Industrial & IoT
A controller built around a part that no longer exists
A small industrial equipment manufacturer
no line stop
Transition covered
none
Mechanical changes
back to target
Unit cost
The problem
A machine controller had been in steady production for over a decade. Its microcontroller went end-of-life with a last-time-buy window of under three months, and the open-market price had already moved to a level that made the product unprofitable.
What we did
- 01
Sized a last-time-buy against real forecast rather than optimistic sales projections, to establish how much runway was worth purchasing.
- 02
Ran a cross-reference against current-generation parts and shortlisted two candidates that could carry the existing firmware with contained changes.
- 03
Prototyped the stronger candidate on an adapter to prove the peripheral mapping before committing to a board respin.
- 04
Respun the board for the replacement while keeping the connector positions and mounting identical, so the change was invisible to the rest of the machine.
Outcome
A modest last-time-buy covered the transition period while the replacement was qualified. The new board dropped into existing machines without mechanical change, and the product returned to its previous margin.
A worked example: a representative problem of this type, and the reasoning we would apply to it.
Next project
A wearable that could not survive its own ramp