Tania Scroggie, SCRM and legacy manufacturing expert, is back with another episode of Tania’s Teachables on YouTube! In this installment of her educational shorts, she takes us on a journey through the complex process of licensing obsolete electronic products.

Finding the Pieces–the Detective work of Legacy Products

A major part of Tania’s responsibilities at GDCA is tracking down licensing for discontinued products necessary to support our customers’ embedded systems. Recently, she was looking for the licensing of a product last manufactured over a decade ago. Since the product had been discontinued, its OEM had gone through multiple merges, adding further challenges to finding the actual license. 

We’ve seen firsthand that many customers view obsolescence management as an easy problem to handle internally. However, obsolescence management requires highly specialized staff, robust and proactive processes dedicated to legacy products, and a well-defined business model designed to support critical, discontinued embedded systems. Tania’s current project of finding the license for this discontinued product of an OEM that doesn’t even look remotely the same as it did when the product was last manufactured is a perfect example of why this expertise is so crucial. 

Putting the Pieces Together–The Journey to Complete the Obsolete Puzzle

Finding the license for a discontinued product is much like archeology–it involves careful research: first, of where to actually look for the product, and then, of how to best get it. This particular customer worked in transportation and required spare parts and repairs of a legacy system to bridge the gap between their current system and the eventual product upgrade–which would not be fully installed and deployed until 2040. Tania’s team researched the OEM extensively, finding that they had filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and subsequently ceased operations. 

The last available units were manufactured by the OEM who had acquired the assets after the bankruptcy. However, both this second OEM and the customer lacked the familiarity and the knowledge of the product to properly maintain it. The current personnel were forced to piece together the product like piecing together a puzzle without the complete picture for reference. Initially, Tania reached out to the first OEM, who she hoped might possess the technical data necessary to rebuild the “full picture,” but was unsuccessful. 

Undeterred, she and her team collaborated closely with the customer to gather all of the information available, utilizing the expertise of GDCA’s legacy engineers to piece all of the product’s history together–much like archaeologists carefully piecing together history through the relics that they unearth at each dig site. Together, they were able to create a full picture of the product’s history and technical data, which allowed Tania to return to the OEM and license the information that GDCA needed to support the customer.

Final Thoughts–The Importance of Specialized Legacy Expertise

This story explores the importance of having that specialized expertise when managing obsolescence in embedded systems. Electronics obsolescence is not something that can simply be handled by a few people internally–it requires the work of a full team of specialists, engineers, and manufacturers to gather all of the missing pieces of the puzzle and actually put it together to create a system of support for the legacy system. 

After all, finding and licensing the data is not the end of the journey–now GDCA is reconstructing a degraded supply chain to determine if we can actually provide the customer with a spares and repairs program to support their product through the end of its lifecycle. Just like archeologists trying to put together the full picture of history, we’re attempting to resurrect the history of these embedded products for our customers and piece it all together so that we can support their full lifecycle needs.

Tune into Tania’s Teachables YouTube shorts series for the full case study as well as many other excellent videos on obsolescence management, legacy equipment manufacturing, and supply chain management support. LINK

Do you love this series? Check out our previous Tania’s Teachables post HERE