Some people view sustaining engineering as a distraction from new product development. We view it as a valuable opportunity to keep your existing product lines competitive. Rather than handling only obsolescence management, depending on your needs, we also provide full sustaining engineering services to keep your legacy products current, including product performance improvement; feature enhancement; and design optimization for cost, reliability, manufacturing, or assembly. Partner with us, and we’ll add value to your legacy products while freeing your internal teams to focus on new development.
Product Performance Improvement
Your products have a lot of valuable life left in them. Our most successful clients keep legacy products relevant and fresh while pursuing novel, next-generation designs in parallel. We support product performance improvements such as usability, connectivity, human factors, speed, reporting, and throughput.
Feature Enhancements
We can add new hardware and software features to your product to keep it competitive in an evolving market. This includes new protocols, software UI upgrades, and hardware upgrades.
DfX and Value Engineering
Improving performance and adding features aren’t the only ways to enhance your business position on fielded products. A great way to increase margins and simplify the production process is to review the design, components, and processes with a new perspective focused on advancements since launch. We can work with your existing designs to reduce cost, improve serviceability, or make the device more reliable or easier to manufacture.
Bug Fixes and Field Issue Resolution
Even the most well-designed products can experience problems in the field. When fielded products experience hardware or software issues, we dig deep to find the root cause of the problem and provide actionable solutions.
Software Service Packs
Software is an ever-evolving component of your system. While hardware improvements can be valuable, regularly updating your system’s software to address field issues, freshen and simplify the user interface, and introduce new features has come to be expected from end users.
End-of-Life and Obsolescence Component Engineering
When you’re notified that a part you’re using in your product is no longer available, you typically have two options: use a drop-in replacement or redesign your product. When drop-in replacements are available, we can select an appropriate replacement to keep your production lines running. When drop-in replacements aren’t available, we can redesign around similar components to get you back to market faster. We also address supply chain management issues involved in identifying, documenting, and implementing replacements for obsolescent components.
Documentation and Design Remediation
We can support regulatory compliance by ensuring your documentation meets the relevant standards, whether you need to address changing regulations or remediate documentation after a product acquisition. Our sustaining engineering expertise includes MDD to MDR remediation for medical devices, documentation review and integration driven by product acquisition, and drawing and documentation updates required for compliance.