Reasons for engaging civil and structural consulting engineers

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Consulting engineers are engaged by clients for certain reasons, it can be:

• Client do not has engineering capability. Builders, developer, manufacturing organizations or government do not have engineering capability of their own and need to utilize consulting engineers for their engineering work. Client may rarely use engineers, and keeping engineers on staff may become an overhead for client. Therefore, it is good to engage engineers by project basis. As for example, an investor needs to build one factory. The best way is to engage a consulting engineer to look into his requirement. The consulting engineer has to demonstrate his expertise and experience on field of engineering. Upon completion of work, the investor is not further obligated to the consulting engineer and has not incurred continuing overhead expense.

• Engineering staff not qualified in work area.Now days, a client especially property developer will have an in house engineering department. In certain case, the staff is not skilled in the discipline required for a particular assignment. A housing development company may competent to design housing project. However, company needs to hire a consulting engineer to design a bridge in the housing development project where only sporadic needs for the project. It will not economical to retain such skill in house. As a result, the company obtains it from outside professional, the consulting engineer.

• In-house engineering staff sized for normal workload.Certain clients may have a fully qualified in-house engineering staff that has the capability of undertaking special assignment. Unfortunately, the client cannot be free from their daily regular workload. It is not economical or efficient that to engage more staff to handle only for case of peak workload.

• Need outside expert knowledgeNormally a client hires a consulting engineer in order to obtain opinion of an acknowledged expert of a project. As for example, in-house engineering team is doing bridge with normal RC beam design. When there is a need of design pre-stress RC beam for a bridge and the team do not has the expertise knowledge, client can engage pre-stress bridge engineer to design and gain the knowledge of pre-stress RC beam design. In-house staff can gain the expertise knowledge on the engagement of engineer.

• EconomyIt is the most common way for client engaging the services of consulting engineers is the acknowledgement of least expensive way to accomplish an engineering task. A consulting engineering firm can able to setup a team with experience and knowledgeable staff. The team can more efficient in undertake and complete the assigned project. The consulting engineer has regularly in handling similar task, can productively start on the project immediately.

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