When it comes to CFD analysis, you are faced with three obvious choices. You can utilize a member already within the company. You can hire an additional member of your team to set up, run and evaluate CFD models. Or, you can outsource a CFD contractor. Utilizing a member of the team or hiring an additional CFD engineer to join your company may seem like the more viable options initially. However, it is important to understand that there are numerable benefits included when outsourcing a CFD contractor that you may not acquire when working with somebody directly within your company.
The following article from MVPModelingSolutions (does this company exist any more? Link no longer works and quick search found nothing) provides five examples as to why it would benefit you and your company to outsource your upcoming modeling work.
TOP 5 REASONS TO OUTSOURCE YOUR MODELING WORK
1) Save as much as $200K in software license fees, equipment and employee overhead by paying someone with a software license and equipment already in place to run your simulation.
Running simulations and staying current with the software is a full time job for the CFD specialist. To have specialists in-house, you will need to supply them with up to date dedicated equipment and software plus offer an attractive salary and benefits so you don’t lose this resource. If you don’t have enough CFD modeling demand to keep a specialist busy full time, it is more cost effective to contract the work out. You will also be saving significant in-house engineering time, which brings us to reason #2.2) Save months to years of engineering and management time and focus the in-house expertise on creating better, more innovative products, instead of figuring out how the software works, or actually writing your own software.
Once you find a well respected, diverse engineering modeling firm, whose expertise lies solely in creating accurate, meaningful computational results – why not use their services whenever you need to model something? If you’re spending 6 months of your own time finding the right software, negotiating with vendors, figuring out how the software works, and setting up your modeling problem, when consultants could have gotten accurate results to you in a matter of weeks, you just robbed your company’s bottom line.
3) Your company mission does not revolve around “producing the best possible modeling results” but the modeling service company’s mission focuses on just that. You company’s mission might be to “be the leader in providing the best value in machines, engines and support services for customers,” as is the case with Caterpillar. Or to “exceed customer expectations by always being first to market with the best products,” as is the case with Cummins.
You simply will not spend as much time on engineering simulation as a company with a mission to solve customer problems with engineering modeling. They are the experts in that area and are much more likely to get the most accurate and relevant results out of computer simulations.
4) Save your job. We engineers take some pride in our cerebral horsepower. You may be thinking, “There are a lot of smart people in my research group so we don’t need consulting.” I believe you. The people controlling the budget at your company may see things through a different lense, however. Professionals who find ways to help their organizations save money, cut costs and contribute to the bottom line in general, are the ones with a much better chance at job security then the ones that are just “really smart.”
So if you think that your job will be threatened if you figure out a way to outsource your CFD work, think again. If outsourcing will help you get results faster and cheaper – demonstrate that to the upper management and you would be in a much better position than a do-it-all-yourself engineer.5) Create more contacts for the future. Here is a novel idea. Because there is no such thing as real job security anymore, you always need to be expanding your network of professional contacts. You never know when you might have to look for a job again and a solid list of professional contacts is a great place to start. If you are lucky enough to be working in one of the large corporate R&D groups, bringing in external consultants expands your list of professional contacts.
Outsourcing your CFD work may be the most advantageous choice for a multitude of reasons. It has the potential to save you ample money and time, and could benefit you in the long-run. If you have any further questions in regards to outsourcing your upcoming CFD modeling work or have any questions about CFD, please don’t hesitate to contact me.