Legacy Electronics Are Costing OEMs More Than They Realize
Legacy electronics continue to be one of the biggest hidden challenges facing OEMs specializing in embedded electronics. While these aging products remain essential to supporting customers, they often consume valuable engineering resources that should be focused on innovation and new product development.
In the latest installment of Tania’s Teachables, GDCA’s Director of OEM Relations, Tania Scroggie, explores how maintaining legacy electronics can lead to engineering burnout, lost productivity, and stalled innovation. Rather than a shortage of talent, the real issue is how engineering resources are being allocated—and why partnering with a qualified legacy equipment manufacturer can help OEMs preserve their legacy while keeping their teams focused on the future.
Too often, OEMs assign their most experienced engineers to support legacy electronics still lingering in the product portfolio. Instead of developing new technologies, these highly skilled team members spend valuable time searching for documentation, tracking down obsolete components, and reconstructing tribal knowledge left behind by employees who retired years ago. While legacy electronics represent a company’s history and long-term customer commitments, managing them internally can divert critical resources away from future innovation.
This strategy leads to massive drain on the engineering team’s time and morale. Every hour that they spend piecing together technical information for old products is an hour taken away from developing new technology and leading the business into the future. Not only that, but as GDCA’s team knows, dealing with old, obsolete products can be a massive strain for those who are not prepared for dealing with fractured technical data, missing components, and lost knowledge. Having to handle both new and old products, especially old products that they are not intimately familiar with, inevitably leads to burnout and loss of morale among the team.
Instead of overburdening your team, transfer that weight to a partner you can trust, such as a qualified legacy equipment manufacturer.
Check out Tania’s latest video for the full discussion over on YouTube and feel free to contact Tania with any questions about this or any of the topics that she has discussed over the past years!
