[time-nuts] Long life products, obsolete components, and code 4 parts. RE: HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover

[Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems)]

My “Test and Measurement” days with HP, from 1984 to 1992, were all in manufacturing (a.k.a. production) engineering.   A major task was dealing with the endless list of obsoleted components, since many of our products had designs dating back 10 or 20 years, into the wild west early days of semiconductors and integrated circuits.

In addition to Frequency and Time products (which we called “PFS” – Precision Frequency Sources), HP’s Santa Clara Division (SCD) also had the frequency counter product line.  I managed the production engineering team for counters from 1988 to 1992; the job that I had to pass the R&D engineering new hire interview to qualify for.   This technology was invented in the 1950s and even with many new models and upgrades, we still were shipping “classics” products from the early 1970s in low volume in about 1990. The 5340 microwave counter and 5328 universal counters come to mind.   We kept raising the prices, because we had newer, better, cheaper counters for sale.   But the old ones kept selling because they were designed into some DOD test system, and the hassle of designing in a new instrument was more expensive than buying an new (but obsolete) counter for our customers.    The parade of obsolete components seemed to never end on these old units.    I recall talking to the marketing manager, Murli Thurmali (sp?) about obsoleting some of these products, and he would wisely respond:  “Tell me how you are going to replace the million dollars of lost revenue.”  The manufacturing manager, Chuck Taubman, would likewise say:  “Our margins are well over 50% on these products, that money pays overhead, which is our salaries.   Show me $500K in cost savings before we obsolete them.”   Turns out that even though they were a hassle, it was relatively easy money, so we kept building and selling them.

The PFS products were similar in this regard.  The product line had largely been developed in the 1960s and 1970s, volumes were low, but prices and margins were high.    Yeah, they took some effort to keep in production, but the development was done, and it was good money.  HP was a business after all, and if we didn’t make money, we didn’t have jobs.    The was a great education for me, brand new to management, learning that HP may be a cool technology company, but we only had jobs as long as the business was profitable, and preferably growing.   Nothing was guaranteed.

HP instituted a system of “Codes” for parts, to measure how well we were designing our products for long production lives and low materials management overhead costs.   Code 1 was best.  Industry standard parts available from many sources cheaply.    Code 2 were OK to use.   Code 3 was something really special, and needed a good reason to include.   Code 4 brought the scorn of procurement engineers, and brought significant management review.

The easy way out for production engineering to deal with obsoleted component was a life time buy.   The Materials group hated this, because they had hundreds of other parts already on life time buys.  What if they get lost or damaged, or the last batch was defective, or the product lasted longer than we expected?    A product like the 5061A, at ~200 build per year, was a typical challenge.   10 more years of life?   Buy 2400 parts?   Perhaps double it to 5000 parts.   The response from component buyers was easy to predict:   “But VendorX wants $2.31 for this ancient transistor.  We’re not tying up $10K in one part.    We have dozens of parts like this, we can’t afford all this inventory.”    So we would try harder.  Maybe a 2N222A, or a 2N3904 will work.   Procurements loves these parts.   We’d try them out, and hope we didn’t miss something in the qualification.  New parts never had the same specs at the old parts, and the original designer was long gone, and design intent documentation non-existent.   I bet half the time the old transistor just happened to be on the engineers bench back in 1969, worked fine, and he just used it.     The Code 1,2,3,4 process was designed to discourage this kind of design thinking.

When we upgraded the 5061A Cesium Standard to the 5061B in 1984-85, the primary objective was to eliminate all the code 3 and code  4 parts.  Designing out all the old stuff wound up being a fantastic education in component technologies, reading and interpreting data sheets, dealing with vendors, worrying about inventory control and so on.   Our attitude was trying to make a product we could ship indefinitely, even though it was already over 20 years old.    We had a history of selling PFS instruments for decades, and we were preparing for decades more.

Bob kb8tq wrote:  “In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.”

Well, I can’t prove that Bob would lose this bet (Maybe Rick K could), and I didn’t work on the 5071.  But for PFS products, in production engineering, we had been building and selling these instruments for decades, with no end in sight.   Volumes were low, so they didn’t get redesigned very often.   I’ll bet the same six pack that the 5071 team felt it would be a VERY long time before HP designed a replacement for the 5071.

Rick – any memories you can share?

Happy New Year,

Hugh Rice


From: time-nuts <time-nuts-bounces at lists.febo.com> On Behalf Of Bob kb8tq
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 9:35 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement <time-nuts at lists.febo.com>
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] HP Cesium Standards in the International Atomic Time Scale, the legend of Felix Lazarus, and the "top cover

Hi

Indeed back at Motorola, a lot of that stuff got transferred into the engineering stock room
after a while. Just how that worked out budget wise …. one wonders ….

Bob

> On Dec 24, 2018, at 11:53 AM, jimlux <jimlux at earthlink.net<mailto:jimlux at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>
> On 12/24/18 5:36 AM, Bob kb8tq wrote:
>> Hi
>> The gotcha is - if you have a very unique part in a device and it goes away, how
>> many years of stock do you buy on the “last chance” order?
>> In the case of the 5071, I’d bet a pretty good brand of six pack that nobody on the
>> planet would have guessed 20 years ago that it still would be in production today.
>
> EOL buys for a product line are plausible. But if you're building one-off (or limited quantity)- maybe not. At work (JPL) there's a whole aspect to sparing that's kind of subtle - you get funded per mission, and it has a cost cap at the proposal stage.
>
> Buying extra parts "just because" cuts into your budget - what do you give up because you bought extra parts, maybe some engineering hours? or test time? - it's easy to say "oh what's a few parts here and there", but pretty soon, it's getting to be a big part of your budget.
>
> So you buy enough parts to build what you're going to launch, plus enough maybe for an EM or breadboard, and then a few spares in case there's some assembly errors, or you need to scrap a board. If the problem happens early enough, you've got time to burn some reserves and order more.
>
> The other problem in the space business is that there is a lot of desire to re-use known good designs. That part may have been a long way from EOL when it was first used, but now, 5-10 years later, maybe it's EOL, and there's no obvious "drop in" replacement. Do you redesign, or do you buy the last remaining stock and hope for the best?
>
> This tends to be a cascading issue - mission A designs and uses part X, and has spares. Smaller Mission B uses the spares to build their widget using the Mission A design. They buy a few spares too. Smaller Mission C does the same thing. Now we're 10 years in, in some cases still using spare parts bought by original Mission A.
>
> I am still using spare connectors and such from Cassini (launched in 1997) in things like breadboards at work.
>
>
>
>>> On Dec 24, 2018, at 1:59 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net<mailto:hmurray at megapathdsl.net>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> jimlux at earthlink.net<mailto:jimlux at earthlink.net> said:
>>>> and the "market lifetime" of parts today is much shorter. There are lots of
>>>> parts from Hittite that were essentially "run on this line only", and when
>>>> they moved geometries, they're never to be seen again.
>>>
>>> Most vendors make a lot of noise before they pull the plug on a part. The
>>> usual deal is that they fill all orders placed by a specified date - lifetime
>>> buy. Distributors typically send a note to anybody who has purchased them, or
>>> maybe only purchased significant quantities.
>>>
>>> If a part isn't expensive, you can afford to buy extras beyond what you expect
>>> to need to cover some what-ifs. That probably doesn't cover something like
>>> the 5071 being in production for 30 years. But it could give you a few years
>>> warning - maybe enough time to find a substitute and/or redesign that section.
>>>
>
>
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