Proactive obsolescence management can often be an adventure.  I like to think of it as a cross-industry supply chain game of chess.  On one side, you have legacy experts like GDCA, with a quarter of a century of experience sustaining legacy systems.  On the other side you have counterfeit risk, disruptive technology and time.

This year, we had an additional player when it comes to long-term support adventures: Hurricane Isaac.

“DMSMS” is a defense industry term and you can’t talk about embedded obsolescence management without eventually coming across it.  For anyone not familiar with it, it stands for Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages.  These shortages can happen due to ongoing disruptive technology (going from NAND to DRAM), environmental disaster (such a flooding in Thailand or the nuclear emergencies in Japan), and plain old EOL.  And, because you can’t always predict how obsolescence and end-of-life is going to impact a supply chain, you can imagine that the DMSMS conference is something we at GDCA look forward to every year.

So this year, while the conference itself got canceled (update: postponed) we got to see firsthand collaboration across the supply chain.  Not just because we put together a panel with collaborators from Curtiss Wright Defense Solutions, IHS, and Rochester Electronics… but also because Hurricane Isaac precipitated state-wide, cross industry collaboration.  Teams supporting impacted states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida coordinated between the National Guard, Municipal power and water, and private industry, making sure fleets of trucks were standing by to bring in supplies.  As a fan of being proactive, we could see all the time, effort and man-power paying off.

But it wasn’t just on the outside that we could see effective collaborations happening. Communication between teams evacuating from the conference ensured everyone had a flight, rental cars, and cross community safety checks.

A special thanks to all of our collaborators; whether from our industry or part of the state-wide response focused on keeping thousands of people safe.

The GDCA Team