Current state, strategies and challenges in 2025
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Engineering leaders agree: supplier feedback comes in too late during product development.
This late feedback leads to moderate to significant rework -- rework that could have been discovered in design. In fact, 1 in 3 companies agree that supplier feedback comes in so late that it leads to significant unplanned costs.
And some of this late feedback means it’s not implemented until post-NPI in a completely new product development cycle.
This survey reveals a significant gap in supplier input. Specifically, between the number of suppliers that give design input to engineering teams and the number of suppliers engineering teams want to hear from.
Currently, only 32% of suppliers provide design feedback. But, on average, engineering leaders would like to receive feedback from 78% of their suppliers.
Perhaps most revealing is that 60% of engineering leaders surveyed would like design input from 80-99% of their supplier base but are only getting input from 20% or less.
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Nearly all engineering leaders agree: there’s an issue getting suppliers the information they need to give adequate design feedback
However, PLM access doesn’t seem to be the answer.
83% of engineering leaders agree that suppliers should not have their own PLM licenses.
This means that what engineering teams need is not suppliers to have PLM access, but instead a platform for bringing suppliers into select product data. Preferably one that sync back to the company’s PLM.
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