Your staff is using old technology and outdated thinking to create new products. Time to fix that.
Perhaps you are already using some methodology that produces results you like. Maybe you don't have any kind of formal engineering scheme in place. Regardless of your methodology or lack thereof Parsec can help your staff make the best of what they are doing now by organizing and regimenting the processes you need to use to create new product.
Working with partners at JML Design, Parsec can help bring a clearer sense of direction, organization, and regimentation to your engineering efforts. By formalizing a least resistance path for requirements to be refined into products your staff will gain confidence in their ability to more accurately estimate project resource needs, completion dates, and reliablility of outcome -- all with reduced errors and associated delays.
It seems that the best times of your engineering staff were in the past, and they are still living there. Advances in microcontroller design have left the MCS-51 family in the dust. It's time your people realized this. They can no longer use 40 year old technology just because it's convenient, or they have the development tools already, or because they "know how to use" this stuff. No good.
Parsec can help your staff become familiar with more modern solutions to embedded design issues. Parsec can also do primary research on off-the-shelf solutions and shrink-wrapped productivity enhancing tools.
Parsec can also help get your staff hooked up to recent advances in Open Source solutions that may apply to your product development efforts, be it in the area of tools, languages, OSes, device drivers and BSPs, etc. Why replicate work that has already been done and can be used verbatim or nearly so?
Parsec has organized a few papers condensed from open sources on the Internet and other professional venues to help you get an idea of where to start in process improvement. Check out these writings to get a grip on the slippery solutions to improving your engineering department's work efforts.