Component obsolescence management
Suppliers retire thousands of components every year and give you weeks to place a final order. LastBuy reads the notice, traces the part through everything you build, and tells you what to buy and what it protects.
One component, traced through everything it touches
live, from the graphThe problem
A supplier's letter gives you a part number and a date. It does not tell you which of your products use that part, how many you will need, or what you lose if you run out. Someone has to work that out by hand, across spreadsheets — and the order has to be in before the date.
After that date the part is never sold again. You redesign the product, or you stop building it.
One part, traced
ADUM1201ARZ
a digital isolator from Analog Devices
Worked out by the engine from the example factory's bill of materials.
What you get
A PDF, a scan, a photo from someone's phone, in German, Japanese or Chinese. It comes back as structured fields in seconds, matched against components you actually build.
One component rarely sits in one product. The engine traces every route it takes through your bill of materials and names each finished product, customer contract and certificate it touches.
How many to buy, what it costs, how long the stock lasts, and what the alternative would cost in requalification. Move the assumptions and the number moves with them.
Every figure shows the path it came from, every claim about a standard cites its clause, and nothing is ordered without a named approver at the right authority level.
How it is built
A supplier notice is a form, not an essay. So the form is read first, and a model is asked only for what the page did not state. That ordering is the difference between an answer and a request that times out.
What the agent keeps
A worked example
A demo factory: five products, sixteen components, a supplier letter about one of them. Your own workspace starts empty — nothing below is in it until you put something there.
01
A PDF or a scan, in any language. It is read on AMD GPUs, and the part numbers in it are matched against your bill of materials. If it names nothing you build, it is rejected rather than guessed at.
02
Not a model — a traversal. One isolator sits under five finished products, so the exposure is the revenue of all five. Every figure here is arithmetic you can replay.
03
Sole-sourced, long lead time, deep in the bill of materials: the components most likely to hurt are ranked whether or not anyone has written to you about them yet.
04
Products carry the risk of their most exposed component. That is the number a procurement lead has to defend, so it is the number on the screen.
05
Drop in as many documents as you like and ask across all of them at once. Every claim says where it came from: a filename if it was read from a document, the engine if it was computed.
You
What does this notice change, and which of my parts does it touch?
Vigil
It is a process change, not a discontinuation: a switch of plating vendor, with no impact on form, fit or function [PCN140002.pdf]. Last-time buy for the unchanged product is 2014-02-01 [PCN140002.pdf]. It names five components in your bill of materials, all under the RF front end [engine].
Why you can sign it
Figures are computed, never generated — the model is handed them as facts and forbidden from inventing one. Claims about a standard carry the clause they came from. And asked something its documents do not cover, the analyst says so instead of producing a plausible answer.
Asked whether a substitution re-opens approval
“Substitution re-opens EN 61800-3 under clause 6.3.2 and UL 61800-5-1 under clause 4.4. Clause 6.4.1 requires re-tested radiated and conducted emissions per affected product.”
Asked for a thermal derating curve
“The documents contain no thermal derating curve for this part. You need the manufacturer datasheet, or review by a qualified engineer.”
What it costs to run
A complete assessment costs $0.00000 of inference and about nine Evolus credits.
Cheap enough to run on every notice that arrives rather than triaging which ones look important — which is how the expensive ones get missed. Every stage reports its own cost on screen.
On watch
Every notice is read. None are triaged out.
Four notices, read end to end, for less than a twentieth of a cent.
Obsolescence management is already an industry. Every tool in it is a database you search.This one reads the letter and tells you what breaks.
ADUM1201ARZ · the same part, asked two ways
Search a part number
Facts about the component.
Drop in the letter
What it costs you to lose it.