Successors and lifecycle
The part you depend on will be discontinued one day. The question is whether you find out from the maker or from an empty shelf.
The first sign is a quote that comes back “no longer available”, or a maintenance stop waiting for a part.
The situation
Makers discontinue products quietly: a product notice on a portal, a line in a catalogue, a successor named in a footnote. The item master does not hear it. The first sign is a quote that comes back “no longer available”, a maintenance stop waiting for a part, or a single-sourced item with no second supplier when the first one fails. Finding the successor then takes an afternoon on the maker’s site, and finding an equivalent from another maker takes an engineer’s day, repeated at every plant that holds the same part under a different code.
What inRecipe does
The maker said so first, usually in a document nobody reads. inRecipe reads it and writes the status beside the item.
Discontinued, active or superseded, read from the product notice or the catalogue page and cited to it. A status nobody stated stays “searched, not found”.
Written as the maker’s statement, with the page. A replacement we find by comparing specifications is a candidate, labelled a candidate, and never promoted to successor by us.
Different generations of one product family stay separate items, with the successor relation recorded beside them: not the same item, the same supplier negotiation.
Equivalent parts and alternative suppliers
From the specifications we can prove and the class the item resolves to, the parts that could stand in for a single-sourced one, and the suppliers who carry them, with the evidence beside each candidate. Your engineer rules; nothing is substituted by guesswork. This is being built and is not part of a Start today.
Which fields this fills
- Identity
- ManufacturerManufacturer part numberSuccessor part number
- Classification
- The attribute list the item’s class definesnext
- Lifecycle
- Discontinued statusManufacturer-stated successorCandidate replacement, labelled
Every one of them carries its source, and every one of them can come back as “searched, not found”.
in development In development: equivalent part candidates and alternative supplier candidates, judged on the class and its attribute list.
What it does not do
- It does not substitute a part by itself. A candidate is a candidate until your engineer confirms it.
- It does not present a replacement we found as a maker-stated successor. The two are different facts and are labelled differently.
- It does not size last-time buys or set stock policy.
- It does not monitor makers’ announcements continuously today; a Live run re-reads the lifecycle on each cycle, which is not the same as a watch.
- It does not know which machines use the part; that relation lives in your own systems.
Start with the parts you depend on most.
- 1Send 100 to 200 items as they are today, with the single-sourced and the long-running ones marked if you know them.
- 2Within days: which items the maker has discontinued, which have a stated successor, which have neither, and what the equivalent-parts work would need from your side.
- 3One hour together.
Live: each cycle re-reads lifecycle and successor on changed items; equivalent-parts candidates when that part ships.
Spare parts and aftermarket →