After years of reading articles, blog posts, attending conferences and ad hoc discussions extolling the virtues of MBD and the 'drawing-less' future, has there really been any substantive progress towards adoption in the industry?

I realize there are some success stories and that's great. But it has been my experience that these successes are often limited in scope and generally small companies or academia. Have there been any mid-to-large scale companies fully implementing MBD, and supporting production manufacturing, specifically, interacting with outside suppliers?

I recently tried (again) to get our engineering management to consider MBD as an option. They seemed agreeable but they wanted to see some 'real world' proof, something like, say.... any company in the Northeast (or wider) that is NOT in academia, that has integrated MBD into their engineering, manufacturing and supplier chain! So, I went to my SolidWorks account manager and asked, "Be there such as beast?" They said "We'll get back to you." The fact is, they could not provide a single example of a success story.

So what's the problem? If MBD is so great and provides such fantastic benefit then why has it not swept the industry? I'd like to hear some thoughts from the 'thought-leaders' on this subject.

Anyone?