Working in the aerospace industry is one of the most challenging and rewarding ways to go through life. The tasks demanded of you are incredible, but when you succeed, you know with certainty that you are changing the world.
It’s the most natural thing in the world to want to lead innovation in this industry, but that’s much easier said than done. If you really want to produce the next great leap in aerospace, you have to allocate your resources wisely.
One of the most powerful tools at your disposal is something you may have never considered before: managed engineering. It could be the simple solution to everything that is delaying your innovation efforts.
What Is Managed Engineering?
Managed engineering is an approach that involves outsourcing some or all engineering responsibilities to a specialized provider. Similar to managed IT, managed accounting, managed legal, and other professional services, managed engineering provides expanded expertise for businesses of all sizes.
Especially in the aerospace industry, managed engineering allows you to consolidate engineering resources to improve workflows, expand creativity, open up new options, and save on costs along the way. Additionally, with a team of experienced and certified engineers, you can equip your organization with skills and expertise that's hard to come by in today’s pool of professionals.
When utilized well, managed engineering can transform your business model and help you become the new industry leader in aerospace.
How Can You Leverage Managed Engineering to Drive Innovation?
If you want to be an industry leader, winning the innovation race is a good plan. Aerospace is transforming rapidly right now. The demand for better, stronger, faster, cleaner aerospace demand is at an all-time high. It’s only natural that you want to be the first to market wherever you can.
The challenge is that expanding your in-house engineering resources is prohibitively expensive, so increasing your potential for innovation is no simple task. But, when you have access to robust engineering resources all rolled into a simple contract, doors open. In fact, there are more than a few specific ways that managed engineering can change everything.
Revisit Your Systems
A managed engineering team has the capacity to provide an additional perspective at the systems engineering level. You can get a seasoned engineering expert to run through your entire operation, from the first stages of R&D to mass production.
With a single systems audit, you can find inefficiencies in your business model and make rapid adjustments. If done correctly, any of these adjustments free up resources and help your time scales. You can dramatically lower your time to market, free up room in the budget, and take some stress off of your existing engineering team, all with one targeted action.
Scale Employee Capacity
When it comes to aerospace innovation, employee capacity is often a limiting factor. Your managed engineering team can help in a few ways. Efficiency audits can find places where a little more automation is affordable and viable, whereas a design consultation can help you improve your manufacturing process.
Simply adding more available expertise to the team can help with some of the most time-consuming aspects of design. Essentially, your managed engineering contract is expanding the number and variety of engineers at your fingertips. Put them to work, and they can solve many of the problems that are limiting your current employee capacity.
Improve Project Deadline Targets
When it comes to innovation, few things are easier than blowing right past a project deadline. It happens to the best, and it happens a lot, but every time it does, it costs precious time, money, and energy.
One of the primary functions of your managed engineering team is organization. They keep everything organized and on task, and any time a project is at risk of delay, they can help reorganize your assets to preserve the deadline.
Ultimately, this saves a lot of time and money. It’s yet another way to lower in-house engineering stress, and it keeps the entire organization laser focused and efficiently pursuing goals.
Innovation doesn’t happen in a single stroke of brilliance. It’s the culmination of consistent effort, and meeting target deadlines is essential to that effort.
Maintain Your Budget
You want to be an innovator, but blazing a trail through the developing history of aerospace is hardly a cheap prospect. Engineers cost money. Materials cost money. Most of all, innovation requires investments that often never see a significant return.
Anything you can do to lower costs and maintain the budget keeps the lights on and the team working on the next breakthrough.
Managed engineering is a way to lower engineering costs across the board. It operates on the same principle as any other form of outsourcing. You’re paying a third party to provide resources, but that third party has clients other than you. Because of that, you’re essentially sharing the cost of your managed engineering with the provider’s other clients.
You get access to high-quality personnel and tools, but you’re not paying the full cost of that access. It’s one of the most affordable ways to approach engineering and innovation, and the money you save through managed engineering preserves your budget. Every dollar saved can be reinvested into your innovation projects.
Increase Production
Even while you’re innovating, you have to generate revenue. A strong profit stream can pay for all of your future innovations, so anything you can do to increase production is invaluable.
There are many ways to approach this problem, but managed engineering offers a very simple solution. Let the managed team oversee production design (or at least let them look for ways to improve your production lines). While they ensure that your production is optimized, the in-house team has a little more time available to work on new projects.
Your managed engineering team can find ways to expand production without driving up costs, ultimately putting more money in your pocket and giving you yet another avenue of increased freedom to pursue innovation.
Gain More Time
This is a bit of a theme, but it’s really the crux of the whole thing. Partnering with a managed engineering provider puts more time in the hands of your in-house team. It’s that simple.
Every task that you outsource is a task that is no longer draining your people. You’ve given them time, and you know better than anyone just how much they can accomplish with more time. If you have any faith at all in your innovators, then untie their hands with a targeted investment in managed engineering. When you do, it leads to the best part of pursuing innovation.
Take on More Complex Projects
The future of aerospace is exciting, but all of the easy problems were solved a long time ago. Tomorrow’s demand will include zero-emission flight, consumer supersonic travel, autonomous flying, and more.
None of these projects are in any way simple. If you want to tackle them head-on, you need to expand your engineering resources. With a managed engineering team, you have more experts in more fields and an entire team of experts devoted to organizing your engineering assets and leveraging them appropriately.
With an extended workforce and scaled capacity, you can put your very best people to work on incredibly complex, yet innovative projects because they have more support. It’s a simple case of resource allocation, but the potential is endless. You could be the first to crack zero-emission, supersonic commercial flight. Or, you could take on any number of equally challenging and complex problems. That’s what it takes to be an innovator in aerospace.
If you’re interested in learning more about Intertec Engineering’s managed solutions, contact one of our team members today.
