Vorlauf — obsolescence management for electronics

Anyone building electronics that has to live for decades — rail, industrial systems, energy, defense — gets component discontinuations as routine mail: PCNs and PDNs arrive as PDF attachments, every manufacturer in its own format. Someone copies part numbers out of them, checks bills of materials in SAP or Excel for whether the part is used anywhere, assesses criticality, and files the case in a grown spreadsheet. The work is monotonous and error-prone, and a missed notice costs real money: a broker buy at a multiple of list price, a redesign under time pressure, or a production line standing still.

Vorlauf is a tool for exactly this inbox. Incoming notices — PDF, plain email, or smartPCN per VDMA 24903 — are parsed into a normalized schema and matched against your bills of materials automatically. The scope is deliberately narrow: Vorlauf needs no global component database and no enterprise data subscription. It works with what you already have — the notices you receive anyway, plus your BOM. Extractions below a confidence threshold go to a review queue instead of silently into the data, and every case carries an immutable trail that holds up in the obsolescence audits IEC 62402 and customer contracts demand.

From PDF to "does this affect us?" in a minute

A discontinuation notice arrives at 9:02. Vorlauf extracts manufacturer, affected part numbers, last-order and last-delivery dates, and the suggested replacement, shows every value next to the original text, and normalizes part-number spellings — packaging suffixes and stray spaces are what break naive matching. At 9:03 the answer is on screen: seven assemblies in three products affected, a case is open, nobody has read a PDF.

A case file instead of a spreadsheet row

Every hit becomes a case with a status workflow: where the part sits (down to assembly, product, and the service contract behind it), stock, annual demand and runway, the last-order countdown, and the options on the table — last-time buy, redesign to the replacement type, or watch. Every step lands in an immutable log, so the record your auditor asks for is a by-product of the work, not a weekend project.

Deadlines surface before they become emergencies

The radar view keeps the portfolio honest: open cases, last-order dates sorted by remaining time, parts whose stock runs out inside twelve months while service contracts keep running. It answers the question the role is actually measured on — is anything about to slip through?

Onboarding that takes BOM reality seriously

The honest obstacle in every tool of this kind is the customer's own bill-of-materials data. Vorlauf imports SAP and Excel exports with automatic column detection, normalizes part-number spellings, and reports what it found: rows without a manufacturer part number, missing manufacturer names, merged duplicates. You see the state of your data before the first match, not after the first miss.

Status

Vorlauf is in development. The screens above are the working state of the product; the current engineering focus is extraction quality — measured against a set of real PCNs from different manufacturers — because without a reliably high hit rate, nothing else matters. There are no customers yet, and we say so: what gets built first is decided with the people who carry this workload today.

If you manage obsolescence for long-lived electronics — as a dedicated role or as the purchasing person it landed on — talk to us. We're looking for two or three pilot customers whose real PCN inboxes and BOMs shape the first release.