Service Options

Over the years, the SLA team has developed many strong relationships with our customers. We've learned that there is no single consulting model that works for all business types. Therefore, we continue to offer our services with a number of Service Options.

Outsource Flexibility is designed to provide the greatest customer value by offering the skills and resources of a complete engineering team for the cost of a single engineering resource. The very nature of product development requires flexibility, engineering teams must be able to expand and contract within the development cycle. This creates a formidable challenge for businesses to reliably forecast and adhere to budget. Many companies have attempted to solve this problem by creating a centralized resource pool and allowing the project team to draw on resources as needed throughout the development cycle. Unfortunately, in most cases, development programs are assigned a portion of the expense for the dormant resources within the centralized resource pool, usually through internal corporate and overhead charges. SLA's Outsource Flexibility offers the same access to a pool of experienced engineering talent, while providing a method to maintain a predictable and flat budget throughout the complete development cycle.

SLA's engineering team is available through a retained contract at a cost equal to the fixed monthly fee for an in-house senior engineer. Outsource Flexibility provides client access to the capabilities of SLA's complete Engineering Staff, Lab Facilities, Test and Development Equipment and in many cases, Intellectual Property. SLA is not a brokerage firm that outsources client projects to a network of subcontractors. SLA's full time engineering staff handles Engineering and development programs. No matter what the client task requires, SLA's planning staff will assign the appropriate engineering resource for the job.

Fixed Bid contracts remain the option of choice for many customers, as they provide an opportunity to establish an known price for a well documented product.

Time & Materials works well for customers that have not yet established their product Requirement Specifications. Often times we will work on a Time & Materials basis to assist our customer complete their Requirements Specifications, before moving to Fixed Bid to complete the remainder product development.