Standard method to determine if a material is obsolete?

Here is our situation. We have only partially maintained the material status on our material masters. The choice is simple, either "Active" or "Obsolete". Due to various reasons, some top-level materials are being replaced, e.g. engineering change where the new top-level materials are backwards compatible, and therefore the "old" materials are no longer needed, hence they will have their status changed to "obsolete". However, the mid-level subassemblies and lower-level components do not get their status updated accordingly. Some of those materials are used in other "active" top-level materials, but some of them are not. This leaves us with materials that still have a status of "active", but they are not used in an end-item/top-level material. Is there a standard method or transaction to query for materials that are not used in an "active" end-item material BOM? If we do not set the appropriate status on these sub-level materials, then Engineering will include these materials in future engineering changes because technically the system still shows them as "active". This means they generate unneccesary work.

Kind regards,

Brian Hagen