Sustainment and Obsolescence Management

Whether you’re in the early stages of product development, or in the advanced stages, gathering feedback from users should be a top priority.

At APC Technology, we have the facilities to gather and provide regular feedback to help achieve success for any prototype or finished product, whilst preventing misconceptions relating to user experience.

The importance of using product surveys for sustainment

User research from product surveys is an efficient method to obtain meaningful data-centric information to validate product ideas, and illuminate all stages of your product’s user story.

Our team can help break down your product survey cycle into actionable steps-

• Determining research objectives.
• Find the right target for your sample and/or prototype.
• Help you ask the right questions.
• Create the first draft of your product story.
• Help you pinpoint the most accurate user feedback tools for your product surveys
• Help you publish your new product survey, then continue to manage, iterate and improve the survey.

Evaluate your survey results to see if they validate your hypotheses.

Integrated Logistics Support (ILS) refers to the technical and management process in which logistic support considerations are implemented throughout the design stages of equipment, and later taken into account throughout its life cycle. All elements of ILS are planned, acquired, tested and delivered in a cost-effective and time efficient manner.

APC Technology’s experienced team of logistics experts can develop a support system that meets your strategic operational intent and aligns with organisational strategic asset management objectives.

Our specialist ILS services involve the following;

• Materiel acquisition and sustainment support.
• Support system contracting strategies.
• Asset management.
• Capability cost estimation.
• Life cycle cost management.
• Transition and introduction into operational service.
• Logistics support analysis.
• Reliability engineering.
• Supply chain management.

Importance of reverse engineering in the industry:

With our reverse-engineering services, we can dismantle a product to analyse and gain important knowledge about the way it works to enable  enhancements. We can use reverse engineering to repurpose old items, lower costs, or simply educate someone about how something functions.

Our goal of reverse engineering hardware is to pinpoint ways to create updated products more economically, or if parts become obsolete. We address compatibility issues, and help integrate solutions with operating systems that they weren’t originally compatible with.

How does the process work?

No matter the context, or how straightforward or complex the equipment, system or product, we will go through three essential steps in our reverse engineering efforts. This includes;

Information extraction – After dismantling a product, we examine any information extracted from a design to determine how well the parts fit together.

Modelling – With the data collected, we then create a conceptual model of a new and improved product which each piece of the model explaining its function in the overall product design.

Review – Once a prototype has been built, we review the model then test it in various ways to make sure it is a realistic model of an original product or system.

The impact of poor long term planning of maintaining or replacing capital investment can be detrimental to a business’ success. By strategically securing products and components a business can maintain their operations and avoid costly downtimes. This is where an effective procurement analytic tool can save significant time and money while boosting a company’s sustainability processes.

Analytical tools obtain statistics, data, and deep-dive insights into a business processes to develop procurement reports that;

• Outline how an organisation delivers value for money.
• Reevaluate a company’s goals and objectives.
• Improve accuracy of financial forecasting.
• Minimise errors in a company’s supply chain.
• Improve supplier relationships.
• Increase efficiency of crucial development KPIS and procurement ROI.

Sustainment models can help an organisation in numerous ways. By utilising these tools, you can gain clarity on costs and funding, and identify future business requirements based on your company’s data. We can integrate this data into the long term sustainment product planning strategy.

Our engineers utilise product life data to measure the capability of any product component, system and their parts.

We can assess whether a product can execute their essential operations for their required periods of time in specified conditions. Life data refers to the lifetime of products in the marketplace, including the time the product operated successfully, or how long a product operated before it fails. These lifetimes can be measured in hours, miles, cycles-to-failure, stress cycles or any other metric. We can assist in the following;

• We select a lifetime distribution fitting the data and model the life of the product.
• Estimate any parameters fitting the distribution of the data.
• Generate plots and results that estimate the life characteristics of the product.

While testing is an integral part of any product development process, redesign engineering is the crucial step to pinpoint any flaws of the original product (or design). Once we have tested a design in our South Australian facilities, we use our findings to conduct a complete redesign of a solution. Any findings from testings, we;

• Fix any problems that occurred during initial operation.
• Polish any aspects of the original design/prototype that were more successful than believed to be.
• Clarify if any product targets were met. If not, we analyse pain points and assess how a redesign of a solution can improve product performance.