CAD Outsourcing: How to Get the Most Out of Engineering

In today’s competitive market, companies need as much help as possible. If you want to take a larger market share, you can start by outsourcing some of your work. This is a quick way to expand your engineering power without onboarding and training a new staff.

This guide will explain what CAD outsourcing is, how it can help you, and how you can save a ton of time and money by doing so.

What Is CAD Outsourcing?

CAD outsourcing is the practice of paying an outside service to handle your CAD work for you. It typically entails working with a team of engineers from another company to handle your drafting, drawing conversions, and engineering in 2D and 3D CAD.

The team you choose will determine the results you get. A high-quality CAD outsourcing outfit will have decades of experience and greatly improve your operation. With the best team, you’ll get the best results.

The Benefits of CAD Outsourcing

Speaking of the best results, what are the benefits of outsourcing your CAD? In this section, we’ll discuss CAD outsourcing and how it can help your operation.

Save Time

The bottom line is that outsourcing CAD work can save you a ton of time. If you don’t have a big enough team to handle all of the drawings in your project, what are you supposed to do? You have to sacrifice either the budget or timeline of your project.

Looking at the timeline, you probably know how much time all of these drawings take. Even a simple bracket drawing could take a full day’s work to correctly format and cut manufacturing drawing sheets from. Multiply that by the dozens of parts you need to make, and your department will be underwater soon enough.

Instead of struggling through these drawings, you can have an outside team of CAD experts handle it for you. This work is typically done behind the scenes and requires very little input from you. You can continue focusing on other aspects of your project while the outsourced engineers handle specific parts.

Free Up Your Engineers

A common issue within engineering teams is the division of labor. There are times when your engineers want to focus on complex decisions in the project, but they need to handle simple 3D modeling first. These roadblocks will slow down your progress and tie up your engineers.

When you outsource, this problem disappears.

Instead, your engineers can focus on the most complex, timeline-critical tasks. The outsourced team will handle all the other drawings that go into the projects.

Since a high-quality CAD team is not just a team of drafters, this team can also do engineering work for you. It’s as if your engineering department expanded for the duration of your contract with the outsourced team.

Your in-house engineers can tackle bigger problems in the meantime.

Leverage the Experts

There’s something to be said about expert-level draftsmen and engineers. If you’ve ever worked with a senior engineer, you might have seen them use commands on CAD that you didn’t even know existed.

A highly trained and experienced CAD designer can finish a part in a fraction of the time. Even better, they can commit to higher quality and better legibility in each drawing.

When you outsource your CAD work, you’re signing up for expert assistance. Leveraging these experts is a quick way to boost the effectiveness of your drawings, and get parts done even quicker.

Any machinist can tell the difference between a rookie’s 2D drawing and an expert’s 2D drawing. The difference could be six phone calls, material wasted due to confusing drawings, and hours thrown away through the process.

Get Engineering and Drafting Help

Regardless of your project size, there’s almost definitely a benefit to getting engineering and drafting help. High-quality outsourced CAD teams can provide both.

Since these teams work on a per-project basis, you’ll get extensive help throughout the life of your project. It could be as simple as documentation and 2D CAD help, or as intricate as designing complex 3D CAD machines.

The same team can handle either extreme example.

Only Pay for the Engineers You Need

When you have a full staff of engineers in-house, you can run into problems. For one, engineers aren’t cheap. When you hit a lull between projects, you’ll still have to pay their full salaries.

On top of that, it’s hard to keep up a consistent flow of work around the year. Projects end and slow down, but your staff can’t be as flexible.

Instead of routinely hiring and firing engineers, you can use CAD outsourcing. You simply tell the outsourcing manager how many engineers you need, and how long you need them, and you’ll get it. If you need more engineers suddenly, then more will be assigned.

A lot of outsourcing companies have dozens or hundreds of engineers bouncing between projects. It ensures that you always have the right amount of engineering power, and never too much or too little. The result? You’ll never overpay for engineers while getting the perfect results.

Save Time on Training

Becoming proficient in CAD could take hundreds of hours. Does your project’s timeline have that much wiggle room? If you’re anything like the countless customers we’ve worked with, the answer is a resounding “no”.

Instead of spending time and money training a staff of engineers, you can use an existing team that’s already trained. This is what happens when you hire an outsourced engineer team.

We have customers that have a limited engineering staff, but they can still handle massive plant optimization projects because of the help of our CAD outsource team.

Conclusion

Outsourcing your CAD work is a quick way to save money, streamline your project, get help from experts, and have constant access to engineers. Consider outsourcing your next CAD project to see how much it can help your bottom line.

When you’re ready, reach out to our expert CAD outsource team at CAD/CAM Services. We can handle your small or massive project with ease. Get a free quote today.