Can all engineering services be outsourced?

In theory, yes. In practice, no.

Why can't some engineering services be outsourced in practice?

For strategic reasons and integration with other processes.

Strategic - for many companies that consider their engineering expertise to be their core strength, outsourcing their engineering services might be akin to giving away their crown jewels. They might wish to keep a select list of engineering services to be done within their company, at any cost.

Integration with other processes - Even in cases where a company might not consider a particular engineering process as its core strength, it might not be able to outsource it because of the close integration this process has with some other core engineering processes / services. For instance, an auto company might not be willing to outsource its mock-up modelling processes to other companies because its main car design architectural team (which the company might consider its core strength) might be working far too closely with the mock-up modeling team and any disruption in this seamless process could be very costly to the company in the long term.

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