On the brink of the brink

One of life’s inevitabilities is change, and whilst I could joke about the fact that the wobbly wheels on a supermarket trolley are also one of life’s inevitabilities, another certainty in life is obsolescence.

Mikey

Very often the last thing on the minds of your company’s new product introduction team, obsolescence management simply cannot be ignored, and leaving it for other departments to deal with can have dire and expensive consequences for any organisation.

The deployment of new technologies occurs with frightening regularity with components rendered obsolete even before an aircraft leaves the drawing board - let alone the runway. Significantly shorter component lifecycles, the growing threat of counterfeiting and legislations such as REACH and RoHS are all conspiring to increase the everyday threat that obsolescence can pose companies within any sector.

And it can happen in any organisation. For example, the procurement team receives the bad news that a supplier’s part has become obsolete, but feels it’s not their problem and instead passes it to the design team who says ‘well, we told you so’ and they pass it onto the production team who then proceed to unleash the problem onto the shopfloor.

Suddenly, production grinds to a halt and everyone starts running around like headless chickens - all because the new product introduction team didn’t plan for the potential threat of obsolescence at the very start of the programme.

While the march of technology continues unchecked - and with it the threat of obsolescence, at some point in time, one thing must remain inevitable: our resolve in ensuring everyone adopts a harmonised approach to obsolescence management. After all, you can’t manage obsolescence; you can only manage its effects.

Mike Richardson, editor

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