Staying ahead of the competition and driving revenue requires a delicate balance between managing current product portfolios and innovating for the future. Device designers and manufacturers understand this. However, a shortage of skilled R&D talent, combined with pressure to reduce costs, leaves companies facing a tough decision. Should they focus their R&D teams on extending the life of existing products or on developing new ones? This choice can mean risking customer dissatisfaction and loss of market share or missing out on future opportunities and revenue.
The demand for R&D skills has evolved over time. A few years ago, the primary focus was on hardware engineering, which then shifted to software engineering, and now, cybersecurity has become the top priority. This shift has altered the composition of R&D teams and may have created skills gaps.
Ensuring that your R&D team is fully equipped to support both new and existing product development, while maintaining the right level of expertise in hardware, software, and cybersecurity, is a significant challenge in the current climate. Outsourcing research and development can help you strengthen your team where it’s needed most, alleviating the strain on your overstretched internal resources.
Here are 3 ways an outsourced R&D team can help:
Accelerating your Product Development Timeline
Partnering with a skilled R&D expert can dramatically accelerate your product development timeline. Whether you engage an outsourced R&D team from the outset to drive innovation or bring them in later to apply design-for-excellence methodologies ensuring manufacturability, they seamlessly integrate with your internal team. This collaboration enables you to achieve your product development goals more efficiently and bring products to market faster.
Selecting the right partner is crucial when augmenting your internal R&D resources. You need a partner who can quickly ramp up and offers the specialized expertise and innovative mindset necessary to propel your projects forward.
At Plexus, our design and development teams have consistently demonstrated the power of true collaboration by working closely with our clients’ R&D teams. Through these partnerships, we have achieved remarkable outcomes, such as selecting optimal components and supply chain solutions early in the design phase to prevent future challenges and creating products with significantly lower environmental impact.
With a global footprint serving over 150 customers across diverse markets, our engineers bring a broad spectrum of expertise and knowledge to every project. Our proven track record of delivering high-quality products on schedule underscores our commitment and capability. Additionally, our seamless integration across engineering, manufacturing, and servicing means you’re not just partnering with an R&D expert, but with a contract manufacturer you can trust.
A partner that can provide access to advanced technology, specialized expertise and streamlined processes, allowing for quicker product development. This integration exponentially enhances the impact of your internal team, guiding you from product development all the way to market launch and beyond. It enables you to focus on your core competencies while delving into innovative solutions, without the ultimate resource strain.
Helping you get your arms around supply chain risk management
Focusing on identifying supply chain risks before they become issues can be extremely time consuming for R&D teams and takes them away from focusing on their core strengths. When you have a reduced size R&D team, you risk becoming reactive when it comes to supply chain management and not proactive. This can increase your costs and potentially cause product manufacturing delays. To avoid falling into this trap, opting to engage a partner with a proactive approach to managing supply chain risk coupled with an understanding of complex devices and regulatory standards can really add value.
At Plexus we take advantage of our industry-leading supply chain predictive analytics solution DRIVE to prevent disruptions for our customers. By providing predictability, we remove the need for our customers to stop and search for alternatives unexpectedly, thus avoiding any meaningful financial impact. By having a full understanding of complex devices and the compliance regulations facing each of the markets that our customers operate in, we can make smart choices when it comes to suggesting alternative parts avoiding the need for requalification.
With supply chain, it’s not only supply disruptions or obsolescence issues that can create challenges for existing and new products. New legislation and regulations can also drive change. For example the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which will come into force in 2026 will mean that customers will potentially face additional taxes on their products for parts sourced outwith the EU. Understanding which components on your BOM will be impacted and what this will do to your product’s unit cost will allow you to decide whether alternatives should be sought ahead of new legislation coming into effect.
Helping you make your products more sustainable and responsible
In pursuit of environmental goals many companies are looking to reduce the carbon footprint of their existing products and to design new products that have the lowest possible impact on the planet. For many companies embracing circularity and adapting to a climate economy is new. Their internal R&D team may not have the expertise and tools available to them to make it easy for them to assess the carbon footprint of their existing product portfolio or implement a design for the environment approach for new products.
At Plexus, we understand that the design of a product determines its environmental impact so we are focused on embedding eco-design principles to ensure that the products we create are built for reduced environmental impact and circularity. We also help our customers find ways to reduce their environmental impact, optimize value stream efficiencies and create tangible value through our Product Impact Assessment. To find out more about the categories across which our Product Impact Assessment delivers potential impact and reduction findings click here.
When we’re considering the impact of a product on the environment we start by conducting a Lifecycle Assessment (LCA). This estimates the global warming potential of a product across its lifecycle. It includes the impact associated with the production of raw materials, energy consumption in manufacturing and emissions released during its use and at end of life. Based on the results, we can help our customers to prioritize decisions to drive actual reductions within the carbon footprint of their product. Additionally we have the ability to design packaging to limit environmental impact through size, volume and sustainable or reusable materials can have a huge impact in helping achieve our customers’ environmental goals and across their extended distribution networks.
Is it time to bring in an outsourced R&D team?
The shortage of R&D talent isn't expected to ease anytime soon, and the pressure on internal teams will only intensify as market demands evolve. Continuing to tackle these challenges alone will be increasingly difficult. If you're considering the benefits of partnering to alleviate some of this strain, our team is here to help. Reach out to learn how we can support your internal R&D efforts, reduce the pressure, and keep you ahead of the competition.