I have been tasked with determining a way to project the End of Life, End of Service, End of Repair, and End of Maintenance periods of equipment. The definitions of these periods are as follows.

End of Life: Date in which a part is no longer manufactured by its Original Equipment Manufacturer.

End of Service: Date in which part is no longer serviced by its Original Equipment Manufacturer.

End of Repair: Date in which product support for a part is no longer available (third party support no longer exists)

End of Maintenance: Date in which a part cannot be replenished (maintenance is absolutely not an option any more)

I have found as a general rule of thumb that manufacturers offer 5 years of hardware service after the end of life period and 2-3 years of software service. So obviously this works pretty well for projecting from the End of Life period to the End of Service period. Other wise I am pretty stumped on a methodology to project the other periods.

Does anyone have any ideas, philosphies, documents, or locations to help with formulating a projection method for these periods?

Sincerely,
David Meyer

Hello david meyer.
I may be reading more into your question than intended but is the question along the lines of REPAIR/REPLACE CRITERIA - also sometimes called BUY-VERSUS-REPLACE?

planschd@yahoo.com

This message has been edited. Last edited by: John Reeve,

It could be seen along those lines. It is hard to determine what the future costs for repair vs replace are when you dont know when you will have manufactorer support or third party support. I am trying to project more along the lines of the projection of the different levels of support end.

You said..."It could be seen along those lines. It is hard to determine what the future costs for repair vs replace are when you dont know when you will have manufactorer support or third party support. I am trying to project more along the lines of the projection of the different levels of support end".
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My thoughts on above are:
A. Some client organizations setup in advance repair/replace criteria.
B. I will assume you have a CMMS product in place and are collecting failure history, costs therein plus maintain an open backlog of work.
C. Repair work can be done under warranty, or not. Repair work can be done by internal maintenance staff. The question is when to continue with repairs (or design alterations), or purchase new?
D. Wouldn't it be clever if you had a pre-built set of questions for each major asset classification which depending on how these questions were answered provided a clear direction on this decision process? Then when the maintenance supervisor walked up to the finance representative there would be no doubt on eitehr side.

If you want to discuss this further, please respond.

On an actual timeline (say for a system life of 20 years is expected) when would the EOL, EOS, EOR, and EOM occur for each component in the system on the timeline. If beginning at year zero right as the system is being implemented (Thus no failure data collected) how do you predict when a criteria will be met to say we expect manufacturing of a certain product will end, when third parties will stop supporting the product, etc?

Right now my only ideas are based on product uniqueness (is it a product used specifically for our application, or is a product used globally for many applications), technology refresh rate (when does the product become technically obsolete), and age of the product (when did the company begin manufacturing the product?).

There are many companies which continue maintenance on assets well after the manufacturer went out of business -- or the warranty expired years ago. There is no magic bullet that you can put together which states at 30 years "get rid of it". Exception to that statement is K12 institutions setup deferred maintenance strategies which say to inspect a building roof or boiler at whatever frequency and then ask for budget money to replace.

Also, it may be my lack of understandin, but I prefer not to make any relationship between assets (which make the product) and the product itself.

Regarding TECHHNOLOGY (i.e. process software) this is something to be closely watched. If the competition is able to be more efficient and produce more product for less cost then you absolutely should be concerned. Example here is use of robots in automotive manufacturing.

In my answer I am primarily focusing on the ASSETS that generate product which in turn need to be maintained. If this is not your conern.... then I may not be able to answer your question.

otherwise let me know... and i will continue.
Please answer questions in response:
(1) do you have a CMMS
(2) will you be recording asset history
(3) do you have a maintenance organization

The EOL is dynamic since your part could be purchased anywhere in the product’s lifecycle. I’ve seen where machine builders actually supply subcomponents at or near the end of their lifecycle because they get discounts from their suppliers to move them out of inventory. It’s good to have contract language against such a situation if you care about it.

Product lifecycles seem to be getting shorter these days and with so many corporate mergers and acquisitions occurring product lines can be optimized to gain efficiencies or market share so lifecycles can be very dynamic as well. You can’t put a calculation on that.

I know there are software programs out there that have built large population databases of lifecycles and replacement planning for everything from complete buildings to roofs to UPSes, VFDs data centers and many others equipment types for long term budget leveling.

Your EOL, EOS EOR and EOM depend on the manufacturer of the individual equipment also. I just found out a back-pressure regulator we use is going obsolete, that is we can’t buy a complete replacement. The company will sell sub-components and soft goods for the regulator for many years to come. However, if we were to destroy one, we would need to come up with something else.

What types of equipment are you looking at: primarily mechanical, electrical, electronic, computerized, and pneumatic or all of the above? Can your company afford software for such a study? The software can’t account for the dynamic nature of the supply chain, but they do have a strong database of past equipment life.