How to Decode Lifecycle Status

Dating back some 65 years, the product life cycle was conceptualized by an employee from the now-management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. The five-step cycle was coined as a means of managing goods right through from the inception phase until they depart a company’s product line altogether. Each of the five stages (we’re calling them ‘lifecycle statuses’) was assigned fitting titles to assert their positions in the overall ‘life’ of a product—a component or complete unit—making them not only more prominent in the minds of development managers, designers, manufacturers, and marketers. This also standardizes the approach to creating and discontinuing units to the greatest effect—understanding how each stage can determine whether a product or component lives, dies, or is reborn in a more up-to-date form. 

Through the lens of electronics and the demand for up-to-date components in a period of technological revolution, the ability to understand the lifecycle status sheds light on the impacts on supply chains, intrinsically affecting customers that demand high-reliability and high-volume electronics to deliver the next generation of digital products. 

The Evolving Electronic Component Lifecycle

Across decades, the electronic component lifecycle has evolved a substantial amount. Back in time, technological advancement was relatively slow, which meant that components remained on the market much longer than they do today. Rapidly accelerating innovation led to a shorter life cycle, with new renditions coming thick and fast in the technological landscape. 

This has impacted industries for several reasons, but the commercial challenges include quicker time to obsolescence and the requirement for much more agile supply chain and production management strategies. Modern platforms like Octopart bring forward a new, strategic way to visualize components and become more proactive in sourcing. These platforms provide a wealth of data and insight to empower professionals with visibility, allowing them to anticipate and plan for each phase in the life cycle. 

Historical and political trends have also influenced electronic component life cycles; globalization, a prime example, has led to a widening of the supply pool and created opportunities for cost reduction and an increase in quantities from suppliers worldwide. You can see this change through the growing demand for electrification, particularly in the automotive sector, where original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) rely on the global semiconductor supply and other components. Combined with leaner processes in “just-in-time” manufacturing environments, the pressure is on global businesses to deliver their goods timely and cost-effectively. 

This goes hand-in-hand with the emergence of new digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, which are poised to be a major evolution of the digital landscape and offer real-time tracking and predictive analytics and generate greater transparency in the supply chain. 

What Does Lifecycle Status Mean in Electronics?

The term ‘lifecycle status’ is akin to ‘lifecycle stage’. Generally speaking, these are the main phases of the product life cycle, and some organizations came to include much more specific stages for insight into more defined moments of the journey. In product lifecycle management (PLM), processes naturally evolved to mimic those of the organization or industry in which they are applied. 

We’re looking at the key lifecycle statuses that can be found among electronic components that are somewhat similar to the traditional stages highlighted in the overall product lifecycle. However, in electronic component development, the system is much more granular; units are categorized into four stages: development, growth, maturity, and obsolescence. 

Electronic Component Lifecycle: Detailed Breakdown

Technologies are evolving rapidly, and thus require an eagle eye on the component lifecycle. In doing so, four lifecycle statuses are given to the key stages of electronic component development.

Stage 1 - Development (or Introduction)

Development can also be referred to as the ‘introduction’ status, but both refer to the stage of research and innovation, closely followed by rigorous testing and validation to ensure that components are compliant with industry standards and customer needs. This phase is governed by the complexity of the component and the regulations controlling the final product. 

Stage 2 - Growth

Cue supply chain alliances. For a component to succeed in the growth stage, relationships are crafted with OEMs as the suppliers as well as distributors to align their efforts and meet the demand for the new component. Beyond this, the growth effort also employs the need for strategic analysis of market acceptance and customer feedback to ensure the product continues to meet the brief. 

Stage 3 - Maturity

The product is established in the market. With customers requesting the component at its peak, manufacturers can explore cost-reduction and further extension of profit margins in an effort to remain ahead of growing competitiveness in the market. 

Stage 4 - Obsolescence

This status can be sent one of two ways: to the decommissioning phase or through further development to prolong its life in the future. 

Understanding the steps that follow obsolescence helps to minimize the impact of the end-of-life process in terms of further sales, inventory management, and waste management, which are all critical for organizations within the supply that wish to keep cost, time, and waste to a minimum. 

Stage 5 - End of Life (EOL)

The EOL phase follows obsolescence in the event of failure to redevelop or update a component. This can be a very complex phase as manufacturers must communicate and coordinate with customers to ensure a smooth transition to a new or revised product. This is a particularly crucial phase that can impact high-demand industries like healthcare or aerospace, where the ramifications of obsolescence are more significant.

Electronic Component Lifecycle: Supply Chain Impacts

Varying from design to distribution, the supply chain is intrinsically linked to the actions taken in the electronic component lifecycle. As customers look to streamline their supply chain interactions and become more proficient at predicting lead times, the ability of the end buyer to search for a component’s inventory is vital to ensure demand is met. 

Demand Forecasting: Considering the aforementioned point about rapidly evolving technology, demand forecasting is essential in this space. The ability to understand where a component is in its lifecycle gives supply chain experts the foresight to predict forecasts and ensure that inventories are stocked when they are needed. 

Inventory Management: Efficient inventory management is what allows the supply chain to become truly lean. Understanding the lifecycle status of electronic components from suppliers will help organizations avoid overstocking or understocking. By managing inventories, organizations reap further benefits, including resilience and cost optimization. 

Cost Optimization: Competitiveness comes as OEMs strive to keep costs to a minimum. This makes component sourcing a continuous game for them, which requires real-time insight into pricing and availability across different distributors. This is to be leveraged in cases of one-time or special purchases through peak demand periods but also hinges on electronic component suppliers and their distributors’ ability to keep in touch with the product life cycle. 

Risk Mitigation: Insight into component inventories and complementary products allows OEMs to reduce disruption from the discontinuation of certain components. On top of that, their suppliers are susceptible to their own delays, which encourages the need to pivot to another supplier to procure like-for-like components or similar acting parts. 

Quality Assurance: Aging components are more prone to issues of quality and function. By recognizing that components in the maturity or obsolescence phases require more stringent controls to meet customer needs, manufacturers ensure timely rectification of defects or unreliable traits, which will later establish better relationships with satisfied customers.

Corporate Responsibilities: Particularly when we look at obsolescence to EOL, the sustainability question comes into play. If a component is decommissioned, customers are forced to search for alternatives, but their ability to successfully use their existing stocks of the previous electronic components will determine the impact that EOL will have on their waste management targets. 

As e-waste is a major concern for industries, there is an imminent need to carefully consider the act of removing products from the range. 

Following the cyclical path from obsolescence—whereby redevelopment occurs—there is ample opportunity for electronic component designers to champion compliance in the renewal phase, which will adhere to corporate sustainability strategies. This could either be through component revision or gaining access to more responsibly sourced materials to reduce the impact of individual components in line with the end manufacturer’s environmental and social commitments. 

Visibility of Electronic Component Availability

Strategic planning is the cornerstone of building resilience in the electronics supply chain, and platforms like Octopart are right at the heart of this endeavor. Think of Octopart as a modern-day component search engine that brings a world of supplier transparency right to your fingertips, showing you the real-time availability of essential parts from a variety of suppliers. It gathers all the nitty-gritty details from different suppliers for a single electronic component, making it a trusted companion for procurement professionals. With Octopart, the quest for the right price, the right quantity, and even alternative options becomes a much smoother journey, significantly enhancing the procurement process and empowering you to make well-informed decisions.

The level of visibility provided by the search engine is indicative of the available supply of millions of components and their prices, which ticks the box of cost optimization. Risk mitigation is supported by the sheer amount of supplier data and links, enabling the user to apply contingencies in their procurement processes with full-price disclosures.