Doing FEA overseas?

[dragoncae]

Wondering if anyone had experience doing FEA overseas. A friend advocated this idea and promised me that he can find good people to do the work with only a third of the cost here. The examples they showed are quite impressive.

But I think I'd be cautious so I came here...

 

[Stringmaker]

I work for a big company who would outsource it's mother if it had one...so we deal with outsourced FEA quite a bit. In particular we do a lot of work in India.

There are some tasks I'm glad to send overseas...because quite frankly they're trivial, easy to explain tasks and I don't want to do the work myself. In cases like that I think it's a great outlet. However, for complex analyses things are a bit more painful. I find the model verification skills of the people we work with to be relatively poor. They seem to have a lot of difficulty using contact properly. Also, many times I get results back that physically don't make sense. Be fully prepared to have to make a decision whether something is right or wrong based on what you see in a few PPT slides.

Where I'm going with this is I think that overseas engineering does have some merit. Upper-management gives the engineers too much credit though I think and sees the price tag per hour and assumes they'll save 3X the money vs. someone domestically based doing the work. What they don't realize is the number of hours spent coordinating, checking, and reworking analyses due to much lower proficiency. In the end you get what you pay for...I would avoid going this route unless you are forced to! That's just one man's opinion...

 

[johnhors]

Very wise to be cautious! Was your friend formerly a used (sorry previously owned) car salesman? The old saying "if something looks to good to be true, then it generally is too good to be true" applies here!

Anyone can show impressive looking FEA work, but it doesn't mean it is right.

In my experience and also with any competent analyst I have talked to who has had to deal with out sourcing FEA work overseas, the message is always the same. You must manage the work very closely, specifying in the clearest possible terms exactly what you want and expect to get back. In effect you have to tell them step by simple step how to do the job! Fail to do this and I can guarantee with near certainty that the sub-standard quality of the work will render it not only wrong but also positively dangerous if it is ever used to qualify a design. I shudder to think that FEA work is out sourced to these low cost centres by companies that lack the personnel with sufficient knowledge and understanding to interrogate the analysis properly and blissfully accept the work on face value alone.

Of course it should be obvious that you can spend so much time overseeing the work and specifying it, that you could spend less time and effort doing it yourself! So where's your saving then?

 

[GBor]

While I completely agree with what has already been said, you can also easily find incompetent users in the US. While I personally am not a member of NAFEMS, or any other FEA organization, there is some prudence in contacting an organization like or a particular FEA software company and getting names of quality users from them.

There are many abuses/misuses of FEA that people don't even take the time to understand...

Garland E. Borowski, PE
Engineering Manager
Star Aviation

 

[EddyC]

My experience reviewing the results of overseas FEA work has been exactly as described by both stringmaker & johnhors. Outsource it with caution, as an "engineer" in a 3rd world country can be created via a $300 phony transcript fee.

 

[ThomasH]

Since this is an international forum I think that "overseas" can mean different things to different people.

Nevertheless:

Competence can be found almost anywere. The problem is that the education system varies. In some countries you have to be a member of this or that organization to be considered competent. In other countries there are no such criteria. To verify that you "buy" what you think you buy can be difficult. Especially if you never meet the guy.

I think communication is a key issue. If you go across the street or to the other side of the world it's the same thing. You have to make sure that "the other guy" understands what you expect from him. Both in terms of technical results (correct answers) but also in terms of timetable (when to be finished).

Like somebody once said: You can have it quick/cheap/correct, choose two

Regards

Thomas

 

[GregLocock]

Incompetence is not a function of geographical location, in my experience. Handing over jobs to other organisations will always take some to and fro, and until you have talked to someone for a while it is very difficult to gauge whether they have made assumptions that improve the result in their experience, or because they don't know any better.


Cheers

Greg Locock

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