Author name: Ethan Plotkin

Exciting times at GDCA. Fun to see our CEO, Ethan Plotkin, share a success story helping a Navy program avoid DMSMS-forced tech. refresh. A big thank you to Robin Brown and her team for hosting such an engaging and interactive DMSMS & Parts Management Working Group Meeting. And this was “just” a virtual session. 🚀 […]

Exciting new perspective to the obsolescence community, and the theme couldn’t be more relevant: commercial and defense system use many of the same parts…and there are no parts without materials. Can’t wait to hear fresh insights from Stacy Newstead! Anyone interested in manufacturing should seriously considering attending.

“Conservatively, 25 percent of overhead efforts are exhausted on less than 4 percent of sales revenue. Most of these sales are old designs. This is why OEMs cannot make money on old designs—even if they increase their prices. But how can GDCA make money on old designs, when OEMs can’t? The answer is simple: GDCA

How cool is this?! Crazy impressive that both Voyagers have survived 46 years IN SPACE without any physical maintenance – allowing humanity to travel and observe outside of our solar system! And now Nasa’s clever JPL engineers have remotely repaired Voyager 1 from 15 Billion miles away (checkout the great conference room photo in the

“We have too much stuff,” my wife said six months into the pandemic. We’d done purges before, but they never lasted. Soon afterward, she’d say, “We STILL have too much stuff!” And she was right. This time, we decided to search the internet for advice and discovered Marie Kondo.

In view of the COVID-19 disruption and anticipated aftermath in the embedded electronics industry, computer board OEMs face an existential challenge right now: How do they best allocate their resources to satisfy the competing objectives of 1) sustaining existing designs while simultaneously 2) inspiring and capturing the market for new designs?

Obsolescence and supply chain resilience take center stage in this week’s Fish Fry podcast! Longtime friend of the show GDCA CEO Ethan Plotkin and I chat about the challenges of obsolescence, how legacy equipment manufacturers can support national security and economic strength, and how the “Hill, Skill, Will Matrix” applies to OEM product discontinuation. Also this week, I

This case study reflects the pitfalls of neglecting legacy customers during major transitions, dissecting missteps and missed connections.