Sustaining Engineering Solutions

With support for the full product lifecycle, Cardinal Peak helps clients post-launch with a range of sustaining engineering services for ongoing operations. For connected and IoT products, our engineers provide sustaining services for embedded, electronic and digital product development. Our CloudOps team can manage your IoT infrastructure making sure everything runs smoothly. To keep your customers happy and engaged with your product long-term, we can supply help desk support services.

Embedded Product Sustaining Engineering Services

Embedded product sustaining engineering involves resolving deficiencies throughout the product life cycle. This includes maintaining and improving both the physical design and the embedded software running on it.

It includes activities like:

• Collecting service use issues
• Conducting root cause analysis for in-service problems
• Addressing in-service issues with workarounds or fixes
• Tackling supply chain issues, including:
  • Updating designs for part obsolesce
  • Modifying designs for bill of materials (BOM) optimization
• Revising designs, in order to:
  • Enhance performance
  • Increase reliability
  • Maintain security and privacy
  • Lower costs

We work with customers to stay ahead of their sustaining engineering needs. Our team conducts root cause analysis of issues and identifies workarounds or recommends design changes. Our electronic engineers update PCB designs to address any supply chain issues before they become an issue. Our electronic engineers also work to optimize the BOM and improve reliability. Our sustaining software engineers regularly update the embedded software to address defects, improve feature operation per customer feedback, address new security exploits, and support changes in the underlying OS or other interfacing software.

The net result is uninterrupted manufacturing, happy customers, and a cost-optimized product.

Digital Product Sustaining Engineering Services

Our digital product sustaining engineering services involve maintaining software applications after their initial release. Among other things, this includes fixing defects, refining/enhancing features, and addressing security vulnerabilities. As technology evolves, sustaining engineering ensures that digital products remain compatible with new platforms, browsers, devices, and adapt to changes in the environment (such as OS updates or hardware). Our digital product sustaining engineering services apply to both cloud and mobile applications as well.

Our sustaining engineers analyze service issues reported by users or recognized by automated monitoring software. Issues are addressed through software modification or publishing workarounds. Digital products also require regular updates to address new common vulnerabilities, like security or privacy risks. This ensures that digital products remain secure and protect users’ data. Patches and larger updates are thoroughly tested prior to release using both automated and manual testing. Finally, updates are pushed to the production system to satisfy consumers expectations for regular improvements to existing software in terms of defect fixes, feature refinements, and net-new features.

Cost optimization is an important component of our digital sustaining engineering process as cloud costs can be substantial. Our digital sustaining engineers work on improving performance and optimizing code to lower cloud costs. Along with these code optimizations, we provide updates to address any scalability issues as user demand grows.

The net result is continued secure operations of your product in an ever-changing environment, happy customers, and cost-optimized delivery.

CloudOps Services

CloudOps, short for cloud operations, refers to managing and optimizing the software operations associated with your product. It includes network management, performance monitoring, security, fleet management and other tasks that keep cloud applications and the underlying infrastructure up and running.

Our CloudOps team can manage the entire operation for you from monitoring your IoT fleet, to recognizing network issues, to pushing software updates to targeted devices. In addition to ensuring continued, uninterrupted operations, our CloudOps team is diligent in minimizing operational costs and making sure unneeded resources are eliminated. We use best practices in DevOps for our continuous improvement (CI/CD) process to insure high reliability with a minimum budget. Our proactive approach identifies and addresses issues before they impact users. We automate activities wherever possible to ensure smooth experiences for end-users. Finally, the team continues to work to make sure that operations are secure, and that user data is kept private.

Help Desk Support

Products are more complex than ever, as are the environments they run in. As a result, customers need support. We can provide help desk support for your customers.

In helping troubleshoot your customers’ issues, we review known issues and known fixes or workarounds. New issues are logged into our system for sustaining engineering to evaluate and address as needed. The net impact, happy customers and detailed information that helps power your sustaining engineering efforts and future feature additions or refinements.