Mike Richardson discovers that while the importance of planning against the threat of obsolescence cannot be overstated enough, who within the organisation is responsible? Who said that only death and taxes are certain in life? While it's been joked that wobbly wheels on a supermarket trolley can also be added to this well known quote, another one of life's inevitabilities that you can certainly count on is obsolescence.
Whether it's the CD-ROM replacing the floppy disk, the DVD replacing VHS or even the telephone replacing the good old telegraph, natural obsolescence has always been a fact of life. However, failure to plan against its threat and the impact it can have on your organisation is guaranteed to upset the happy hum of many a manufacturing shopfloor.
And it can happen regardless of the size of your organisation. The procurement manager receives the bad news from a supplier that they're no longer making the part and it's become obsolete. The procurement manager feels it's not his problem and instead passes it to the design engineer who says ‘well, I told you so' and passes it to the production engineer, who, on informing his line manager unleashes the problem onto the production shopfloor. Suddenly, production grinds to a halt, the balloon goes up and everyone starts running around like headless chickens. All because the company's design team - at the very beginning of the project - didn't plan for the potential threat of obsolescence.
It's a team game
So, who should ultimately take ownership of these obsolescence issues: the procurement department, the design engineering team or both? Ultimately, the whole company owns obsolescence management (OM) and can contribute to its improvement. Ownership is the responsibility of all the business core team members, including: marketing, system design, component engineering, hardware and software engineering, procurement and production engineering. Non-core members include finance, logistics engineers, commercial support, field engineering, as well as the suppliers and even the end user in some rare cases.
The solution for ensuring a harmonised approach across any large organisation can comprise the following important factors: efficient manufacturing processes to reduce losses; systems engineering design – fitness for purpose; procurement/component supply chain awareness of design options; real through-life lifecycle planning through phase reviews, and embedded proactive design reviews; the creation of an obsolescence management plan (OMP) with regular reviews and current status included together with decisions taken.
As a special interest group of like-minded professionals from all industries and all levels of the supply chain, the Component Obsolescence Group (COG) strives to address and mitigate the effects of obsolescence. The benefits on offer to manufacturers and suppliers in joining up include training opportunities from focused workshops on best practice methodologies and standards guidance, the exchange of process and technical solutions across different industries, regular meetings containing informed presentations from industry experts and, importantly, the opportunity to network at COG's various not for profit events.
“The main reason why people attend COG events is because of the networking opportunities and the chance to meet other people, exchange ideas and discuss real issues,” begins CEO, Ian Blackman. “Our strength lies in the rich variety of people that attend these functions, because very often you may have similar problems and yet someone else's opinion may well be more open and not as blinkered.”
So when it comes back to the question of just who is responsible for obsolescence within the organisation, Blackman is unequivocal in his response: “The entire company must take ownership of obsolescence management,” he affirms, “and if the marketing department try and sell something that the engineering department cannot feasibly design and manufacture, then you've got a recipe for disaster. Equally, the procurement department manages the entire supply chain so they're accountable too, but it's down to the company's management team to ask the right questions and check that everyone in the organisation is really serious about OM. The spares, repairs and manufacturing functions will be undermined if they don't get it right.”
Blackman advises that the more modern electronic documentation methods of keeping track with design changes are vital if the threat of obsolescence is to be avoided.
“It's always best not to rely solely on an engineer's logbook,” he continues. “Ideally, staff from the engineering design team should document everything during their project life together because they might not still be in place as a team later on.”
Get it down in writing
He suggests that when an organisation is looking to create its OMP then the best place to start is with the Obsolescence Management Application Guide BS EN 62402:2007, a document that COG helped to write. “It's vital that from design inception, we document information such as the customer's details, the expectations of the aircraft programme, who is responsible for what, any assumptions about the criticality of individual elements and what the logistics support plan may entail,” he notes. “I always insist that you use this information as a ‘living' document and that you are able to chronologically demonstrate what you've achieved. Any customer or senior manager can read this document and quickly understand the programme in its entirety. COG receives regular updates of what initiatives the Government and other trade associations know about OM so we can work to understand how we can document designs better.”
A recent trend has seen the once relatively stable design team increasingly being forced to adopt a blinkered short term approach to a project and then fragmenting when the project is complete, thus robbing it of its long term sustainability. In order to uphold real insight and innovation, the team needs to maintain long term ownership of their designs - including planned responses to potential obsolescence - as a fundamental building block of a successful design.
“If you're going to build a through-life plan for an aircraft programme then you really need a stable idea of exactly what it entails,” confirms Blackman. “In the past, aerospace suppliers would pick up multi-year aircraft programmes without really knowing how large they could become, whereas nowadays the smarter companies know pretty much from the beginning of the programme how many aircraft they will need to build and plan their OM accordingly. Ideally, a company's systems engineering department needs people who can step back from the individual detail of every element and look at how the entire system can best fit together.”
Although the march of technology continues unchecked - and with it the threat of obsolescence at some point in time, one thing must remain certain: your company's resolve in ensuring that everyone in the organisation – and from the very start of the design project - adopts a harmonised approach to obsolescence management.
www.cog.org.uk
