PP&A led the design, fielding and analysis of a voice of customer survey aimed at technical and purchasing decision-makers in design, innovation, engineering, research, quality and manufacturing roles, screened for direct FEA experience, across 23 end-markets from aerospace and heavy equipment to medical devices, electric motors and design engineering services. The survey focused on the United States with a secondary reach into Europe and closed with 255 qualified FEA users, plus a secondary sample of companies not using FEA to understand why. Fieldwork and analysis ran over roughly six weeks, with an interim readout in August 2020 and the final report in September.

To find structure in the responses, PP&A applied k-means clustering, calibrated with variance and silhouette tests, which grouped respondents into five clusters by their use of external FEA services and of adhesive FEA today and in the next 12 to 18 months. The team profiled each cluster by industry mix, company size, function, execution model, use cases and perceived value, then prioritized the two clusters that combined external FEA use with current or planned adhesive FEA for deeper analysis of spending, data card sourcing and pricing expectations, technical challenges and value propositions by industry.

The survey put numbers on a market the client had only seen through its key accounts. Around a quarter of FEA users already modeled adhesives, and a further 26 percent planned to start within 12 to 18 months. The clustering separated three groups with little or no external FEA activity from the two addressable clusters, 95 respondents or 37 percent of the sample, who already outsource part of their FEA and either use adhesive FEA or expect to. Those clusters were heavy in automotive, aerospace, automation, metal fabrication and heavy equipment, with about half of respondents from companies above one billion in revenue, and both expected their external FEA activity to grow.

The priority clusters valued better performance predictability and faster design times above cost, uniformly across sectors, and outsourced mainly for lack of internal resources and to handle complexity. Spending on external FEA varied widely by industry, with professional services, automotive, aerospace and specialty vehicles among the top spenders. Seventy percent of respondents obtained their adhesive data cards from suppliers or other external sources rather than in-house, priced them mostly in the hundreds to low thousands of dollars, and named data standards and modeling accuracy as the main obstacles.

The report closed with a five-step roadmap the client could act on: deepen the segmentation, size and price the broad market, build industry deep dives, blueprint and test adhesive data cards with the priority segments, and turn the results into a segment deployment strategy and business development playbook.

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