If you’re a hardware engineering manager or product owner, you know that being able to manufacture and ship your product in volume to new and repeat customers is highly dependent on factors outside of your control. The largest of these is availability of components selected in the initial design. Components go obsolete all the time and companies have departments set up to monitor this to be ready to change them out , ideally with drop-in exact form, fit and function replacements, to ensure continued customer supply. The unavailability of a single resistor, costing less than a cent, can stop production of the entire product until suitable replacements are made. If no replacements are available, the product will need to be redesigned, which can take months to complete. Component manufacturers typically provide a six-month end of life warning, so this process can be effectively managed within that timeframe for production to continue without a gap.

AI Helps, but it Doesn’t Solve the Core Problem

All of this seems like it should function like a well-oiled machine and, today, with the advent of AI-driven parts obsolescence management systems (such as the latest version of PTC-Arena’s tools) knowing that components  are approaching end of life  has never been easier. These tools are automatically able to suggest drop-in replacements. While AI has helped automate the identification of replacement components, this increased visibility results in more:

• Engineering Change Order cycles
• Product validation and regression testing
• Documentation updates
• New supplier qualifications
• Excess and obsolete materials

For industries like telecom, where there is a requirement to support products for up to seven years beyond the last order date, this ties up substantial investment to build inventory that may never be used. This approach affects long term profitability at exactly the time when the product should be at peak profitability.

A Better Approach: Continuing Engineering

What if there were another way? For many years I ran two parallel engineering teams:

1. The main Design Team – focused on next generation products
2. The Continuation Engineering Team – focused on keeping existing products in market, profitably

To many engineers, the thought of being in the second team doesn’t sound very exciting since this brings up images of simply replacing resistors through the obsolescence process described above. While this is part of the work, there comes a time when this replacement process becomes ineffective due to the age of the design –this is where the true value of this second team came to bear. Using the knowledge gained through the process of obsolescence updates, the team had an unparalleled knowledge of how each product worked, in our case we were responsible for 1500 active hardware assemblies. [Through these repeated learning cycles, they gained deeper insights into:

• Which types of components were most at risk for obsolescence
• Which product family specifications were diverging over time
• Where SKU proliferation was driving additional cost and complexity
• When similar SKUs could be consolidated into new combined designs

SKU Consolidation as a Strategic Advantage

They would use the latest available technologies to create single products which could provide the functions of those multiple SKUs using programmable technologies and other techniques such as de-population of components for some of the SKUs. This refresh of a number of products into one new design as a multi-use product reduced the number of manufacturing SKUs (thus reducing stocking, built-inventory and test requirements), as well as modernizing the product design to use the latest available parts (of all types) and removing short-term obsolescence issues, giving the product extra years in market at a reduced cost to manufacture. This is where continuation engineering shifted from reactive maintenance to portfolio optimization.

A Powerful Training Ground

Surprisingly,  the continuation engineering team became one of the best places to train younger engineers because they:

• Worked on real products at lower risk
• Learned the core architecture deeply
• Redesigned with the freedom to create against known specifications (existing products)
• Saw first-hand how design decisions directly impact manufacturing, cost, and lifecycle

While this team was intended to create a training ground for younger engineers to gain experience and then move on to the main design team, many chose to stay in the continuation team since the work was interesting and fulfilling.

From Obsolescence to Competitive Edge

Continuation engineering strategy is a way to keep products in market longer. To do this successfully, it requires deep understanding of the pivotal times when this should be applied to your products. Applied thoughtfully, continuation engineering can transform aging products into profitable, simplified, modern platforms, while at the same time freeing new product teams to accelerate innovation.

If you’d like to explore how a continuation engineering strategy could extend your product’s life, reduce SKU complexity, and improve profitability across your portfolio, let’s talk.