If you’re an engineer at a large manufacturing company, this might not be that surprising. Working with suppliers during NPD is incredibly difficult. It’s admin-intensive, it’s slow and the effort rarely feels worthwhile. However, you also know getting suppliers into early-stage designs would mitigate much of the risk and rework that plagues NPD cycles. 

But, the problem is also nuanced. Supplier quality, procurement or supply chain management each own aspects of the supplier relationship. So, a directive like “get supplier input earlier” oversimplifies the problem. In addition to making the problem feel impossible to solve.

Yet, the problem exists and it’s systemic. 

Late supplier feedback during NPD is an industry-wide problem

90% of engineering teams get supplier feedback too late during NPD and it’s causing moderate-to-significant rework for the majority of companies. In some cases, the feedback isn’t even implemented until the next NPD cycle.

There’s two major gaps hindering progress on this issue:

• Engineering teams don’t know the extent of the problem
• Engineering teams don’t understand the downstream effects of these problems

And because engineering teams aren’t able to compile and quantify the issues hindering early supplier engagement, companies don’t prioritize solving the problem.

That’s what this guide will do:

• Detail the problems hindering engineering teams from getting supplier feedback early and often during NPD. HIghlighting both aggregated survey data and engineering leader commentary will show the problem is systemic.
• Highlight the downstream effects of those problems on company-wide initiatives. Quantifying the problem will help leaders prioritize even small steps to solving the problem.

Engineering teams can control and improve supplier engagement during early product development. But, a solution must start by identifying the root cause issues and their downstream effects.

Legacy tools are the root cause of poor supplier engagement

In the same survey report that uncovered the titular stat for this article, engineering leaders also agree: administrative headaches caused by legacy tools keep engineers from engaging with suppliers earlier on designs.

When we look closer at this graph, a few themes emerge:

• Suppliers are slow to provide feedback or can only provide feedback in meetings. When the only mechanisms for providing feedback are PowerPoint slides, spreadsheets, email and meetings, it’s not surprising suppliers provide feedback slowly. These tools are are manual, time-intensive and prone to error. 
• Lack of access to the same tools or technology systems (CAD, PLM, PDM). This is often due to myriad admin challenges in getting suppliers access to OEM tools. Even though both teams could be using Catia + Windchill, because they’re on different instances of each tool, they cannot provide seamless, easy feedback. The technology tools slow suppliers down.
• Documentation challenges are prolific. Problems like version control, sharing design files, having to share drawings over models – these are the definition of legacy tooling problems. In a perfect world, everyone would be working off the same file at all times without needing to update CAD or create an SFTP. 

These problems are similarly systemic to late supplier feedback. At least 1 in 4 and as many as 1 in 2 engineers experience at least one of these legacy tooling issues. 

This is not surprising. The processes and tools engineers use to conduct supplier DFM or design reviews haven’t changed in years. Yet, the complexity of organizations and products gets more complex every year, if not every month. The engineering teams we talk to every day confirm this. Their products, company structure and supply chains are more complex than ever, yet they’re still using PowerPoints, spreadsheets and email to do supplier DFM or design reviews.

Using legacy tools for early supplier engagement frustrates engineering leaders across industries

The information presented thus far has been aggregated survey data. When we look to individual engineering leaders, they add more color to this conversation.

In two recent panels, The State of DFM in 2024 and Turning Supplier into Partners, engineering leaders from TPI Composites, Ford Pro, iRobot and Mainspring Energy shared their frustrations with legacy tools when coordinating with suppliers on designs.

It’s too hard to communicate design intent

Working with suppliers in the consumer goods space is an especially difficult task. You’re often working with a fixed space and you need to understand if a supplier’s solution will fit into the space available. The only good way to do this is alignment on design intent from the get-go. 

For Eric Burbank, Engineering Manager at iRobot, it’s a mix of understanding a supplier’s capabilities and deciding if the time invested is worthwhile.

Eric explains, “A lot of the design to value starts with working with suppliers to understand: is there a solution that could actually fit. How can they help us enable the process of product development? It’s still too hard to communicate design intent. When you're trying to do concept evaluations it's hard to bring it to the level of complexity and invest time without knowing if it's going to be worthwhile.”

But, Eric and his team could only communicate design intent through CAD screenshots and meetings. These legacy tools for collaboration added too much complexity and time to a process already rife with inefficiencies.

Manual processes add too much rigamarole to the design cycle

For Kevin Walters, Senior Director of Hardware Engineering at Mainspring, the way things had always been done wasn’t good enough. In 2022, company leadership gave him a mandate to double product development speed. And he was more than up for the challenge. However, legacy tools held his team back.

 “The way we were doing our work is, I think, the same way that everyone else has traditionally been doing their work,” Kevin remarks. “An engineer comes up with a design based on the requirements they have, and they do that design in their CAD tool; we use SolidWorks. Then they're going to take screenshots from SolidWorks, put that into a slide deck, and send that slide deck around for comments.”

While the team used the Google ecosystem for internal collaboration, most communication with suppliers happened via email. Slide decks would be converted into PDFs and design input would be emailed back and forth. “It all ends up being a slow process,” recalls Kevin.

“It also forced a lot of live meetings because it can be so hard to get the right screenshot that really gets the design intent across,” Kevin continues. “So then you’re getting 10 people in a conference room for an hour. You're going to have your doc up on the screen and you're going to try to load it up in SolidWorks. And with really big CAD models, that doesn’t always work smoothly or fast.”

CAD screenshots, meetings, email and PDFs – these are all tools not purpose-built for supplier-engineer collaboration during design reviews. This legacy tool system is disjointed and requires intense manual effort. This means critical information gets lost leading to late-stage design changes and rework.

Manual documentation as the customer and supplier adds more pressure

Tyler Phillips, Global Director of Engineering at TPI Composites, sits in the middle of OEMs and suppliers. TPI’s customers are large wind turbine OEMs and TPI works with suppliers to manufacture the blades for those turbines.

And the top priority for his customers is time-to-market. They want to produce faster. But the tools for DFM documentation are too manual and too slow. 

Tyler explains, “It’s a lot of Excel spreadsheets. As a build-to-print manufacturer we would receive a set of drawings, we would send those out to a group of people around the globe, then populate a spreadsheet. We then provide feedback to the OEMs, so they would understand what our concerns were and how they can adjust the product tolerances, requirements, etc. to help us be more successful.”

“So it's really been a very manual process. Which spreadsheet do you have? Which revision do you have? Which servers are things based off of? We were having to duplicate a lot of the information. And we only had a paper copy.”

TPI is stuck in a tight spot. They need to coordinate with their suppliers to meet the tight time-to-market requirements for their customers and the only mechanism they have to do this is Excel spreadsheets and paper drawings. Now add version control, updating those spreadsheets and ensuring everyone is working off the latest version and TPI is a team of documentation engineers. 

As OEMs are under more pressure to deliver faster, this pressure falls to their suppliers and down the chain. So, suppliers like TPI have few choices when it comes to meeting those requirements.

Because there’s no good way to do it, early supply chain involvement was never a priority

“Our converters wouldn’t see a physical product until we had production running,” notes Simon Robinson, Chief Engineer at Ford Pro. 

The relationship between Ford Pro and its converters is an interesting supply chain edge case. Ford Pro develops and manufactures transit vans. These are then sold to converters who customize (or convert) transit vans into niche vehicles, like campers, delivery vans and handicap vans.

The problem is as Simon explains, “We’re pivoting towards electrification-only platforms and we recognize that some of our converters need to put in water tanks or other large components and that space will now be taken up by large batteries and PDUs. Working with converters early, we can try to do that package. Historically, this just would not have happened. They would not have been brought in early because converters were an afterthought.”

And for converters, this meant when Ford would get to the start of production, the converter had to start on a brand new sheet of paper, fighting decisions that were made without them by the OEM.

This caused a lot of frustration with Ford Pro’s converter partners, which is why Ford Pro had to figure out a way to bring them in early. There just isn’t a great way to do that while also maintaining the speed required by Ford’s aggressive delivery timelines.

The downstream effects of late supplier feedback

We already know that for the 90% of engineering teams who get supplier feedback too late, it causes moderate-to-significant rework. Or worse, the feedback doesn’t get implemented until the next NPD cycle.

But, what additional effects does late supplier feedback have on NPD and engineering outcomes?

Delayed Production 

Rework causes delays. Delays in product development affect launch deadlines. According to recent research, 90% of engineering teams delay product launches due to late-stage design changes. Similarly, something as simple as the wrong CAD version is used causes delays in production. 

Cost Overruns

Rush orders, extra shipping fees, late-stage changes – these are all preventable cost errors stemming from poor communication with suppliers during design. McKinsey estimates late-stage design changes cause up to a 35% increase in total product development costs.

Increased Risk in Prototyping and Production

Without early supplier feedback, designs may contain issues that surface only during manufacturing. This can translate to quality issues and even recalls. GM recalled an entire vehicle line due to a faulty ignition switch that could have been flagged in design. It ended up costing GM ~$4B.

Missed Opportunities for Innovation

Suppliers cannot offer improvements if they lack context or access. So, suppliers can’t proactively offer alternatives on tolerances, material lead times, or cost-saving ideas without upstream collaboration. In the original survey report, engineering leaders recognize they’re getting too little supplier feedback and that feedback comes in too late. This is also why they have initiatives to tap into more supply chain expertise.

Loss of Institutional Knowledge

Feedback, lessons learned, and tribal knowledge often remain undocumented or inaccessible for future programs. This is a massively undervalued risk and the root cause of many repeat errors. Most teams document lessons learned in some way, but it’s hard to then apply these to future decision-making. So, engineers rely on tribal knowledge too often, which perpetuates the cycle.

Late supplier feedback is a problem worth prioritizing

Engineering teams have put off this problem for obvious reasons. It’s too hard to get leadership support and then it’s similarly difficult to get suppliers to change their systems and processes. But it is worth it. 

Recognizing legacy tools are the root cause of early supplier engagement issues and then identifying what the downstream effects of those issues are is the first step towards a solution.

Based on the aggregated survey data and engineering leader input, replacing legacy tools should be the ideal next step. To do this, engineering teams should prioritize tools that do the following:

1. Make it easy and seamless for suppliers in any location to access CAD files
2. Allow suppliers to provide real-time, asynchronous feedback on those CAD files
3. Facilitate real-time, asynchronous communication between engineers and suppliers
4. Collect all that feedback in a single database accessible by everyone
5. Create an automatic design history as a byproduct of doing reviews

This tool does exist and it’s called a Design Engagement System.