The Outsourcing Institute finds, "Outsourcing is rapidly becoming an accepted management tool for redefining and reenergizing the corporation. It challenges today's executives to rethink the traditional, vertically integrated firm in favor of a more flexible organization structured around core competencies and long-term, outside relationships."

Ability to complete all projects with a permanent core of technical staff is always the main advantage of using external resources. Hiring and training staff is a long and expensive process but most companies will want to have a core of staff that are fully familiar with the company, its products and processes. Outsourcing at times of high pressure, scarce skills or demand allows companies (especially small ones) to grow and expand without the risk of hiring and training new engineers with the accomanying risk of the extra cost if there's a dip in workload.

Outsourcing might not initially seem cost effective when compared with the hourly rate for an in house engineer. There are hidden costs for permanent staff that most people forget to consider. These include

Development Hardware.
Development Software (often $000's per license).
Support Staff for the above.
Employers National Insurance Contributions.
Employers Pension Contributions.
Office Space and Heating/Lighting costs.
Administration Costs.
Sickness Cover/Pay.
Sectetarial Support.

When all these are taken into account the financial benefits of outsourceing become a lot more evident.

It is recognised that the time taken to get a project to market is crucial, and in order to speed this up many companies are trying to complete development with fewer 'spins' or revisions of their designs. In order to reduce the number of revisions it is important to have experienced engineers on board. This can help especially with design debug when FPGA designs are being integrated with hardware and software. If you outsource to us, all of the engineers which we will use on your project will have al least twelve years hands on industrial design experience.

You might have enough engineers to get a project completed eventually but do you have enough to beat your competitors to market. Outsourcing can allow parallel development of different aspects of a project, possibly allowing you to get a jump on your competitors.

Sometimes an alternate viewpoint can help when considering a problem. For a recent tender we were able to propose the use of a smaller cheaper Altera Acex device rather than the Stratix device that initially seemed necessary by taking an alternate approach to the design. We will also be honest and give our professional opinions on the feasibility of designs. It's not in our interest to be 'Yes Men'.

When verifying a design it can ofter be useful to get a completely independant party to write a test suite. This can help remove mutual assumptions over what 'should' happen, especially if the independant party has no past in house experience of the design. An independant viewpoint can also help identify why things are done a certain way when there are better alternatives (when the answer is sometimes "we've always done it like that").