Design capacity bottleneck: outsource or wait?

Capacity bottlenecks in design are rarely permanent, but almost always expensive. The reflex to wait until the in-house team frees up looks cheap because the cost of waiting is never booked anywhere.

Delayed tooling pushes series starts, blocks press capacity and ties up project participants for longer. Quantifying these effects roughly gives you a solid basis for the decision instead of a gut feeling.

Clearly delimited packages: a complete die design, a strip layout, a fixture family, or drawing derivation including the bill of materials. The clearer the interface, the lower the coordination effort.

Tasks with high change frequency and constant coordination with production or the customer are often more efficient internally. The same applies to designs tightly coupled to internal product know-how, unless an NDA-based working model is established.

A smooth start usually requires part data, target machine, tolerance requirements, standard parts catalogue and one contact with decision authority. After that, we can normally say within one or two working days when the package can be scheduled.