Development service provider
Development service providers (also engineering service providers or engineering service providers ) are industrial companies whose turnover is largely achieved from the provision of development services in the form of works contracts and order developments. The production and sale of their own products is not a priority for development service providers. This means that they are generally at the beginning of the value chain .
The VDI standard 4510 engineering services and requirements for engineering service providers is intended to support competitiveness and innovation.
Origin and meaning
The corporate form of the development service provider emerged as a further development of the classic engineering offices . Since the 1980s, industrial companies have increasingly outsourced development tasks. Development service providers see themselves as development and technology partners for customer companies. Engineering offices can be understood as a sub-form of development service providers.
The classic customer companies are the automotive industry (with supplier companies) and the aviation industry (with supplier companies).
As early as 2000, 14 development service providers exceeded the 100 million euro mark in sales. In the automotive industry alone, the market volume is around EUR 8.5 billion (as of 2002). This volume is expected to grow to EUR 13 billion by 2012. In times of outsourcing and rationalization in industrial companies, development service providers are becoming increasingly important as employers for engineers and technicians.
Demarcation
While engineering offices (in Austria the term engineering office is used with a modified meaning, see engineering office .) Mostly only offer services from one specialist area (e.g. construction , layout , structural analysis , project management ), development service providers cover a broader range of services (e.g. . automotive electronics ), and are often able development of subsystems ( modules ) completely (i. e. from specifications to serial production ) carry out in-house. The boundary between development service provider and supplier company becomes blurred at this point. However, unlike suppliers, development service providers generally have no production facilities and therefore often do not achieve the status of risk-sharing partner.
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Most development service providers offer services from various of the areas described below.
Ranking list
The ten best-selling development service providers in Germany in 2014 were as follows:
| rank | Companies | Sales in Germany in million euros | Number of employees in Germany |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bertrandt AG *) | 801.7 | 9550 |
| 2 | EDAG Engineering GmbH | 537.0 | 5800 |
| 3 | IAV GmbH - engineering company for cars and traffic | 519.0 | 5417 |
| 4th | FERCHAU Engineering GmbH *) | 470.0 | 5350 |
| 5 | AKKA Technologies Germany / MBtech Group GmbH & Co.KGaA | 318.2 | 2995 |
| 6th | Altran GmbH & Co. KG | 249.0 | 3000 |
| 7th | ESG Elektroniksystem- und Logistik-GmbH | 213.0 | 1249 |
| 8th | Brunel GmbH | 199.1 | 2600 |
| 9 | FEV GmbH *) | 168.5 | 2210 |
| 10 | Old GmbH | 282.3 | 3300 |
- *) Sales and / or employee numbers are partially estimated.
Inclusion in this ranking is subject to precisely defined criteria. More than 50 percent of sales are generated with technology consulting and engineering services, including design / conception, testing / validation, research & innovation consulting, embedded systems / software , project management , scientific simulations and modeling, system integration, and process and IT consulting . This ensures that only companies are listed whose core business is located in the market under consideration.
The Lünendonk GmbH considers continuously the market for technology consulting and engineering services in Germany since of 2006. The market research company maps the market structures by analyzing the 25 leading providers in the relevant market segment and comparing them to a comparison group of medium-sized and smaller development service providers.
According to the Lünendonk Study 2013, leading providers of technology consulting and engineering services in Germany are outsourcing more and more development services to external providers of technology consulting and engineering services. In doing so, they want to maintain flexibility for themselves and their project teams. In this way, customers can absorb peak loads. On the other hand, they are also shifting more responsibility to their external partners - customers develop new products and technologies together with their service provider.
After strongly disproportionate growth in 2011, the development dynamics in the engineering services market in Germany decreased slightly in 2012. Nevertheless, 2012 was a very successful year for many of the providers in the technology consulting and engineering services market. The companies analyzed were able to increase their domestic sales by an average of 14.8 percent. In view of the flattened economic growth in 2012, these results were a clear indication that customer companies viewed product development as a whole as strategic and therefore hardly reduced their budgets. For the 2013 financial year, the study participants expect their domestic sales to increase by an average of 13.6 percent, which is nine percentage points above the expectation for market growth in 2013. In terms of overall sales growth, however, the expectations of the provider companies are significantly lower, on average 9.9 percent. In addition to the positive development of the economy in Germany, international trends are also gaining more and more importance from the perspective of engineering providers - sometimes even beyond short and medium-term economic trends.
For 2013 the Lünendonk analysts estimate the market volume in Germany for technology consulting and engineering services at 8.5 billion euros. The worsening economic environment made itself felt in 2013 in the expectations for the current financial year and in the medium and long-term expectations. Compared to the previous year's survey, in which market growth of 8.4 percent was forecast for 2012, the forecasts for 2013 have been reduced to an average of 4.6 percent. Despite the lower expectations of the market development, the companies remain optimistic: With the five-year forecast from 2013 to 2018, they are at least expecting average annual growth of 6.7 percent. With the long-term forecast for the period from 2018 to 2021, companies are somewhat more skeptical and expect average growth of 6.1 percent.
The most important customers of the supplier companies in Germany traditionally come from the automotive industry, 54.8 percent of them from OEMs and their suppliers (8.2%). The aerospace / defense sector (17.0%) also plays an important role. All in all, these sectors accounted for 80 percent of sales in 2012. In the other sectors, the companies generate single-digit sales shares on average.
The services of the providers of technology consulting and engineering services take place along the entire product life cycle. The companies analyzed achieved the largest share of sales in 2012 with the services testing / validation (18.4%) and design / conception (15.9%). These two service fields have already reversed the order several times in the studies of the past years, but they consistently represented the two most important service segments overall. Other important components of the service spectrum are embedded systems / software (11.9%), system integration (11.0%) , project management (10.7%) and simulation and modeling with a share of 10.2 percent.
The four most important types of contracts in the market for technology consulting and engineering services in Germany are:
- Project business
- Work contracts
- Service contracts
- Temporary work (temporary employment )
Outsourcing contracts in which assets and employees are also relocated to an external provider have so far been rather rare in the German engineering market.
Project contracts account for the largest share in the collaboration (78.4%), 65.2 percent of which are commissioned as contracts for work or work-related contracts. In the case of a work contract, the contractor owes a defined result. In addition to the contracts for work and services, constellations similar to work contracts are used, in which work is carried out on the basis of a contract of service, but specified service levels define the quality of the services, which, if not exceeded, can also lead to contractual penalties.
34.8 percent of service contracts are used within the projects. The share of temporary workers in 2012 averaged 20.0 percent of sales.
The number of employees in the companies increased from an average of 1,173 in 2011 to 1,310 in 2012. This corresponds to an average growth of 137 employees and continues the positive trend of the previous year. Consultants / engineers have been with a company for an average of 5.1 years. In comparison, employees from sales / marketing stay with the company longer (5.7 years). The employee turnover rate rose by 0.2 percentage points to an average of 18.5 percent compared to the previous year's survey. The trend of recent years is thus continuing: in 2010, an average of 16.2 percent of employees changed operations, in 2009 it was 14.2 percent.
See also
Web links
- Automobile Cluster Report 2003 (PDF file; 404 kB)
- Automotive development November 2003 (PDF file; 574 kB)