The most noticeable trend at least from my perspective for 2023 concerns everyone doing surveys and issuing press releases. I guess you can do new products or applications, or you can do a survey. I took a grad school class on doing surveys. Then I became a (ahem) journalist and discovered what passes for surveys in journalism bears only a faint resemblance to what I learned in social science.
Be that as it may, Molex commissioned Dimensional Research to survey more than 750 qualified global participants with direct or managerial responsibility for hardware design or system architecture. The results should not surprise anyone. In brief:
- More than half of the survey participants assert that reliability drives brand loyalty
- Top reliability challenges include adequate time for testing, supplier quality, cost and correlation of product design attributes to their impact on reliability
- 46% of respondents believe AI, ML, simulations and analytics are best bets to boost product reliability
- 92% expect to lose reliability experts to retirement over the next five years
91% of the survey participants reported a strong correlation between their ability to deliver reliable products with having trusted, proven supplier relationships. To that end, 96% of the respondents have changed part suppliers due to reliability issues, with more than a quarter reporting frequent changes. Overall, these supplier relationships are becoming increasingly critical, as evidenced by 74% of respondents who believe reliability is at risk due to shortening design cycles.
