Disposition, E&O, returns, governance, and unit-level history — five daily decisions made without economics attached, and what Tallgrass does about each.
Every aftermarket organization makes thousands of lifecycle decisions a week. A returned unit is routed. An excess part is reserved. A warranty claim is paid. A repair is approved instead of a replacement. Each call shapes the lifetime availability and productivity of the installed base, and each one is usually made with no economics attached at the moment of decision.
This is not a failure of effort. Product Support, Lifecycle Services, Parts & Services, Sustainment, and MRO teams work hard inside the systems they were given. The problem is structural: the information needed to price a decision lives in one place, and the decision is made somewhere else. Below are the five places this shows up most often, and what Tallgrass does about each.
When a unit comes back — through an RMA, a trade-in, or a buyback — someone decides whether to repair it, harvest it for parts, resell it, or scrap it. In most organizations that call is made by tribal knowledge or a static routing rule written years ago. No one prices the competing outcomes for that specific serial number before it moves.
The cost is invisible because it never appears as a line item. A unit sent to repair that should have been harvested consumes labor and bench time. A unit scrapped that could have been resold is value written off without anyone noticing.
What Tallgrass does: SKU Surfer runs the economic comparison per SKU and per condition — full build, partial assembly, component harvesting, resale, and controlled scrap — before the unit is committed to a path. The decision is made once, with the economics visible, instead of discovered after the fact.
E&O parts inventory gets reserved and scrapped for a simple reason: answering "what is the best economic use of this line item" across thousands of SKUs is manually impossible. So the default becomes the write-down.
What Tallgrass does: The same decision engine behind disposition, pointed at the E&O file, turns a write-down queue into a ranked recovery plan. Each line item is evaluated for its best available outcome, and the list is ordered by recoverable value — so teams work the items that matter first.
Returns are typically handled case by case, as a cost center. There is no predictive view of what is actually coming back from the fielded units, and no structured loop from exception data into warranty economics or claim adjudication. Each return is resolved; nothing is learned.
What Tallgrass does: Revlogix is the exception-and-recovery intelligence layer. It provides predictive diagnostics on what is likely to return, supports adjudication with evidence, and closes the learning loop so that what the returns reveal feeds back into warranty and service decisions.
Repair versus replace. Warranty accruals. Disposition routing. These decisions are made locally — in service, in parts, in finance — and each function optimizes its own P&L. Afterwards, none of it can be audited. When a leader asks why a decision was made, the answer is reconstructed from memory and spreadsheets, if it can be reconstructed at all.
What Tallgrass does: The Lifecycle Performance System (LPS) is the governance layer. It keeps one record of what was decided, on what economics, and by whom. Decisions become consistent across functions, and defensible after the fact.
At exception time, the OEM often cannot see the configuration or history of the specific unit in front of them. That information exists, but it is scattered across ERP, service, and warranty systems that were never built to answer a question about one serial number.
What Tallgrass does: The Digital Product Passport is the persistent, unit-level lifecycle record. It follows the asset from acquisition through transition, so the history is available at the moment it is needed — not assembled after the decision has already been made.
These five problems look different on an org chart, but they share a single root: decisions about physical assets made without their economics in view. That is why the same engine applies across them — and beyond them:
This is what Tallgrass means by Decision Science as a Service. Intelligence before motion. Economics before commitment. The unit should not move until the decision has been priced, recorded, and made defensible.
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Reuse, harvest, resell, controlled scrap — the call is usually made by static routing rules and tribal knowledge. SKU Surfer attaches economics to the disposition decision itself.