Remote support for your projects. Your team of electronics engineers. Meet the team
Get a quick engineering boost
Do you need to:
Subject to availability, you can borrow one of our electronic engineers within a couple of days. That engineer becomes one of your team for whatever amount of time you need them. It could be as little as a day, or up to a couple of weeks.
4. Are you missing documentation? Our engineers can produce product specifications and update schematics.
5. Something has been missed? A second pair of eyes that hasn’t been involved in a project often spots issues really quickly.
6. Are you recruiting? If you are struggling to find the perfect addition to your team, use one of ours until you make that hire.
Our engineers can work remotely to support you, so you can be anywhere in the country or even the world. Just because we are in Nottingham, doesn’t mean you have to be. Our engineers are fully equipped to work remotely. We use Slack and Teams to communicate internally. We’re frequently on Skype or Zooms calls with remote customers, and use tools including Altium Designer, Eclipse, Simplicity Studio, Code Composer Studio, Visual Studio, git and subversion but can work with whatever tools you use including pencil and paper, calculator or a whiteboard.
Benefits of hiring one of our engineers includes expertise in electronics design , get us to test product feasibility, check product unit costs are as low as they can be or get a clear picture with a design review.
BTS borrowed an Ignys Engineer – Here’s what happened
Project deadlines are tight and getting tighter. Production issues need to be resolved urgently to get supply moving again. New project feasibility and R&D work needs to be on a continual cadence to keep pace with competition and to meet the rapidly evolving needs of consumers. Often there’s simply not enough time in the day nor knowledge in the room to make progress quickly and robustly. Everyone needs a boost or helping hand at some point.
We’ve found that lone engineers on a project really benefit from occasional external input. Similarly, small development teams can get locked into a particular way of thinking, causing delays and project overruns.
Getting external help isn’t a sign of weakness or a lack of competence or confidence in the team. External technical help is analogous to getting business coaching for the company leaders. Involving an experienced engineer or two in your project can be a shortcut to successful completion or an early warning that things are not as they should be.
Having non-judgemental engineering support for your development team can make a real difference to your project delivery and to the company’s progression.
Cost reduction projects, component obsolescence, verification testing and in-field fault diagnosis may have your in-house resource running for cover. You can use external resource on the less interesting projects while your internal team forge ahead on your roadmap free of distractions.
Kicking off a new project, especially in an unfamiliar area, can be fraught with unknown risks. You can bring experts in that area in early to set the project off on the right footing. Arranging periodic technical reviews, independent prototype verification and test or simply off-loading the unfamiliar areas of work all help to reduce risks, costs and ultimately get to market quicker and increase lifetime profitability.
If you have a challenge, if your internal team need help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the Ignys Team. {cue theme music}….de de de dah
It is increasingly difficult for companies to find qualified engineers, with the right experience, to get the job done. Engineering is unfashionable. It has an image problem and is seen as a poor cousin to other white collar careers such as solicitors, doctors, finance and architects. This has the knock on effect of attracting less young people into the industry, meaning the engineering skills crisis gets worse. This situation is not helped by calling anyone who repairs things an engineer.
To make matters worse the trend towards small SMEs from large multinationals has reduced the available apprenticeship and graduate placement schemes, making it much more difficult for commercial design experience to be passed down from seasoned senior engineers to new intakes of engineers. Instead it is being learned through mistakes which could have been avoided with senior support.
The trend towards smaller companies also means smaller teams. It is not unheard of to have one-person teams where that sole engineer has no one to bounce ideas off, to review things and to check their work, which can lead to slower development cycles and more mistakes being made.
The lack of engineering experience within the company also makes it very difficult to recruit good quality engineers when that team needs to grow. The interviewer has little to go on when filtering CVs and interviewing candidates.
For a company with no engineering resources, there are a number of steps they can take to solve the short term issues:
1) Ensure they have a short term (1 year) product roadmap
2) Outline and plan the delivery of that roadmap, including feasibility studies or assessments to make sure they are investing in a success and not throwing money away
3) Use the plan to establish immediate resourcing requirements
4) Use outsourced resource to get the projects underway
5) Outline a 3-5 year development roadmap with resource and skill requirements.
6) If the development program is long term and the company wants in-house capability, then work with the outsourced resource to start to build an internal team. This comes with requirements for lab space, equipment and software licences
7) Reduce the external resource to a supervisory role, helping the new team through their first few projects, transferring knowledge and adding process.
To fix the countries longer term issues, there are a number of things which need to happen:
1) Make engineering more attractive to schoolchildren and colleges
2) Value engineering resource as highly as other professions
3) Remove the barriers to becoming qualified – companies could offer degree placement schemes.
If you’d like to know how we can help businesses lacking engineering resources, please get in touch. Below you’ll find some links which may be useful to you.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/stem-awards/energy/the-great-uk-engineering-shortage/ https://www.engineeringuk.com/media/1356/enguk_report_2017_synopsis.pdf