Component Obsolescence and Replacement Parts
Despite it’s usually negative connotation, the word ‘obsolescence’ isn’t always a bad thing. Obsolescence doesn’t always mean entirely useless either. Many older components dating back over a decade ago are still reliable and in use today. But sticking to the subject matter in the title, we’ll save that for another post.
So, you might be sitting there asking yourself, what are some solutions for the inevitability of component obsolescence? One way is to have design engineers choose products that have longer lifecycles to try and reduce risk that way. While there will always be inherent risk for obsolescence in any design, it is helpful if companies try and review these risks to include them in the decision making process. Another route you can take is coming up with a repair or replacement maintenance program. Companies can pursue several possible replacement and repair strategies: corrective, in which components are replaced and/or repaired only at failure; preventive, where components are replaced at optimal intervals before failure; or a combination of these. And while this step will add to increased costs, it is a better course of action considering the potential production losses associated with downtime.
Finding an independent distributor that specializes in finding obsolete parts is an avenue some companies take also. This distributor should be located in advance to ensure you can vet them in regards to stock and reliability. Partstat is a good place to locate distributors and even locate the potentially obsolete parts yourself. www.Partstat.com is a big data platform that has over 8 billion rows of historical data. It’s a good place to start when moving forward with replacements as part of your obsolescence planning.
Regardless of how much planning you conduct, obsolescence is inevitable and needs to be embraced. We wanted to leave you with some parting (no pun intended) statistics on component obsolescence:
In the year 2000 component manufacturers issued 1,164 EOL notices. By 2014 the number of such notices increased to 5,506 notices issued. The good news is that we saw a decline in 2016 to 4,327 EOL notices. And the forecast in 2017 is around 4,270.
In summary, there are several ways to proactively approach obsolescence. Explore other options for yourself, and perhaps consider a BOM monitoring service that can aid in staying ahead of obsolescence. All in all, obsolescence is going to happen and planning can be your friend.
What has been your biggest struggle with obsolescence?