Obsolescence Management
Written by Peter Buxbaum
MLF 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 8 (September)
Now that the United States government has gotten serious about reducing federal expenditures, and the Department of Defense budget is on the chopping block, obsolescence management may play a more important role than ever in planning and executing military programs. The U.S. armed services have a history of utilizing commercially available systems and products over a much longer life cycle than the private sector. In this day and age of tight budgets, the pressure will be on to squeeze even more usable life out of older systems.
That means that a greater numbers of parts, especially electronic components, are likely to become unavailable, at least from their original suppliers. Suppliers can go out of business; technologies can become antiquated. And all this calls upon obsolescence managers to reach into their bags of tricks and employ a number of different strategies to mitigate that situation.
Obsolescence managers on military platforms that have been developed and deployed in recent years tend to take a proactive approach to obsolescence. Program managers and contractors alike anticipate obsolescence and pursue plans and strategies to avert the negative implications of this phenomenon. But it is not always possible to be proactive, so strategies must also be in place for situations when all else fails.
“The cuts in the defense budget mean they will have to keep these same systems out there and supported longer,” said Lynne Marinello, the obsolescence branch chief at the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC).
The implication of limping along with older systems is that the original manufacturer of these systems may be out of business or may no longer be supporting a particular product with replacement parts.
“Many of the systems out in the field today were developed in the 1970s and 80s,” said Willie Brown, director of obsolescence management services at BAE Systems in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. “Especially in areas like telecommunications and information technology, the commercial product life cycle is decreasing while the government platform life cycle is increasing. Manufacturers may no longer be producing the parts military systems need.”
DoD has been encouraging program offices to push obsolescence management as far up the supply chain as possible. “That makes obsolescence management an integral part of the original parts selection process,” said Brown.
There are a number of approaches obsolescence managers take to the challenges they face. One is to identify potential replacements by locating COTS parts with similar form, fit and function to the old part. Sometimes specifications and technical data are developed to locate new aftermarket sources for parts and components. A more expensive alternative involves the redesign of obsolete components. Despite the cost, redesign has the potential advantage of effecting engineering changes at higher system levels, which could enhance system performance and improve reliability and maintainability. Technology refreshes are also used to mitigate the effects of obsolescence.
AMRDEC has a staff of 29 people who do nothing but manage electronics obsolescence. “We support 15 different programs,” said Marinello. “Our approach is completely proactive. We don’t wait until we have problems. We identify them early so can plan and budget for a fix.”
AMRDEC deals mostly with items such as integrated circuits and microprocessors, piece parts that populate the computer circuit, video, graphic and Ethernet cards which are incorporated in many military systems. In order to keep up with the hundreds of thousands of parts involved in these systems, AMRDEC subscribes to several automated services which keep track of the manufacturers’ disposition of these parts and attempt to predict how long they will still be supported. That way, the obsolescence managers are able to alert programs when parts are about to become obsolete and recommend solutions.
“The programs track the usage rate, maturity and demand rate of the parts,” said Marinello, “and apply an algorithm which results in a projection of how long the part will be available.”
One set of tools available to AMRDEC, called Advanced Component Obsolescence Management, or AVCOM, is provided by BAE Systems. AVCOM helps customers manage obsolete parts for complex systems and platforms, including aircraft, ships, vehicles, machines and electronics. AVCOM is a web-enabled tool that allows users to forecast when a part will become obsolete or too expensive, and then finds suitable replacements from across the marketplace.
“Our customers can never assume that the parts they purchase today will be available tomorrow,” said Brown. “AVCOM can deliver significant savings for the total cost of a system or platform by efficiently resolving difficult part obsolescence issues and by providing advanced planning capabilities for managing the full life cycle needs of a product.”
AMRDEC has also developed its own in-house data-management product that allows the obsolescence team to determine the impact of the obsolescence of a part across multiple programs. “The tool is tailored to the way we do business,” said Marinello. “We enter the number of the part at issue and the system gives us every program that the part fits. That way we don’t have to search through a bunch of spread sheets to figure out everywhere the problem may lie. There are a finite number of parts and it is amazing how many are used across different weapon systems.”
Some parts are not included in any database, however. In those situations Marinello’s staff work the phones with parts providers. “We are constantly on the phone with vendors,” she said, “doing market surveys and asking then how long they plan on supporting particular parts.” Problems also arise when obsoletes part turn out to be nonstandard.
“From the 1960s to the 1980s, engineers would sometimes tweak parts to get more performance out of them,” said Brown. “You can’t go to a vendor website and locate that type of part. We have to get the engineering drawings to go back and identify what are the underlying technical characteristics of the part and what has been tweaked to make a standard part not work.”
The F-15 and F-16 aircrafts are examples of platforms replete with non-standard parts, according to Brown. BAE Systems has worked with these programs to replace non-standard components as they became obsolete.
The Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle, which began full rate production in 2002, has benefited from the obsolescence management services provided by AMRDEC. “We work closely with the Shadow program office and AMRDEC,” said Pete Collins, who leads the obsolescence management effort for AAI Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Obsolescence management has been high on the list of priorities for the program since 2003.
“We started by looking at the bill of material for the aircraft’s electronics systems,” said Collins. “We examined the airborne computer, the avionics on the aircraft, and all components in the ground control stations and data terminals in an effort to predict when they might go obsolete. Then we examined the alternatives to mitigate obsolescence such as making lifetime buys, redesigning the components or refreshing the technology.”
Other strategies used in the Shadow program have included “bridge buys,” in which enough parts are bought to get the program through the anticipated replacement of a component on the system. “That gets us to the point in time when the new technology is fielded,” explained Collins.
Collins has also found success locating aftermarket electronics parts. “Going that route has allowed us to avoid a redesign in a number of cases,” he said.
AMRDEC helps the Shadow program by amortizing the costs of the parts subscription services over numerous programs. “Providing this information to our program helps us to proactively manage obsolescence,” said Collins. “AMRDEC has much greater visibility of parts and obsolescence than organizations that subscribe to only one service.”
Marinello’s group has also helped the Apache helicopter program manage its obsolescence issues. The Apache is about to head into a block 3 update of the aircraft. AMRDEC analyzed the availability of existing parts and the opportunities for technologies refreshes. Using a database provided by the Defense Microelectronics Agency, which provides lists of costs associated with obsolescence, AMRDEC was able to advice the Apache program how to budget for obsolescence in the upcoming upgrade.
“For components that were going obsolete we first tried to locate alternative parts or suppliers,” said Marinello. “In some cases we were able to do a lifetime buy for certain parts. But in cases where only a two- or three-year supply was available, we advised the program to look at a redesign. As a result of these efforts the Apache program had a line item in its POM [Program Objective Memorandum, a budget planning document] just to fix obsolescence.”
When other obsolescence strategies are not available or desirable, components may need to be redesigned. Redesigning a component is less of a problem when the original engineering drawings for the product are available. But often that is not the case. VSE Corporation provides a service that yields military services and agencies drawing packages for parts and components in the absence of the original specifications, so that the government can contract with a manufacturer to produce the needed item.
VSE uses technologies such as coordinate measuring machines and reverse engineering machines as part of that process, explained Len Goldstein, the company’s director of business and new product development. “Coordinate measuring machines allow you to take a part and get a three-dimensional rendering of that part,” he said. “You can also model the part within its next higher assembly to see how it fits. You want to examine the tolerances to make sure that the new part has the same tolerances as the old one.”
Reverse engineering machines use lasers to help come up with the design drawings. “The machine does a laser scan of the part and develops a CAD [computer-aided design] drawing,” said Goldstein.
VSE worked on an obsolescence project involving the F-18 aircraft. “The wing tip on the aircraft was designed so that if a bulb blew you had to replace the entire wing tip,” said Goldstein. “We broke that out so that they could have access to the bulb without changing the wing tip. That saved the government many dollars.”
Technology refreshes are distinguished from redesigns in that the former is designed to add more capabilities to the existing systems. “Redesign involves developing a replacement part with the same fit, form and function,” said Collins. “Refreshes add more capabilities, such as faster microprocessors or lighter and more compact systems. The Shadow is currently being used in Afghanistan and Iraq and there are a lot of new capabilities that the user community wants to see.”
AAI has dealt with over 100 obsolescence cases involving the Shadow in the last several years. “There are several thousand components in the system,” said Collins. “We have done a lot of mitigation activity but have also been involved in technology refreshes. They are all decided on a case-by-case basis. We determine what makes sense for each individual issue.”
For all of the proactive planning and predictive analysis that goes into obsolescence management, Marinello and her crew are sometimes taken by surprise. “We can’t always know everything,” she said. “Sometimes a vendor, especially smaller companies that make custom parts, will call us and say they won’t be sending those parts anymore. We try to identify those types of parts as high risk in the first place. We also try to allow a margin for error because we know these kinds of pop-ups are going to happen, we just don’t know how or when.”
When the AMRDEC obsolescence folks have to fly by the seat of their pants, they sometimes will look for other programs with an excess of similar parts and try to buy or borrow some from there.
But whether it involves mitigation, redesign or refresh, whether the proactive stance taken by obsolescence managers works like a charm or they have to do some last-minute scrambling, Marinello is sure that the discipline will only grow in importance if and when the next round of defense budget cuts come down.
“From the standpoint of managing obsolescence,” she said, “that means more and bigger business for us.” ♦