## 3 Results
### Company Has Implemented the 3D Product Model in the Assembly Process  
As discussed in the Materials and Methods section of this paper, potential survey candidates were screened based on the organization/industry in which they worked and their role within that organization to increase the likelihood that these individuals would have knowledge of the use of the 3D product model and how it was or was not being deployed in the assembly process in their organization. To test the effectiveness of the survey screening approach, survey respondents were asked to indicate their level of knowledge about the use of 3D product models in assembly planning, assembly design, or assembly shop floor execution. The categories and responses were as follows: very knowledgeable (6), knowledgeable (11), somewhat knowledgeable (5), not at all knowledgeable (1). With only one of the 23 respondents indicating that they were not at all knowledgeable about the use of the 3D product model in the assembly process, the survey screening approach appears to have been a success and drives greater confidence in the results described in this paper. To ensure that results were not biased by any one industry, the researchers checked the distribution of responses by industry type. As shown in Figure 6, there is a relatively even distribution of survey responses across multiple industry types, and all industry types have applicability to an organization in an industry that would be a candidate for the use of 3D product models in the assembly process. The authors note that when viewed as a group, the aerospace, agricultural equipment, and automotive industries comprise a large portion of the survey responses. Based on the authors' experience, and comparison to the relative percentage of these industries to others with complex assembly operations on the 2020 Fortune 500 list (the largest 500 publicly traded companies in America by revenue), these three industries are a large portion of the population of the manufacturing organizations that have complex assembly operations. Of the Fortune 500 companies, only 44 companies are in industries that have complex assembly operations applicable to this research. Figure 7 shows the comparison of the percentage of survey respondents by industry relative to the percentage of companies with complex assembly operations by industry from the Fortune 500 and validates that the sample of industry respondents is representative of the broader population of manufacturing companies with complex assembly operations. Figure 6: Industry distribution of respondents. In addition to ensuring that the industries represented by the survey respondents were reflective of the population, the research team also wanted to ensure that the jobs of the survey respondents within those organizations were representative of the population. Due to the nature of organizational hierarchies, there are more engineers than engineering managers/supervisors, more managers/supervisors than directors, more directors than vice presidents, etc. When reviewing the survey respondents, as seen in Figure 8, the categorization of respondents follows this general trend, which demonstrates that the survey responses are not biased by any one job type when compared to the broader population. The research team also gathered information on the company size, by employee count, which was represented by the respondents. An interesting finding is that all respondents who worked for a large corporation said that their organization implemented the 3D product model in the assembly process. Figure 9 shows the breakdown of which size company the respondents work for based on employee count. Figure 8: Job title distribution of respondents. Figure 7: Comparison of survey respondents percentage by industry to Fortune 500 companies with complex assembly operations percentage by industry.