Managing High-Risk Components and Obsolete Parts

A hardware product company approached us after facing repeated issues with component availability and obsolete parts across their products.

Their engineering team was maintaining BOMs, component details, supplier information, and alternative parts across spreadsheets and internal folders. They could identify when a component became unavailable, but it was difficult to understand which products, revisions, and production builds would be affected.

The team also had limited visibility into:

• Components approaching end-of-life or becoming obsolete
• Parts with limited supplier availability
• Approved alternative components
• Products and BOMs affected by a component change
• Whether an alternative had been validated before being used in production

This resulted in last-minute BOM changes, additional validation work, and delays in production planning.

We helped the team bring their component and BOM information into S3Suite and connect component health with their product structure.

The team could:

• Track component status, availability, lifecycle and supplier information
• Identify high-risk and obsolete components within their BOMs
• Maintain approved alternative components
• See which products and revisions were using a specific component
• Track BOM changes when a component was replaced
• Link engineering changes and validation records to the affected product
• Maintain a history of component decisions and approved changes

Instead of finding out about a risky component only when procurement faced an issue, the engineering team could identify potential risks earlier and understand their impact across products.