Function:
Consultation is an intellectual service and knowledge transfer. It provides the society with optimal decisions, alternatives and plans, or data, forecasts and survey results with reference value. It serves the needs of decision makers and plays an important role in promoting social and economic development and technological progress.
First of all, consultation is a harmonious "external brain", and its main task is to serve harmonious scientific decision-making. Consultation is not decision-making, but it can bridge the gap between the responsibility and ability of decision makers. According to the decision-maker's entrustment, we make use of our knowledge, experience and existing investigation materials to diagnose the production and operation situation and solicit opinions, so as to provide one or more scientific and reasonable alternative suggestions or schemes for the decision-maker, so as to reduce the decision-making mistakes and make the decision-making step into a scientific track.
Secondly, consulting often concentrates a certain number of experts and scholars in various fields, and has a large amount of information, experience, knowledge and advanced technology, which can be provided to users at any time to promote the horizontal exchange and transfer of scientific and technological information. Through the bridge function of consultation, the new achievements of scientific and technological research are continuously transferred to production practice. Making up for users' deficiencies in science and technology and information is conducive to expanding users' information capacity and promoting knowledge updating in all walks of life. For complex topics and generally incompetent scientific research projects, consulting can quickly concentrate a large number of scientific and technological personnel and experts in related fields, provide relatively complete research methods, and promote the emergence of new scientific research achievements or new breakthroughs. This is particularly beneficial to SMEs.
Third, through international consulting services, the content of international technical and economic cooperation has been expanded, which is also conducive to the development of international trade. After World War II, especially since the 1960s, due to the influence of scientific and technological revolution, the international division of labor and the integration of the world economy are deepening. In addition to commodity trade, there are also various forms of international economic cooperation, such as international, contracted projects, labor export, technology trade, consulting services, etc., which belong to the category of service trade. Especially in recent years, some developed countries have actively carried out technology trade and foreign-related consultation. With the development of international consulting business, especially engineering consulting, many western countries often use their own equipment, products and materials in their engineering design when accepting project consulting services entrusted by foreign customers, which promotes export trade, expands the international market, not only increases their foreign exchange income, but also benefits their economic development.