In April of this year, we asked SEs, SE Managers, and Technical Enablement Members (N=76) to respond to a survey about reliability platforms and supporting resources. The survey was conducted by the Product Mtg and Technical Enablement teams. The goal of the survey was to better understand how and where the reliability platforms are being used, and to identify reliability-related resources that might be in need of improvement.
For those of you who responded, thank you for your time!
The return rate was approximately 71% (54/76). While the response rate appeared lower in Europe, there was not sufficient evidence to suggest effects due to location or tenure.
The three platform-specific items - comfort demoing, demo frequency, and customer use - had similar results. This lead us to believe they may measure the same underlying characteristic.
Beginning with demoing comfort, we aggregated the five response levels into three, grouping the bottom two (Not comfortable demoing and Can perform basic demo) to Basic and the top two (Can answer most customer questions and Can create examples) to Advanced.
Life Distribution, Fit Life by X, and Degradation had fewer Basic and more Advanced responses. The four repairable systems platforms (Recurrence Analysis, Reliability Growth, Reliability Block Diagram, and Repairable Systems Simulation) and Cumulative Damage had more Basic and fewer Advanced responses.
Similar patterns were seen for demoing frequency and customer usage.
Satisfaction with support materials was consistent across sources, with the exception of Detailed Examples/case studies, where there was a smaller percentage of Satisfied responses.
As is probably expected, there are some differences in comfort level (in showing/discussing reliability tools) across our core industries, with people most comfortable discussing reliability within the pharma and semiconductor industries followed by oil and gas. The lowest comfort level was within the Consumer Products, Chemical, and Biotech/Medical industries.
Seven of the responders (~13%) indicated they have lost sales to a competing product. Four people indicated it was Reliasoft, two Minitab, one R. Five individuals (~9%) indicated they lost sales due to gaps in functionality. No single specific gap was identified.
In conclusion, we found:
- People were most comfortable with, demoed most frequently, and had the most customer usage with four non-repairable system platforms (Life Distribution, Fit Life by X, Degradation, and Survival).
- People were least comfortable with, demoed least frequently, and had little/no customer usage for with all repairable system platforms (Recurrence, Reliability Growth, Reliability Block Diagram, and Repairable Systems Simulation) and Cumulative Damage.
- Overall, people were more neutral than satisfied for the various support resources. The largest proportion of neutral responses were for detailed examples/case study, suggesting room for improvement in this area.
- Approximately 12% of sales were lost to a competitor with Reliasoft making up 2/3rds of the cases.
Our next steps are to meet with the SEs to discuss the results and better understand the differences between the platforms. Particularly, to understand why the repairable system platforms are not used more often.
We would also like to discuss potential gaps and improvements to resources, along with possible resources to help guide SEs and their customers to the proper reliability platform.
