Sanne Klit: The Obsolescence Trap: Why “Proactive” Is Harder Than It Sounds (Part 3)

(Part 3 of our series with Sanne Egholm Klit, Head of Parts Solutions & Warranty at BEUMER)

Spare parts planning is already a difficult task.

Failures are irregular. Demand is unpredictable. Inventory ties up capital.

But there is another challenge that quietly reshapes the entire spare parts landscape. And it has nothing to do with demand at all.

Sometimes the part simply disappears.

When a Critical Component Is No Longer Available

It often starts with a customer call.

A maintenance team opens a panel, identifies the failing component and prepares to order a replacement, only to discover that the part is no longer produced.

The supplier discontinued it years ago. No direct replacement exists. And suddenly, a routine spare parts order turns into a complex engineering project.

Sanne recently experienced exactly this situation.

A customer contacted BEUMER after discovering that a component inside a power panel delivered more than fifteen years earlier had become obsolete. The component could not be replaced one-to-one. The entire system needed to be rebuilt.

What made the situation particularly uncomfortable was not the obsolescence itself. That happens regularly in industrial supply chains.

It was the way the problem surfaced: The customer discovered it first. Not the machine builder.

The uncomfortable truth about obsolescence

Obsolescence management often appears straightforward in strategy presentations. Monitor supplier notifications. Track component lifecycles. Identify replacements early.

In practice, the reality is much messier.

Machine builders rely heavily on information from their suppliers, and those signals do not always arrive in time. Sanne explains:

“You are relying on suppliers coming to you and telling you that a part will become obsolete. But that information does not always reach you in time.”

Even when suppliers provide advance notice, the work has only just begun.

Engineers must analyse the impact of the discontinued component, identify alternative parts, validate compatibility and sometimes redesign entire assemblies.

For complex industrial systems, this process can take months. And in organisations responsible for thousands of components across decades of equipment, gaps inevitably appear.

Sanne describes the situation with a simple metaphor. There will always be holes in the cheese.

Why obsolescence is a data problem

The deeper challenge is not simply detecting obsolescence. It is understanding where the affected components exist.

A single discontinued electronic module may appear in dozens of different machines, across multiple generations of equipment and several documentation systems. Without reliable spare parts data, identifying those dependencies becomes extremely difficult.

This is where many organisations struggle.

In our earlier interview series, spare parts data specialist Conrad Greer described how fragmented material master data often prevents companies from even seeing the true scope of their spare parts landscape.

Different naming conventions, duplicate materials and incomplete documentation can hide critical relationships between components and systems.

When a supplier announces the end of life of a part, companies may not know where that component is actually used.

By the time the impact becomes visible, customers may already be affected.

The three ways BEUMER tracks obsolescence

At BEUMER, Sanne’s team currently combines several approaches to reduce this risk.

The first is supplier-driven notifications.
Whenever procurement receives an end-of-life notice from a supplier, the information is forwarded to a dedicated obsolescence specialist within the customer support organisation. That specialist coordinates the analysis and replacement strategy.

The second approach relies on data screening.
BEUMER periodically analyses spare parts data to identify components that are already obsolete or approaching end-of-life. This screening process helps detect issues that may not have been communicated through supplier channels. To support this, BEUMER also uses SPARROW.Clean, which continuously screens spare parts against external data sources and flags components that are discontinued or at risk.

The third approach is customer-driven requests.
Sometimes operators ask BEUMER to analyse their specific system and identify obsolete components within the installed equipment. In those cases, the documentation of the system is analysed and the components are screened individually.

Each approach helps close some of the gaps. But none of them eliminate the problem entirely.

The real cost of delayed detection

The longer obsolescence goes unnoticed, the harder it becomes to resolve.

Replacement components may become scarce. Engineering work becomes more complex. And the customer may face unplanned downtime or costly retrofits.

Industry bodies such as the International Institute of Obsolescence Management (IIOM) highlight that unmanaged obsolescence is a growing lifecycle risk in long-life industrial systems.

For machine builders responsible for supporting equipment over decades, this risk is unavoidable.

The question is not whether components will disappear. It is how quickly organisations can detect and respond to the change.

From reactive firefighting to lifecycle visibility

Improving obsolescence management ultimately depends on one thing: better spare parts data.

Machine builders must be able to see which components exist, where they are used and how they evolve across generations of equipment.

Solutions such as SPARROW.Clean help organisations address exactly this challenge by identifying duplicate materials, structuring spare parts descriptions and revealing hidden relationships in spare parts data. The platform also continuously screens spare parts against supplier and market data, sending notifications when components are discontinued or approaching end-of-life.

Once the data becomes clearer and lifecycle risks become visible earlier, organisations can coordinate replacement strategies more effectively.

But even with better data, obsolescence will never disappear entirely. Industrial systems evolve too slowly, and electronic supply chains evolve too quickly.

There will always be new holes in the cheese.

The next frontier: predicting failure before it happens

Despite these challenges, Sanne sees a much more optimistic future for spare parts management.

The next transformation will not come from warehouses. It will come from data shared across the installed base.

If machine builders could combine maintenance data, sensor data and lifecycle information across all their systems, they could move beyond reacting to failures or obsolescence.

They could begin to anticipate demand before customers even notice the problem.

In the final article of this series, we explore this vision of the future, and how machine builders and operators might eventually collaborate to deliver spare parts before the failure occurs.

Want to read the whole interview series?

Part 1: Spare Parts Is Not a Side Business for Machine Builders
Part 2: You Cannot Stock Everything but You Are Expected to Know What Breaks Next
Part 4: The Data Future: Deliver the Spare Part Before the Failure