Welcome to the End
of Life EOL Plan. After watching this video, you'll be able to explain the end of life plan
in the retire stage, describe different categories of the end of life or EOL plan, and explain how to develop the EOL plan for
the given product. The end of life plan is
required when a product or service enters the retire stage of the product life cycle. An EOL plan ensures the product is retired
in a manner that helps customers plan and
manage the transition to alternative products
and allows the firm to retire products in
the product mix no longer profitable or feasible
to continue producing. Here is an overview of EOL planning categories and
planning considerations, and we will follow the overview with an example
of a completed plan. The first EOL planning category is the product identification. Provide a product name
or identifier so that we can identify the product that is the candidate
for retirement. And in addition, ensure all stakeholders
understand the impact on the product mix of retire in this particular product strategy for the retirement as well, options may include divest, spin off harvest,
or just retire. A proposed migration
plan should be provided, the retirement process
needs to be mapped and this process needs to
be shared and understood. Communications planning
is an essential category, define how the retirement
process will be communicated. You need to communicate
the process and also understand impacts on both internal and
external stakeholders. Identify impacts to
internal stakeholders such as manufacturing
and operations, customer support,
sales, human resource, and even the legal community. External impacts may impact
customer partner support and ensure customer
support considerations for these external
customers are addressed. A cost benefit analysis
should be performed and the approval of the retirement concept
should be provided. Develop an activity
schedule with milestones that are
realistic and achievable. Provide a brief risk
analysis where we identify risks and develop
responses and finally, end up with a critical
success factor plan or simply document and identify those critical
success factors that are essential to the success of the overall
product retirement. Here is an example of a EOL
plan for a color printer. This particular
company currently has a 402B color printer. This color printer
is being retired and being replaced with
a new color printer. In the product identification, we identify the
model that is being retired and the model
that is replacing it. We provide rationale for
this particular retirement. Some of the rationale is additional
functionality and profit. For the newer model, sales are down and the retirement process will span a two year period. This particular
retirement strategy is using a spin off strategy. Technology that was developed
for the old model will be used for the new
model with improvements. A proposed migration
plan is provided from announcement to
ultimate retirement. We identify communications
planning activities that we are going to undertake, such updating the website, ensuring contact with all legacy printer
users and in addition, equipping support personnel
with retirement information. The internal impact to
manufacturing and operations, customer support, sales
and legal is defined. The external impact, in particular to our
customers is defined with measures on how we can
hopefully mitigate the negative impact of this particular retirement for those particular customers. Cost analysis was conducted and we determined that
we will be able to offset the costs and
we also list that the operations director
approved this plan. We broke out three
scheduling milestones from the announcement
of the retirement to the two year period where
we are going to retire this particular printer to even some contingency for
emergency exceptions. We identified four
risks and defined four specific responses to hopefully mitigate
these particular risks and we came up with five critical success
factors that we're going to monitor carefully to ensure that this retirement goes
without a glitch. You and your team will
have an opportunity to develop an end
of life plan to support the solar
heating water scenario later in this lesson. In this video, you'll learn that an EOL plan ensures
that the product is retired in a way that
helps customers plan and manage the transition
to alternative products. An EOL plan includes the following information
product identification, rationale for
retiring the product, communications, impacts on internal and external
stakeholders, cost benefit analysis, and the critical
success factor plan.