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Consultancies like Hillside Product Design deal with a wide range of products across a variety of markets from farming equipment to golf clubs; whereas your in-house team of designers might be highly specialised in a particular product or market area. Designing a large variety of products gives consultancies a much bigger breadth and depth of skills and knowledge to draw upon when they are working.
When it comes to originality consultancies are able to offer different viewpoints and ideas as they can cross pollinate insights and knowledge gained from the variety of projects they have worked on, with the experiences of your business, users and manufacturers.
Enlisting the services of an external design house at first glance may seem expensive, but in the long run you save money as the ability to pay consultancies on an ad hoc basis, which contains everything you need such as software licences, workstations, salaries and prototyping/test equipment; Hillside Product Design even has in-house 3D printing capability, means you are not paying for equipment and fulltime staff during periods of low activity when you may not require them.
Design consultancies cannot just help you save money in designing your product but they can potentially help you save when it comes to manufacturing. You can use your design-house’s suppliers to gain competitive quotations and manufacturing experience.
If your company is experiencing peaks and troughs of working activities, your own staff can be complimented by external design services when previously they would have been stretched thin and unproductive. Seeking external help during stressful times can help you to prioritise your workload; your internal staff can stay busy maintaining existing product ranges and the help you have brought in can help create new products. Delays in launching a product or missing design opportunities can often cost the company far more than the external help required to advance a project.
You may require extra staff to be able to tackle large projects, but adding temporary design staff to your team can be costly, not just in monetary value but also time. There is also the potential for intellectual property to become an issue when they leave; this is not an issue when working with outside help as IP can be assigned to you, the client. Hillside Product Design can support your IP applications by quickly producing illustrations.
New staff members may also require time to learn on the job which means that they cannot start working on live projects immediately. Hiring an external team to compliment your own staff alleviates these issues as they will already be experienced working together effectively and efficiently.
There are many advantages to hiring outside help to assist you on an ad-hoc basis; including time-saving, cost-reduction, but also avoiding the often-heard doctrine ‘that’s how it has always been done’ which can help change your design perspective. Broader focus can be invaluable.
If you need something designing, or to compliment your current design capabilities, or even just a fresh perspective on a project, feel free to contact Hillside Product Design.
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