Our commitment is to supporting customer programs throughout their lifecycle – even if that lifecycle is measured in decades.
Abaco’s dedication to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) ensures that customer programs receive unwavering support throughout their lifecycle, even if measured in decades. We achieve this by designing successive generations of products to be pin-compatible with their predecessors, facilitating seamless technology insertion for enhanced performance and functionality. For example, our 3U VPX SBC3215, introduced recently, maintains form, fit, and function compatibility with the SBC320 from 2008.
Our PLM services are designed to protect customers from obsolescence through a range of standard or tailored solutions. These include proactive product health checks, which monitor the availability of every part we use. This allows us to provide advance notifications and options for managing obsolescence, such as last-time buys, identifying replacement parts, or redesigning products for compatibility.
We also offer secure storage for lifetime buys in our state-of-the-art, environmentally controlled facilities, ensuring components are available when needed. Our commitment extends to maintaining the necessary facilities and personnel to support any product we have ever sold, preserving the expertise required for long-term support. By focusing on minimizing long-term costs of ownership and ensuring compatibility across product generations, Abaco delivers reliable and efficient solutions for your programs.
DATASHEET
Product Lifecycle Management
Product Lifecycle Management for Mission Critical Electronics Simple... Effective... Long Term Support services.
Abaco was among the first companies to bring to market commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products that are rugged by design–as opposed to products that are ruggedized as an afterthought.
Defensive Approach
- With the defensive approach, you freeze the design of the system from the outset of production. The impact of obsolescence is then managed through a combination of component health checks, 'buy ahead' of spare parts and their long-term environmentally controlled storage. Abaco provides these services for customers who determine that the defensive approach is their best option.
- The defensive approach sees configuration control used to manage any potential changes to the build state.
- Although the potential for obsolescence increases with time and features/performance may lag behind more up-to-date systems, this defensive approach ensures excellent equipment interchangeability and the highest in-service reliability for the whole program life.
Progressive Approach
- The progressive approach brings technology insertion into play. This enables regular, planned system updates that can take advantage of the latest COTS technologies, facilitated by standard product architectures and layers of software insulation. This strategy minimizes the impact of obsolescence while ensuring that features and performance stay up to date.
- Both the above strategies have potential downsides. With the defensive approach, that might be the cost of finding component EOL buys. With the progressive approach, there may be the possibility of introducing unforeseen problems with more up to-date products. It may simply be that the circumstances of a particular program do not suit either of these strategies.
Mixed Approach
- Under a mixed approach, it is possible to combine the defensive approach with technology insertion to achieve the optimum result. An example of this is to break a 15-year project into three planned 5-year cycles. Having initially frozen the design, you would use defensive techniques for Phase 1 production - monitoring obsolescence and finding EOL buys while taking a progressive approach to planning for technology insertion system enhancements to be integrated for Phase 2.
- This is a good compromise for many programs, providing the benefits of the two methods while minimizing the potential downside of each of them. Abaco Systems offers a flexible array of services enabling you to adopt the strategy best suited to your program scenario.
Restricted Production Phase (RPP)
If you require documentation or software use our RPP selector, or if you have any questions or require product support, including help migrating to our latest products, please contact us.
Flexible options to enable you to stay in control of your configuration throughout your program’s lifetime.