What is a Parts Catalog and Why Does it Matter?

A Parts Catalog is a book that is made up of a TOC, Engineering BOMs, Diagrams and Hotspots.

Wait... BOMs? Like the explosive ones? No no, not those. The only thing exploding are exploded view diagrams. So first thing's first, let's talk lingo.

BOM = Bill of Material, aka Parts List. The list of parts and quantities required to make or fix an assembly.

Exploded View Diagrams = Engineering Drawings that show the parts required to make, fix or service an assembly.

OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer, aka the company that makes really cool and expensive equipment to keep the world and society working.

TOC = Table of Contents

Hot Spots = Areas with a reference number that point to a part in the exploded view diagram. Typically interactive, and provide a mapping from part-image to part-data.

There's also other names for Parts Catalogs, such as Parts Book, Parts Manual, Spare Parts Book, Spare Parts Catalog, ... Any combination of these are still referring to.. you guessed it - the Parts Catalog!

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So now that you're an expert on Parts Catalogs, what does one look like?

It looks like this:

Parts Catalogs are an essential cog in the wheel of revenue for Equipment Manufacturers.

Some OEMs might earn up to half of all of their revenue on Aftermarket Part Sales and Rebuilds.

To put this into perspective; when I worked at Joy Global a decade ago, revenue was around $6 billion. Nearly half of it was in Aftermarket Part Sales, facilitated by their Parts Catalogs. Doing the quick math means that's $5 billion in orders via Parts Catalogs!

.. actually I did pass 2nd grade, so it's more like $3 billion, but whose counting anyways..?

You see, while Parts Catalogs can facilitate millions and billions in revenue, it can also Cost OEMs revenue by leaving money on the table.

OEMs can be missing chunks of revenue due to will-fitters and overseas competitors that try to reverse engineer parts and sell direct to OEM customers.

Why would OEM customers use Will-Fitters of less quality? It's not usually their first choice. They might do this for any of the following reasons:

Freight - Every 18 wheeler that ships a wrong part due to incorrect parts catalog data adds up to thousands of $$$, but it's even worse for OEM customers. Their machine is down and they're waiting, only to receive the wrong part...

Lastly - there's time. Time is money, and how long does it take publishing teams to create a parts catalog? Is it taking them days..? A Week? Are they frustrated?

The great thing about problems.. is that they have solutions. We've spent the last few years developing TIPS - a Cloud Platform built exclusively for OEMs that solves real problems like these. So how'd we do it? With smart engineering and architecture, which we put on display in the 2 minute video below:

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