Sustenance Engineering

Overview

With the increasing pace of technology advancements, product lifecycles have shortened as a result. While these mature products no longer require constant innovation, they may still play a critical role in business operations. Hence to ensure the stability and reliability of such products, they need ongoing support and maintenance efforts.

Sustenance engineering aims to prolong the life of mature products, ensuring they continue to deliver value and meet evolving market demands without the need for full-scale redesign or replacement.

Sustenance is a Value-Addition over Maintenance

From a business standpoint, sustenance aims to maintain profitability while retaining customers. It focuses on cost reduction over cost control. Some business metrics commonly associated with product sustenance are:

• CSAT
• TCO
• Product revenue
• % reduction in maintenance tasks
• Rate of unlocking experienced resources

From a product engineering perspective, sustenance aims to apply new-age techniques such as machine learning, SAFe Agile, and DevOps to rejuvenate aging products. It aims to ensure optimal performance, security, and adherence to compliances for established product lines.

Expertise

Sustenance engineering covers a broad spectrum of service areas, building upon maintenance to account for EOL support, revisiting product design and optimization to extend the product lifecycle, and finally automating the right aspects, including testing efforts.

Extended Support and Maintenance

This area covers ongoing assistance for mature products, to ensure continuous performance and reliability.

• L1 to Ln Support: Continued support for existing products at any stage.
• Bug Fixes and Patch Management: Maintaining system integrity through updates, ensuring security and compliance, and reducing chances of downtime.
• Release Management and Process Improvement: Efficient deployment of new versions and patches to ensure smooth operations, and continuous enhancement of business processes.

Value Engineering and Product Optimization

Revisiting product design and functionality to enhance performance and cost efficiency.

• Product Augmentations & Feature Extensions: Adding functionality, integrations, or new features to mature products.
• Technology Enhancements: Keeping products updated with modern technologies (framework upgrades, etc.).
• Product Customization: Aligning products with specific geographies, price points, and regulations through customization.
• Platform Development: Focus on developing scalable and modular solutions for future adaptability.
• Cost Optimization: Includes re-engineering efforts to reduce operational costs, enhance reliability, and improve product performance.

Product Lifecycle Management

Focused on maintaining and evolving products over time, leading to long-term viability.

• Obsolescence Management: Ensuring that products remain functional and supported over extended periods, offering extended support services, including updates, patches, and End-of-Life (EOL) support.
• Re-platforming and Re-engineering: Includes cloud migration, leveraging emerging technologies, re-architecting, and modular development to adapt products for evolving tech landscapes.

Test Automation and Test Optimization

Ensuring that mature products can continue to meet performance and safety standards without excessive downtime during updates.

• Test Automation: Ensures that critical functionalities are continuously validated, allowing organizations to deploy updates faster with lower risk.
• Test Case Recommendation: Reducing testing cycles by ensuring that only the most relevant test cases are prioritized.
• Test Optimization: Streamlining testing efforts, ensuring that resources are focused on the most critical areas, reducing time-to-release, and lowering costs from extensive manual testing.