Let’s face it, we live in the modern technology space where rapid innovations and increasing competition have shortened product lifecycles. This situation has impelled the product companies to constantly innovate and roll out new product lines, keeping in mind the sustenance of their existing products to ensure higher profits. And that’s the reason why most organizations are always looking for the best and latest strategies to extend the lifespan of their products to cater to the needs of modern applications for exceptional efficiency. This will significantly deliver revenue and uplift their position in the market. 

Product sustenance drives innovation to enhance the characteristics of existing products and services in an organization. It addresses legacy technology hurdles to revitalize and lengthen the use of the products. Sustenance can allow the companies to gain the required competitive advantage in the product offering by leveraging insights from the usage stage of the customer’s journey. A robust software product sustenance model ensures the extended life of mature product lines, augments operational excellence, drives revenue and ultimately consolidates the market position of companies. 

Benefits of Product Sustenance Engineering

The foremost advantage of sustenance in digital product engineering is that it helps to enhance the revenue-generating products’ life span with great profitability. Let’s look into the achievable benefits: 

  • Boosts customer loyalty: It helps to enhance customer loyalty by providing quality products and increased customer satisfaction.  It increases the capability to adapt and respond to real-time customer needs. 
  • Increasing ROI: It helps in increasing ROI by saving costs without affecting the incremental sales and improving efficiency in defect fixing, process improvement and achieving the highest degree of automation in processes, testing and others. 
  • Reduces efforts: It helps to achieve a scope to focus on core competencies by minimizing focus on supervision, managing resources effectively, thereby substantially reducing efforts. 
  • Identifying Defects: It helps to analyze defects by using real-time tracking of performance, Business Intelligence (BI), finding out faults.  

Challenges in Product Sustenance practice

The challenge of product sustenance is especially genuine when there are a huge number of customers using an extensive portfolio of established legacy products, while expecting state-of-the-art user experiences and a steady improvement in scalability, security, and reliability. With innovative digital product engineering techniques, mature products can be rejuvenated with a focus on building revenue, efficiency and customer satisfaction. However, there are certain challenges experienced during the sustenance process. Some of the typical set of issues encountered are as below: 

  1. Project teams often face excessive lead time for planning, prioritizing and implementing new features. 
  2. The inconclusive attitude among managers in categorizing tasks in a correct way. 
  3. Having difficulty to bring in a uniform process for various tasks which vary a lot in terms of complexity and priority. 
  4. The end-user priorities are often overlooked. 
  5. Inability to incorporate enough testing cycles which in turn affects quality. 

Finding a way to Overcome the Challenges

An apt sustenance approach constitutes the following practices: 

Code Refactoring:

It helps to reduce complexity and remove code redundancies and maintain a structure that helps to build and extend new features easily. Refactoring should be done as part of every release so that the code structure is well maintained, and features can be built smoothly. It helps to reduce efforts and enables faster time to market and gain competitive advantage. 

Having small agile teams:

Smaller agile teams that work on different releases help to reach the release target in an effective way. Smaller targets keep team members focused and make releases easy to plan and execute, while reducing risks. It becomes easier for the project owners to plan the deadlines accurately, which in turn helps the marketing and sales team to promote the features efficiently.  

Knowledge Management Archive:

Different teams should share the experience gained through retrospective meeting held after completion of a release/ iteration and also document the knowledge gained in a Knowledge Management Repository. Cross functional training of team members can be facilitated easily by having a knowledge repository. Such a knowledge archive can speed up new resource transition and also be used for product documentation at the end of the release.  

To Conclude

By now, we know for a fact that, rejuvenation of mature product lines can offer product companies an open door to benefits like, maximizing profits, retaining customers, and lowering the total cost of ownership & maintenance. This certainly calls for excellent sustenance engineering services and Aspire Systems, with its digital software engineering capabilities, can offer innovative engineering to develop new products and modernize matured products at high velocity while achieving high-quality standards. 

Thinking to future-proof applications and reduce time to market? Let Aspire help you achieve it successfully!

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