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An online spare parts shop based on PlusParts was created for the British garden machinery wholesaler Rochford Garden Machinery Ltd. containing over 30 brands from a large variety of different suppliers.
Retailers still occupy a very important position in the British garden machinery
market and so the traditional wholesalers (distributors) in Britain still represent
an indispensible link between manufacturers and retailers. Rochford is a
dynamic company which, in recent years, has managed to generate an impressive
increase in turnover. In order to expand upon their spare part distribution
activities with dealers, Rochford commissioned us to create an on-line parts
shop based on the PlusParts system. The aim was that Rochford customers
could find and order any spare part from any make. An on-line catalogue as
comprehensive as this one, containing almost 500,000 items for over 4,000
products from over 30 brands was, at the time, unique in Europe.
  Another
criterion was that it should not matter whether the manufacturer used article
numbers or reference numbers in his diagrams or if a reference number in the
diagram happened to refer to several different items. The enormous quantity
of parts diagrams also posed another important challenge; before opening the
on-line shop, a comparitively small team was responsible for processing and
importing more than 10,000 parts diagrams into the system. In addition to
that, the extremely complex discount system that Rochford applies to its spare
part sales had to be incorporated into the on-line shop. This meant that the
system now lists and manages a total of 1.5 million discount rates.
  1. Real time coupling with the manufacturer's PlusParts system
If a supplier runs his spare part system using PlusParts, e.g. AL-KO or Allen,
all data between the supplier's system and that of Rochford can be directly
exchanged. The advantage is that the new data will immediately be listed in
the wholesaler's spare part system as soon as the supplier has updated his
own database.
2. Data importer for external systems
We now offer importers for a number of other manufacturers spare part systems.
This lets you transfer all data, including all the diagrams and hotspot
information, from the external system into PlusParts.
3. The SVG parsing module
The SVG parsing module lets you analyse and add hotspots to vector-format
exploded-view diagrams in the PlusParts backoffice. The system simultaneously
creates a bill of material or parts list during the parsing process. However,
using this method as opposed to the importer means that each individual
diagram has to be re-edited. We have updated our parsing module for the
Rochford project so that diagrams that are only available in pdf format can be
parsed, provided the pdf file was created from a vector-based format.
4. Editing manuall y using OCR software
This method works for all parts diagrams. But because this method takes quite
a lot of time, you should only consider it if the other three methods are not
possible or if a manufacturer only has a limited range of products. In this case,
the three previous methods may not be efficient..
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 Online spare part shop based on PlusParts |
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Overview of all shop functions |
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Guided search In 4 steps to the needed part. |
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Identify and order parts via exploded drawing. |
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Order management |
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Bookmark manager for parts and products. |
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