2021 State of Electronics NPI
77% of NPI leaders that shipping on time is most important goal, yet 43% of new electronics products shipped late over the past 5 years. Why?
The COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call in electronics manufacturing. Starting with global travel bans, which compounded existing vulnerabilities driven by US-China tariff changes, electronics manufacturing teams saw decades of carefully cost-optimized supply chains quickly unravel. Early 2021 continued this trend of disruption with the global semiconductor shortage impacting everything from automotive to consumer electronics, and erratic demand throwing capacity planning into a tailspin.
But these challenges didn’t start with COVID-19, and they won’t disappear simply because the pandemic has passed. In fact, data shows that new product introduction programs have been slowing for years, with few companies addressing the root cause of the slowdown – crippling engineering inefficiency and sluggish innovation.
While many suggest that increasing supply chain volatility and global travel disruptions are to blame for program slowdowns and cancellations, this survey of 100 electronics brands focused on new product introduction (NPI) programs found that NPI programs have been sluggish for years, and that electronics businesses need to address how they empower their product engineering and operations teams to be agile if they want to continue to accelerate both product complexity and time-to-market.
In recent decades, product engineering has become an exercise in fire fighting. Teams that focus on optimization and intentionally design processes to support agile decision-making and distributed collaborators are well positioned to confront the biggest risks to NPI programs through the 2020’s.