Focusing on predictive strategies can offer dramatic advantages to those looking for obsolescence options for legacy devices.
Taking a reactive stance around obsolescence is common. With the many other challenges in sourcing, the focus on longer-term strategy for legacy devices can easily slip. But thin margins can result in critical shortages that take lines down, potentially setting you up to lose market share that you cannot get back.
Fortunately, predictive strategies offer solutions to get a handle on obsolescence. Embracing the process of planning obsolescence options for legacy devices can yield significant results.
Two steps to take control of your obsolescence options for legacy devices
1. Create a schedule
The first step to taking control of your obsolescence options is creating an end-of-life schedule for all existing inventory. Depending on your existing inventory tracking systems this could represent a significant undertaking, but the resulting schedule puts your data to work for you.
2. Get a handle on the market
With detailed inventory information and tracking of obsolescence needs, comes the power to forecast. We know that forecasting can optimize the supply chain in many ways. Short-term, you will gain insight into inventory planning and procurement. Longer-term forecasting can assist with major investment and strategy decisions, like lifetime buys.
Pair forecasting with an end-of-life schedule, and you are well poised to make intelligent decisions. While this sort of market tracking could theoretically happen in-house, consider that a supply chain partner has access to vast amounts of data from years of dealing with trusted partners. When a supply chain partner has worked globally for a long time, this yields data that can support your forecasting and eventual purchasing needs.
Three benefits of taking control of your obsolescence options for legacy devices to keep in mind
What kind of payoff can you expect from taking on an end-of-life schedule and engaging in forecasting? We see three clear benefits from taking control of your obsolescence options for legacy devices.
1. Boost business continuity
One of the biggest risks in obsolescence comes from components failure. By pairing a comprehensive EOL schedule with a strong understanding of the market, you can match your needs and the supply/demand curve and stay ahead of a component failure situation.
2. Reduce spending
When you are caught short, you can’t sacrifice quality or time. So prices for the components you need could be at a premium. By assessing your end-of-life schedule and forecasting your needs with market intelligence, you can stay on top of your needs and avoid wasting money.
3. Find opportunities to vent excess at the optimal time
In addition to gaining insight into when to buy to prevent components failure and other obsolescence challenges, there is an interesting flipside of tracking your inventory. When you have a handle on your inventory needs, you also gain insight into when you are ready to offload excess.
With a strong understanding of what you have, paired with what the market looks like, you can create a long-term plan to alleviate the storage challenges that come with excess while finding ROI. This type of strategy really benefits from outsourcing to a partner who can handle both your purchasing and selling needs, primarily because of their access to market insight and supply chain networks.
Staying on top of the markets requires time that might serve you better in other areas of your business. The broader the networks for both purchase and resale, the better you will fare in both sourcing and selling components.
To summarize: You can effectively guard against the negative consequences of obsolescence and ensure business continuity in case of components failure by understanding your obsolescence options for legacy devices.
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