Contract Engineering Makes Good $en$e
Companies seek engineers to hire directly for a number of
reasons. But direct hire doesn’t have to be the only way to ensure
that your manufacturing, project management, design, or other tasks are
being addressed. It is possible to have your projects completed and
have good accountability without the overhead of another direct
hire.
Contracting your engineering needs is certainly not
new. However, it is a viable option that you may not have considered
for various reasons: the lack of a quality service provider,
misconceptions that contracting is more expensive than doing the work
in-house or the loss of control of a project.
Running
the Numbers:
Engineer with 5-10 years of
Experience: $55,000 annual salary
Medical benefits, workers’ compensation,
401(k)
retirement
$10,000 annual
Total: $65,000 annual -OR- $31.25/hr
On any given week,
this engineer may spend only 40% of their time working on pro-active
projects: cost reductions, quality improvement, etc. The other
60% of their time is devoted to daily manufacturing or other tasks.
40% x 2080 hrs/year = 832 hours 832 hours x $31.25 =
$26,000
If you could devote $26,000 each year to contract
engineering, how much could you accomplish?
Scenario
1: Average Project Cost - $5,000
$26,000 / $5,000 = 5.2 –or- 5 projects completed each
year
Scenario 2: Average Project Cost -
$7,000
$26,000 / $7,000 = 3.7 -or- 3 projects completed each year
More Productivity
You would need to hire 2.5 engineers full-time, to yield a full year of time devoted to all of the pro-active projects you may have. Why not consider a dual path? When timing is short, use our contract services to help you achieve more with the resources that you have.
There are still only 24 hours in a day. What will you
accomplish with your day?
