Steel detailing services are an important element of most construction activities. All activities such as residential house building, commercial building work, and even shipbuilding need to use steel detailing services to ensure the project is completed as quickly and as accurately as possible. The smallest error can be a significant problem for your project and can cause a lot of lost time and money fixing it.

Steel detailing is a communications channel between all the vital professionals during a project. It gets them all onto the same plan and direction for the project to be completed. The best option to ensure you have quality plans for everyone is to outsource your steel detailing requirements to a professional organisation.

The benefits of outsourcing your steel detailing

There are numerous reasons why outsourcing is the best option. To begin with, you need the highest quality drawings you can get. The top talents tend to work for consultancies, therefore, by outsourcing your work to a consultancy, you’re getting access to the top talent in the industry.

In addition, unless you’ve got someone who can understand 2D and 3D drawing software, the drawings you develop aren’t going to be very useful to other key players in your project. Those working in a consultancy will use the latest software that most professionals will be using.

Another key benefit is the potential time and cost savings you can get. Firstly, outsourcing is a way to allow your staff to do what they do best while professional consultants work on the drawings for the project. In addition, the costs are much reduced as you don’t have to hire expensive engineers to get the talent to start the project.

At the same time, outsourcing allows you to get access to more advanced tools that consultancies will have access to.

The challenges you could face

As with any outsourcing, there are some challenges that you might need to overcome. These challenges aren’t too problematic with the right mindset to overcome them.

For instance, you might face some issues that relate to which technologies are being used to do your steel detailing. There are many tools available and some consultancies will use different tools to other parties involved in your project. This can cause communication problems and even slow-down the work. Therefore, it is important to ensure everyone has the facilities to work together.

Another common problem is working with virtual teams. This is more of a cultural aspect for you and your team who might not be used to working with people who aren’t on site. However, more than half of the workforce is expected to work remotely at least some of the time by 2020. Therefore, this is a common work practice that you might want to endorse anyway. To make virtual teams work better, you need to work on strong communications. There are tools available that can aid in this and they can be very important in the building of a strong relationship between you, your team and remote workers. The best part of using communication tools is that they help with coordination that can be another challenge for those looking for outsourced steel detailing services.

The final challenge is if there is any inter-cultural diversity. Sometimes, outsourcing services offshore can cause problems arising from cultural differences. This is often noted in miscommunications and work that is submitted that doesn’t meet your expectations or is late. This can slow down projects and raise costs more than you might imagine, despite the lower costs of offshoring. Therefore, it can be more beneficial to stick to consultancies that offer a similar cultural ethos as your own business.