Scale Up With a Corso Systems Staff Augmentation Project

Apr 17

Recently we've been updating our proposal formatting and website content to include more education for our customers. This includes helping them determine the ROI of a project to get support for it within their company, as well as improving how we describe our capabilities, work with technology, and most importantly, how we work with our customers and our overall process for projects. Watch the video version of this post instead.

We’ve also been considering the types of projects which have been most successful for our customers. Typically in manufacturing, projects are discrete: they have a beginning, an end and a specific scope of work. A single project may be implementing a production line, setting up communications, building a mobile app, or creating the backend architecture for their SCADA system. We’ve also completed many successful staff augmentation projects. On these projects, a customer will hire Corso Systems team members to essentially become staff at their company. Then, we’ll help them implement many projects at once, provide expertise on their architectural designs, answer any questions, or simply complete tasks from their to-do list.

The Benefits of Staff Augmentation Projects

The first and often biggest benefit of a staff augmentation project is its very low barrier to entry. You won’t even need to create a full project scope. Many times, you won’t even need to get all of the information together at once or all of your stakeholders in the room to plan each step along the way. You can simply bring in Corso Systems and let us handle a number of tasks you need us to complete across your facility.

We can work alongside your existing staff. We can even become your control staff—which we do for a number of companies as well. We’ve helped companies across all industries with staff augmentation projects, from water wastewater treatment to electric vehicle manufacturing, food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, appliances and more. And we've had ongoing engagements that are still active after seven or eight years. Many successful staff augmentation projects have been multi-year engagements across a wide variety of industry verticals.

Simple Billing: Low Cost, Low Commitment

Customers only need to pay for our time, and typically on a monthly basis. If our team works on their projects, we charge them. If they don’t need any work from us during a month, then they don’t need to pay us. If they have work for us to do, then our team will take it on. Many times we can have the same engineers working on the same projects as before. And while they’ll be the most efficient, we can also pull in more engineers from our team whenever needed. You won’t need to commit to a multiple months or longer engagement over the course of a large project. You can also try working with our team along with the option of also engaging other integration companies to see how they work before investing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to complete multiple projects across an entire facility.

With a Staff Augmentation project with Corso Systems, you can have us work on a small project for two or more weeks and get a feel for everything. We also offer the option to have a flexible scope of work that meets your needs as the customer over the life of the project. Whether this means we complete individual tasks from your to-do list, clean up loose ends accumulated over the years, or just fix a number of small nagging issues.

Complete Flexibility

We can scale our team working on your project over the course of the engagement—if you have a lot of work on one particular month, we can add more engineers, then remove them once the workload has subsided. This flexibility can keep you from needing to hire more of your own full time employees. Instead, Corso Systems can come in and help out in the short term until the work is complete—or keep us on board for as long as you need us. Staff Augmentation can also work parallel to your hiring processes. Espectially since it can often take six months to a year to hire and train a whole team. We can come in on day one, get up to speed quickly, and bring our expertise to the table while you're building that team. We can also help vet your potential hires and get your team up to speed as well. This can save a lot of time in your hiring and training process.

Get the Best Blend of Experts

A Staff Augmentation project with Corso Systems can also allow you to work with multiple integration firms. Bring in specialty experts and we can team up together—instead of bidding against each other on a given project if it had had static scope of work. We’ve had success with this scenario with many customers over the years.

Simply put, staff augmentation allows you to bring people in as you need them, add or subtract labor hours to fit your needs, and handle loose ends across your facility. It's an easy way to get started with an integrator and experience working together while seeing what you need as a customer. Our improved proposal process now includes better tools and the specifics of what we need upfront for completing tasks on time and under budget.

In our experience, staff augmentation projects can also be a valuable learning experience for customers. With a staff augmentation project, we can even be part of your in-house design team and help them solidify a project’s scope of work before they begin a bid process—and the customer can decide if they want us to bid on it!

The Ultimate in Efficiency

Compared to a conventional large-scale project, a staff augmentation project can be much more efficient through the life of your company. We hope you will consider the option of Staff Augmentation as an alternative to a static scope of work for your next project. We’ve had a lot of success with this approach with many companies over the years as well as in our internal work strategies.