Often, having a maintenance contract misleads Application OEMs and Prime Contractors into a false sense of long-term protection. When Primes are not privy to an accurate assessment of a system’s life cycle, gaps between the end of a contract and the continuing need for parts creates production and sustainment vulnerability. Reacting to these vulnerabilities adds […]
Read More
Listen to “Five Minutes With…Ethan Plotkin, CEO, GDCA“, a podcast by Rich Nass of OpenSystems Media as he interviews embedded personalities. Obsolescence is something that many vendors dread. But fear not, help is out there. Just because a chip or a board is no longer available from your supplier, you may be able to find […]
Read More
Business leaders don’t like process exceptions, because they’re inefficient and require a lot of special intervention to resolve. They also don’t like to discontinue old product designs that still have a few customers, because these orders help them make their sales targets and avoid customer issues. That makes sense, right? Maybe not as much sense […]
Read More
Reassessing your company’s approach to legacy sustainment is a critical step in minimizing stress and maximizing profits. Since the early 1950s, product life-cycle management (PLM) has been the commercial best practice for managing value and lifetime profitability of products and systems. However, as technology has advanced exponentially, so have the needs of managing products with […]
Read More
…and What You Can Do Embedded and Application OEMs both face issues with their customers when product life cycles are longer than originally anticipated. Thinking critically about servicing systems past component EOL notices is vital for effective forecasting and maintenance, not only for end users but for manufacturers as well. Paying attention to the following […]
Read More
Obsolescence and Changing Our Minds You’ve got to know when to hold ’em Know when to fold ’em Know when to walk away And know when to run “The Gambler” – Kenny Rogers Maybe the writing is on the wall. Maybe the truth is hidden in between the lines of your BOM. Maybe you really […]
Read More
Press Release LIVERMORE, Calif. — Feb. 6, 2019 — GDCA Inc., a California-based company that specializes in manufacturing obsolete embedded computer equipment, announced this week that it has joined forces with Abaco Systems, a leader in the electronics systems industry. Together, the companies have completed an initial transfer of 13 product lines from Abaco to […]
Read More
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “true cost” of things. Our leadership team has been working on a particularly large order for more than a year. Since we restarted the production line for this discontinued COTS board several years back, this is the third ad hoc order we’ve accepted. In each of these […]
Read More
Once component EOL notices have been issued and COTS embedded boards are discontinued, the processes for keeping your embedded systems vital drastically changes and so must your overall thinking about them. When the supply chain is active, acquiring the boards and components you need requires simply placing an order. Extending or even reviving a product […]
Read More
Albert Einstein said, “Problems cannot be solved with the same thinking that created them,” and we agree. The speed with which technology is advancing causes new issues in system sustainability; problems that up until now, provide chronic headaches for most engineers and companies. For instance, note the vast differences between the processes of building embedded […]
Read More
Critical Thoughts RSS Feed