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Continental Design & Engineering Newsletter
Reducing Engineering Costs
The Advantage of Using Contract Technical Staff
Every manufacturer is confronted with the rising pressure to cut costs and improve profitability.
Within this struggle is the need to design and engineer new products for the customer without
dramatically adding a number of new technical personnel to the workforce that later must
be trimmed by layoffs or attrition over-time. With the largest corporate expense for the
average company being its people (usually one in three dollars are spent on personnel),
the ability to grow and shrink, or to "right size" as one's engineering needs
change has a profound impact on the bottom line.
Many firms have changed from the traditional use of contract staff as "gap fillers"
or short term replacements, migrating instead to a strategy of long term contract assignments,
that help them reshape their workforce into a more strategic mix of technical specialists.
The use of contract staffing solutions clearly presents options for the creation of a significant
percentage of the workforce based on contract employment, without the conventional costs
of fringe benefits, retirements and out-placement (termination) costs.
The Uncertainty of Where the Economy is Heading
Until employers are more confident in the continuation of the current economic up-trend,
many are creating growth in their business forecasts utilizing contract technical staff.
"Managers have realized that they need the flexibility to add or trim costs in an
instant," said Judy Nagengast, CEO of Continental Design & Engineering. "
They need to quickly take advantage of economic, technological or customer-driven business
opportunities, without the added recruitment, training and capital expenditure costs that
go with the normal salaried head count increases."
Where to Get Contract Technical Talent
Over the past twenty years Continental Design & Engineering has created a resume
database of technical talent that includes, as a strategic specialty, Exterior Automotive
Lighting.
"While this database includes Optical and Product Engineers, as well as CAD Designers,
we have found our group of technical staff is very capable of designing and engineering
just about every known plastic part out there," added Cathy Mellinger, Director of
Technical Staffing. "We have retirees that can travel in the U.S. or to Shanghai,
and we
have experienced plastics engineering that can deal with die casting, rubber or metal stamped
assemblies. It seems once an engineer has experience in lighting,
the most regulated plastic component on the automobile, he seems to have acquired many,
if not most of the skills needed by the manufacturers in most other industries."
Why Use Continental Design & Engineering?
At Continental, we are able to respond quickly with the technical resources and contract
personnel needed to handle the peaks and spikes in the workload. We are able to search,
screen and locate the special candidates you need, at very competitive rates. We can help
manufacturers extend their existing engineering resources while reducing engineering
costs at every step from product design through assembly.
See also Contract Technical Staffing
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