WASHINGTON, Oct. 2, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Answering an anonymized survey, more than 400 defense executives rated the top 20 defense firms across a wide range of criteria, showing significant deviations in perceptions among executives with different job roles and positions in the industry. This is the second year Defense Industry Daily conducted the survey of its defense procurement readership, analyzing the data to show individual firm trends for each of the measurements. Overall, contractors were rated worse than in 2011, especially in quality ratings.

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Starting off on opposite ends of the ratings spectrum, defense IT firms (poor performers last year) and major aerospace contractors (good performers in 2011) both suffered significantly worse ratings this year. These ratings were even worse among engineering executives and those with personal experience with those firms.

Defense contractors tended to perform in sync with other firms in their sector, and the included graph shows how those different defense sectors fared against each other.

"The individual comments people made in the open-ended questions were some of the most informative data we collected," said Defense Industry Daily CEO Olivier Travers. "It was in those boxes that the executives explained their reasoning and the causal links behind their more positive and negative ratings."

Travers noted three interesting developments in the 2012 data: "We found that respondents were more critical of the larger prime contractors; that they were less concerned with ITAR restrictions; and that the entire industry is progressively more disillusioned with the major information technology firms."

The study, a 45-page analysis containing more than 30 comparative charts, examines the different opinion sets in multiple dimensions, including by job role, industry sector, U.S. vs. international respondents and several other factors.

The study identified several segments and individual firms that have large perception problems among key decision makers. In some cases, firms were able to bounce back somewhat from severe negative opinions in the previous year's survey. In both types of cases, the difference between the opinions of those with personal experience with the firm and those who have not personally worked with the firm were useful in showing some of the causes in the perception changes.

The poll was conducted in late August and early September 2012 among the audience of Defense Industry Daily, an online defense procurement trade magazine with more than 300,000 unique monthly users. Information about the report and access to an executive summary can be found at: https://reports.defenseindustrydaily.com/?release.

Tig Tillinghast, Watershed Publishing, 8027854260, tig@watershed-publishing.com

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New Defense Exec Survey: Contractor Performance Falling