Sustaining Engineering
As systems and products age near the end of their product lifecycle, the requirement and opportunity for sustaining engineering increases. For many engineering organizations, supporting older designs can become a large distraction from new product development that supports higher revenue and profitability. Axelsys Sustaining Engineering Services (SES) provides an enabling solution to overstretched in-house engineering resources. Axelsys Sustaining Engineering Services, supports off-loading the maintenance and updating of existing products from in-house organizations. This allows in-house teams to focus their time and effort on new product development and reacting to customer needs on existing products.
Sustaining Engineering activities at Axelsys provide technical services for existing systems that reduce overall product cost, implement ruggedization or improve performance. In addition, componentsourcing issues related to obsolescence are resolved. Technical activities can also include, updating/upgrading designs (either electronic or mechanical) to include new components or sub-assemblies. Manufacturing test procedures may also be revised to reduce test time and improve yield. At Axelsys, typically items are first re-engineered to solve known problems and then various product attributes are enhanced. Lastly, all associated documentation is either written or revised.
Common Objectives for Sustaining Engineering:
Improve Reliability – remove and replace high failure-rate parts or improve electrical / mechanical design to correct original design flaws. Reliability improvements reduce the frequency of failure. For defense applications, improved reliability can increase weapon system readiness. Total ownership costs are lowered through reduced material purchases and fewer maintenance actions.
Reducing Cost – new technologies, higher levels of integration provide opportunities to reduce cost in older systems. Electrically or Mechanically – re-architecting systems using the latest technologies may enable significant cost savings that were not realized in the original design – typically, Axelsys has achieved cost reductions of 25-40%.
Ruggedization – re-design system originally intended for controlled environments, harsh or un-controlled environments. Ruggedization may involve the design (or re-design) of PCBs, enclosures, cabling, interfaces, etc….
Increasing Performance – new materials, designs, and processes may be utilized to take advantage of changes in technology that drive higher performance or reduced power consumption.
Resolving Sourcing Problems / Obsolescence – in most instances, designs greater than five (5) years of age will experience sourcing issues as various components become obsolete from their original manufacturers. Axelsys excels at re-design of these systems to newer components, in many cases realizing significant cost savings.
Consider Axelsys Sustaining Engineering Services as an extension of your Engineering Team. Contact us today!