productivity and efficiency, but they can each verify the work of the other designers.
This is an incredible benefit because it takes some of the verification work out of your hands as the manager, and, if done properly, you will only have to spot check the work to ensure that everything is complete and accurate. You will likely get faster work done, at a higher quality, and with lower risk because each portion of it will be verified by the other consultants.
A third way your risk is mitigated is that your intellectual property is secure with Cad Crowd. This is unique to our services offered, but it is another opportunity to keep you safe while performing high-quality work.
Whatever designs get created are yours to own and are protected from theft by our organization. Not only will freelancers provide high-quality work, improve efficiency, and verify that everything is being performed correctly, but your ideas and designs will be safe and secure.
In some situations, if the proper precautions are not taken in advance, your intellectual property may not even be safeguarded properly from your own employees. Cad Crowd offers that extra level of security to ensure that everything you do is safe and protected.
Money is all that matters, right? Obviously, when you are creating a product, running a company, or doing anything like that, you want to make sure you are getting the best value for your money.
There is no better way to do that than by using freelancers and consultants. You can shop around to find the designers that will provide you the best results at the best rate, and that alone will reduce your costs.
Beyond that, however, you will not be paying benefits, time off, and insurance for extra employees because those decisions are relegated to the consultants themselves.
When you outsource, you know the cost upfront and can budget that number in effectively and reduce costs accordingly. You will also reduce your time to completion on these projects by using freelancers.
As we discussed before, you will, first of all, have 24 hours each day in which work will be completed, and you will also have highly motivated, skilled individuals who are completing your projects as quickly as possible, because they are paid per project.
Because of this structure, you will be paying less per hour for someone to complete a task in less time than it would take an in-house designer, which further reduces costs.
Need to reduce costs even further? Many of these designers live and work in countries or communities where the cost of living is lower than your own.
For instance, if you are a company based out of Palo Alto, California, it is going to be much more cost effective to hire a freelancer who is based in Hopkinsville, Kentucky than in your own city, and it will be even cheaper to hire someone who is located in Shanghai, China.
Using freelancers gives you the flexibility based on your budget and your demands to find the best and cheapest options.
Will outsourcing help you grow your business? Of course, it will! There are three main things that the customer cares about, and using consultants for your CAD work will improve every single one of them.
The customer cares about costs, just like you do. If you can reduce your costs, in some cases drastically, you can offer similar products and designs as your competitors for a much more reasonable price. This in and of itself will drive customers through your doors and give you potential for growth immediately.
Advertise that you can do the same thing as your nemesis for half the cost, and you’ll get the customers nine times out of ten. The great part is, you will still be turning an ever larger profit because of the margins offered by these consultants.
Another of the top three considerations for customers is time to completion. Anyone who works in manufacturing knows there are a couple of very essential metrics – On Time to Customer and On Time to Demand. These measurements capture whether you are getting products or services to your customer when they asked them, and whether you will be able to complete all of your orders in a certain time frame.
Use a freelance designer from Cad Crowd, and you will produce much faster than you ever were, and you’ll have projects going on around the clock.
The final thing customers are looking for is quality, and you are guaranteed excellent quality when you are working with these freelancers. With design consultants all vying for a project for your company, as well as continued work, they are motivated to provide the highest quality services they can, and you will be able to check their work against other engineers, as well as chose the most qualified individuals for the job.
In an unstable economy, especially if you are a smaller company, flexibility is likely one of the most vital things for you. Let’s imagine a scenario for a minute. If you produce a product, such as a new tool to help extract oil and gas in mining operations, and it takes off, you will have two options.
Your first option is to hire a full-time staff of engineers and employees to handle the designs and to produce the product. You go through with this and set the fixed overhead and begin producing your product and start establishing a solid company from this plan.
Suddenly, however, the economy shifts. What if oil and gas prices drop drastically and there is not as much demand, or perhaps a new technology disrupts the market, like solar panels or another green technology.
You will have invested time and money in a large workforce of people that you can no longer sustain, and you will have to make a second, much more difficult choice.
Reduce salaries, cut jobs, and grow leaner through attrition so that you can still function, or run the risk of shutting down because you aren’t making profits because you are holding onto a large, permanent workforce. I have personally been in this situation as an ngineer, and it’s not a fun place to be.
Your second choice is much better, for both your company and the employees all around. Instead of hiring a permanent workforce of salaried employees, you choose to employ a group of freelancers, designers, and consultants to make your product a reality.
In the event the market shifts, you have no obligation to them, and they are already positioned to be continually searching for and receiving other projects.
They have secured their financial future by pursuing multiple revenue streams instead of tethering themselves to one company, and you will have given your company flexibility to weather lean times and a shifting marketplace. That flexibility can make or break a company in an economic climate with as much upheaval as there is currently.
Any CAD designer or engineer will have the skills needed to customize products, redesign drawings, and make changes as needed. These customizable qualities will help drive business and productivity and allow you to keep a competitive edge at all times.
If you can offer a specific solution tailored to a customer instead of a standardized product at the same price, you will reap the rewards of increased customer satisfaction, profit, and business growth, all of which will help your business thrive and produce in today’s markets.
Using freelancers and consultants, however, can give you even more opportunities. If you want to offer customization, but you don’t have the talent in-house to perform those actions or make the changes, without a consultant you can’t offer it without hiring a full-time staff member.
Let me share a personal story. I joined a company that doesn’t typically deal with customization or CAD work in general. Out of 5,000 employees, including many dozen engineers, I was the sole member of the company with knowledge in CAD design, and it wasn’t even my role.
When a customer asked for a product that needed special machinery to be built, my company had two options – reach out to a machine design firm they frequently used, or pull me off of my typical duties to draw it up.
I gladly made the drawings for them, but my day-to-day tasks suffered because I was unable to focus on them. If you don’t have a resource like that in-house, you can reach out to freelancers through Cad Crowd who have intimate knowledge of the types of problems you are dealing with, and they can customize and improve upon your products for you.
A tangential benefit to using freelancers is the scope of their experience and knowledge. You will encounter designers who have worked in entirely different industries but have made similar products or machineries. They can offer this knowledge to creatively solve your problems, instead of relying on someone who is only familiar with your specific industry or company and can’t offer as creative a solution or customization.
When you are managing a project, you need to be in charge of everything. One of my favorite business phrases is the “10,000-foot view.” If you haven’t heard of it, it’s the concept of stepping back to observe the project or process from far away so you see all of the intertwining pieces.
If you are trying to manage day-to-day responsibilities, production, customers, and design services, it can get very difficult to see the big picture.
Outsourcing design can’t solve all of those issues, but it may mitigate some. If you take the project out of your own hands or the hands of someone in your organization, you can oversee the remainder of the project with better perspective, and you can, in fact, better manage the design process.
In spite of not having your hands on the design at all times, you can be sure of the quality, verify it as often as you need to, and get it completed earlier so that any necessary rework still happens within the requested timeframe.
Outsourcing does not in any way mean giving up control, it means going from a micromanager to a true project manager. The scope of your responsibilities changes when you can trust this design to someone else.
Cad Crowd vets and verifies the engineers so you can be confident that you will have high-quality work that is completed as quickly as possible, and that will give you the peace of mind to focus on other needs in your organization.
11. Competitive Edge
We’ve discussed how outsourcing can radicalize your business before. You can customize your products. You’ll have input from industry leading professionals as well as professionals in tangential industries that can offer a view of your products and designs that you would never have imagined.
These perspectives and the high quality of work that you receive from reliable consultants will drastically improve your company’s competitive edge in the marketplace.
It is difficult to compete with a lean company that can effortlessly weather the shifting tides of the marketplace and economy as well as offer low-cost, high-quality products that are customizable and innovative. A company like that sounds too good to be true, but, done right, outsourcing and utilizing skilled freelancers can make it happen.
It’s impossible to guarantee success in a business, and there will be millions of ways to fail, that’s for certain, but with an outsourced crowd of high quality professionals, you will be able to avoid several of the largest pitfalls.
You can keep costs down, improve your company’s adaptability, and provide high-quality services in a timely. That’s really all you can ask of a company, especially one that’s just starting out or is on a shoestring budget.
12. Network Opportunities
The final benefit of outsourcing your engineering and CAD drafting services is a surprising one. There is a level of networking that happens by virtue of how they work.
The drafter that you hire to design the brand-new steel-toed work boot may also be working with the nation’s largest Telecom supplier to redesign their towers. On their resume, they will have information about your company and potentially even some of your work in their portfolio. It’s no guarantee that business will come of it, but it will spread your name a bit farther and for less money than a billboard.
I always find it useful to include some personal anecdotes, and I have already shared one with you, but this benefit hits particularly close to home for me because I’ve experienced it several times.
First, I was working as an engineering designer for a ventilation company that worked on contracts. We ended up working on a design for a large electrical parts manufacturer, and I was very impressed by their scope, their facilities, and the products they were making.
Several months after that, the company for which I worked was bought out, and I was left searching for other jobs. I reached out to that manufacturer because I was impressed by them and they remembered me. I ended up working there for several years before moving on to a higher position.
There are obvious merits to outsourcing your engineering and CAD services, and your company can greatly benefit. Not only can you reduce costs and improve productivity, but you can strengthen your company against economic downturns, you can bolster your market shares, you can bring in new customers, and so much more.
Take a look at Cad Crowd’s catalog of highly skilled, vetted, and guaranteed individuals. Your intellectual property is secure, and you will be able to work with an incredibly talented designer that will change the way your business is run. Take a look at how it works or get a custom quote.
The living room is the part of the house where families spend most of their…
3D rendering services allow architects to present design ideas and visualize complex plans in an…
The last few years have put the beauty industry under a great deal of serious…
No matter how sunny a house or building is, there will always be some dark…
The cosmetics industry relies a lot on packaging. As the primary point of contact between…
Professional architects, architecture students, and hobbyists alike are all aware of the importance of architectural…