Worldwide industry trends, strategic priorities, and trust

This 24-page report contains results from our online contract manufacturing survey

Our worldwide industry survey, Eyes on Electronics Outsourcing Industry Survey 2006, was sponsored in part by Underwriters Laboratories, Universal Instruments, and TES Electronic Solutions.

Surveys can quite possibly be the only tool that can generate specific numerical data in a repeatable and statistically valid format. However, in virtually every survey Venture Outsource has conducted over the years, traditional telephone and regular-mail surveys have been found to sometimes be costly and frankly, just too slow.

The data may also be skewed in some instances. Someone may behave or respond differently over the telephone during conversation if the individual knows his or her activities and / or responses are being evaluated.

Of the various survey types available, we've found online surveys to be quite effective because they encourage survey respondents to feel comfortable while enabling them to be privately polled at their convenience.

Note: Do you want VentureOutsource.com to include particular industry topics, subjects, or concerns in other surveys? E-mail comments or suggestions to insight@ventureoutsource.com

Companies wanting to sponsor a survey can inquire using the above email address.

Electronics outsourcing survey development and delivery

When developing our most recent survey, candid talks were held with more than 60 influential industry executives from various OEM companies and electronics contract manufacturing and original design manufacturing (ODM) and supply chain vendor companies, worldwide...focused on finding out what's important to executives and their organizations.

This time-intensive, upfront work resulted in a large reservoir of industry concerns on the minds of executives across all five continents.

The guidance of several survey development professionals was enlisted to refine this information into effective survey questions. For example, in questions where ranking was to be achieved or a weighted value on a particular statement or subject, the order of responses for survey participants to select from was randomly generated to not influence a particular response.

Furthermore, in questions where it was appropriate to do so, the number of responses presented to survey participants to select from was intentionally limited to an ‘even' number of options so that participants were encouraged to not ‘sit on the fence'.

The final survey questions presented to survey participants generated single select; multiple-choice, analysis of variance, ranking, and open-text responses.

In addition to open-text responses, many questions allowed respondents to provide clarification, or bestow ‘comments', resulting in a high percentage of respondents (from all sectors in industry) choosing to offer additional, valuable commentary, in more detail for many survey topics / questions.

Various software applications were evaluated for delivering the survey to industry. Applications selected used decision-logic to direct, and redirect, survey respondents to subsequent questions based on responses to a previous question.